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!