Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Second Wedding Cake and Working With Gumpaste.


 Here is my latest masterpeice.
 This is the best cake I have ever made.  I have also never made anything that has taken SO LONG! It took me about a week.
This three tier beauty is made up of chocolate, (top) red velvet,(middle) and butter pecan cake, (bottom)  the top two tiers have a cream cheese butter cream filling, while the bottom has raspberry.  It is all dirty iced with cream cheese butter cream and covered in a beige colored fondant. the pearls are done in royal icing, dusted with, my favorite, pearl dust.
The flowers (there are about 140 of them) are each hand made out of gum paste. The centers are dusted with, you guessed it, pink pearl dust. An edible pearl was glued with royal icing in the center.
 The most time consuming part of the whole process would have to be the flowers, by far.  (though the most difficult part most definitely goes to dealing with the fondant)
 I did some research (thank you Google and Youtube) and decided to go with using gum paste, though I had never used it before.  It was new to me, and dried out quickly, but was also perfect for what I needed.  The flowers hardened nicely and would be ok in the freezer.
The gum paste(NOT made out of gum) was sticky, and hard to work with at times.  I had to knead it a lot before it was malleable enough to do anything with.  Once it was soft, it was a little like working with play-doh.
While I could have just rolled it all out and cut a bunch out at once and be done with it, but it probably would have looked a little blah.  Personally, I have to have things looking the best they can.  That means that each flower was made one at a time. (trying to do more than that, they would have dried out too fast to do the details).  They were formed into cones, with the edges rolled flat.  Then cut into a flower shape, rolling the petals out with a ball tool.  Then the detail in the center was cut in, then brushed with rose pink pearl dust.  Each flower took 5-10 minutes.  That is a LOT of hours.
I was so sleep deprived from making flowers till the wee hours of the night/morning.  add taking care of a baby.=one exhausted mama.
 I never would have finished it if it weren't for this beautiful gal.  My bestie had come over multiple times to help watch my little man, and make flowers.  She also rolled a layer of fondant so I could take a shower for the wedding (that is how close we cut it)Add in that she babysat while we were at the wedding and you have a life saver.
The little clusters of flowers at the bottom were my husbands idea.  Some of that bottom fondant was not so smooth.  Lucky for us, they were evenly spaced, making covering it up easy.

Isn't this couple beautiful?  They are very good friends of ours.  I am glad I was able to make this for their special day.  I even had multiple of their wedding guests ask me for a business card.  Gives me something to think about.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Babies First Butterfly Cake

It has been a while, but I had a lot of fun learning with this one.  A friend of mine asked me to make a cake for her daughter's 1st birthday.  She had 3 words; Pink, Flowers, and Butterflies.  So this is what I came up with
 That caked had pearl dust EVERYWHERE!  I love it.  The butterflies, while a pain, were really fun.  I drew butterfly wings on some parchment paper, taped it to the counter, then outlined multiple wings on wax paper with some thinned out royal icing.
I didn't really like the cake after I had iced it.  I was exhausted and delirious so it didn't turn out as smooth as I had hoped.  When I put all of the decorations on it (Pearl strings, flowers and butterflies) the next day, it really came together.  It turned out to be such a cute cake
 So every baby in my family, (and I assume a lot of peoples families) when they turn 1, gets to sit in front of a cake and take the first bites...or fist fulls of cake.  I don't know where this tradition started, but I like it.
This is the first time I have heard of having a whole photo shoot for this "Cake Smash".  and I must say, I like the idea.  I mean look at how cute the pictures turned out!
They were taken by Stolen Hearts Photography whose Facebook page you can find Here.  I have been able to look at some of her stuff and I like it.  I mean, look at these cute pictures.
 Of course the baby is quite adorable too.  I was told that she loved the cake.  Went strait for the butterflies.
I absolutely love this picture!

Monday, February 28, 2011

Baby Monkey

The sister of my good friend is having a baby, and had her baby shower was this weekend, so my friend, being a good sister, came to me with an idea to make a monkey cake, with a baby monkey on it. I said "lets see what we can do" so i googled "monkey cakes" and fond a cute idea for a monkey using a wilton"stand up bear pan" (I have said that so many times the past 4 days!) with that as our base idea, it grew into this adorable thing:




As you can tell, the baby will be a girl. The whole cake is german chocolate from...Betty Crocker(My Aunt will be so Disappointed in me) I was lazy on the Icing and used canned Whipped white frosting, also from Betty Crocker.(Sorry Auntie) I liked using it. It flowed out a lot easier than the buttercream I usually make(still havn't perfected the consistency of it) and it tasted betther than the Recipe I use as well. The design of the sheet cake actually came from a blanket I have been making for this same friends baby boy. and the side of it is supposed to be like the crib.


Bad thins I did with the cake-not ancoring the baby monkey down! by the time we got to the shower, the monkey was tipping over. AND had cracked the back side of the cake a bit too. Luckily, It never actually fell over.



The little monkey is also german chocolate. The fur was done in the "Duff" brand of chocolate Icing from "ACE of cakes". It took us about 2 hours to figure out how to make the cake look more like a monkey. It kept wanting to look like a bear. But I think we did a pretty good job.

Both cakes are also filled with a chocolate mousse that I made just out of melted chocolate chips and whipped cream. I think it was my favorite part.


All in all, it looked pretty good. Even if it wasn't finnished. I still wanted to put a border around the bottom, and put some cute little pink bows and safty pins on the baby, but time ran short. The good thing is, I actually learned a bit fom this, like the difference bettween a bear face and a monkey face. Really I did larn a lot from it and I tried some new stuff on this cake that I have found that I liked (like the texture that i put one the blanket squares! I decided taht I really liked that!) I still have not perfected my peaks in my dots though. I need to practice them a bit more.


Old cake-sunkist


This is one of my very first cakes. I made it for my brother a couple years ago. His favorite soda is sunkist in case you couldn't guess. I did two separate cakes for it.



the fist one is just a plain sheet cake (it was so long ago i dont remember what was inside.) I tried to copy the style of writing that is on a sunkist can. the blue and the green on the cake is just pipping gel with color in it.
The second cake was made to look like an actual can of sunkist. It isn't the cleanest looking but i think it turned out pretty good for my first cake. I Stacked 3 6inch round cakes and even carved out a little of the top one for the soda tab. there is writting on the sides that I also coppied from an actual can of sunkist too. The writting taht is on the plate says "not to scale." I got a lot of comments about it being a little short. I guess i should have used 4 cakes.
It is amazing to look back at this and think of how proud of this cake I was, and how much I've learned since then. I'm looking forward to learning even more!





Sunday, August 1, 2010

My Best Friends Wedding

On Friday the 30th, My best friend got married, and yours truly was asked to help make her wedding cake. It was a combined effort between her and I. It wasn't perfect. And took super long to make!




The cake itself was slightly crooked. The dowels were cut slightly different sizes. But in the dark people thought it was amazing. I'm just sad that the pearl powder didn't show up as well, but it still adds a nice touch. My dad said that for a first time wedding cake, It was amazing. I still have a LOOONNNNGGG way to go to have the skill of a professional.


My Growing Cakes

I've decided to create a blog devoted to the different cakes I've made. I want to show my growth as a cake decorater, and will post my progress. I'm hopeing to get as good at cake decorating as my aunt. Who knows, maybe someday I will actually make money off of my cakes!