Sneak Peak

I am doing an 18th birthday cake this weekend, and the theme is black and white, so I started to make some flowers out of gum paste last night.



I Still have a lot more to make along with the big 18 that will be on top of the cake, but I thought this was a good start.

A 50th Birthday

So this weekend was my godfather/Uncle's 50th birthday and I was asked to make the cake. He only made one request that is cake be blue.. not really much help. But i know my Uncle well and I had an idea right from the start.
His cake theme was golf, since I know it is his favorite past time, he plays just about every weekend with me dad. I love making cakes and cupcakes so I thought of a fun way to combine them all. After some research I had the perfect cake laid out.
It started with making gum paste decorations to go on the cupcakes
I made some small golf balls, tee's and flags out of gum paste (sorry for the pictures they were all taken with my phone)

I LOVE my chocolate cupcake recipe no matter what, or how far in advance make them, they always stay moist and light. They are by far the one recipe I get the most compliments on.
So I made 4 dozen medium sized cupcakes all chocolate of course. I iced them with a light blue butter cream icing and decorated with my gum paste golf pcs.

I knew I wanted to make a vanilla cake as a cake topper, since I had the perfect idea for stacking the 3 levels of the cake/cupcake cake.
I made 2 8" round vanilla butter cakes that I was able to cut into 4 layers. I covered the cake in a Italian meringue buettercream, and then in light blue fondant. I like the meringue butter cream is spreads better on the cake and it's not overly sweet.
I started searching around for some ideas of what I could do to carry the gold theme onto the cake, and I found a wonderful argyle pattern. You know the pattern that is made up of diamonds of different colors. Ya I took on a LOT but it turned out great.
When I first started cutting the diamonds out of the gum paste I was measuring each one, after 3 i decided it was way to much work and cut some templates out of cardboard, and used that with a sharp knife. It ended
up taking a couple of hours but well worth it.

This is just come of the cutouts in varying colors of blue and some white.
Next I set out to stick them all onto the cake, using what was left of my butter cream, and trying to keep it as straight and level as possible.

I also made small golf balls to go around the edge of the cake (yes I sat there and made tiny dimples on every one of those little balls )
Over all i was very happy with the way the cupcake/cake turned out, it was a hit at the party my Uncle cried when he saw it, and the argyle pattern turned out to be not nearly as scary as I thought it was going to be

It's a Baby Shower

I LOVE making cupcakes, as I'm sure you can tell by my blog name. But on occasion I dabble into cake making when someone asks me too. I actually started out making cakes, and then fell in love with cupcakes.
Recently my Aunt threw a baby shower for my cousin, and I got the honor of making the baby shower cake. My aunt sent out the cutest invites that had little polka-dotted elephants on them so that is where I took my inspiration from:
 

I wish I had some better pictures to show you, but in my rush to get it all done, I forgot to take any pictures at all, this one was actually taken by my cousin.
I made 3 large sheet pans of cake, 2 lemon and 1 vanilla. I stacked them together using a Italian meringue butter cream, I like using it best under fondant, it's a much smoother texture and I find easier to spread then a milk and sugar butter cream. To cut the elephant shape I used a template that my Aunt had made me from her work. For me that was the easy part.
Next came the fondant job. I have never had any training on using fondant or any kind of decorating at all, I just like to jump in head first and see where it takes me. As you can see from some of the lines I had to do some patch work to get the fondant around the legs, and the nose as well. Luckily the entire cake was covered with polka dots, so I was able to cover up most of it. Once the brown fondant was laid, i used left over butter cream to attached the polka dots I had made with died fondant.
Since there was so much cake left over from the large sheets cakes I decided to make something I have never tired before. Cake Pops.

These turned out amazing, and are a great way to use up any left over cake. I took all the cake I had left over from the sheet cake after cutting out the elephant and threw it all into my mixer with any icing I had left over. Mixed until combined. I then rolled the cake mixture into 2 bite balls, stuck a candy stick in the middle and put them in the fridge over night.
The next morning I melted some white chocolate candy pieces over a double boiler and dunked each ball in the chocolate. You have to work fast for this one the cake ball start to thaw they fall off the stick while dipping them in the chocolate, I would reccomend just doing a few at a time. Once they were all covered I put them back in the fridge for an hour to make sure the candy coating was hard. I used the microwave to melt the pink and purple candy coating and swirrled is on with a spoon.

Overall it was a great day, everyone loved all the my sweet treats.