Tinkerbell's Teapot

Sorry... Didn't mean to leave ya hanging with an unfinished Tinkerbell cake.

The truth is that I took all those photos at home while I was making the cake, and then I forgot my camera when we left for the party! So, my friend sent me the photos she took once we got to her house and set up the cake. First... me adding the final touch - the Tinkerbell candle.

This is how the cake looked when everyone came into the house for the party. The girls loved it, and nobody could believe that it was completely edible.

The birthday girl with her cake. She said to her mom, "I can't believe she made this just for me!" Such a sweet girl, that Bayley.

After the party was over and all the cake was gone, the family decided to crack open the teapot and enjoy the white chocolate inside!

There you have it... the "life cycle" of a cake... from beginning to end!

Double-Decker Batman

I made a pirate cake for my friend's son last year, and this year he's requested Batman. I happened to have a Batman cake pan, so I figured that'd be easy enough. Then she said there would probably be 40 people at the party, so I decided to make two Batman cakes and stack them like a layer cake. I've done it with my SpongeBob pan before. Turned out to be just EXACTLY enough. No leftovers!

Oddly, I've had the Batman pan for about 8 years now, and I've never made a Batman cake. I got the pan when my son was turning 6 and wanted a Bibleman cake. So, thank goodness I'd kept the instructions on how to make Batman.

I got TWO BIG HUGS from the adorable birthday boy, so I guess that means it was a success!

A work in progress...

I've posted lots of photos of cakes I've made over the years on this blog. I've even written about how I've made each of them or who they were for. But I just realized that I've probably never written a post with photos about each step in the decorating process. So, here goes my first attempt....

Well, I guess I didn't start snapping photos early enough in the process, but first, I made a ball out of Wilton Candy Melts (white chocolate), using my sport ball cake pan. Basically, you pour the melted candy into the pan and chill it until it has hardened to about 1/4" shell. Then you scrape out the rest of the melted candy, add some more to it and make the second half. Don't forget to spray the pan with cooking spray first. Makes getting it out SO much easier. Anyway, once they're both set, you can stick them together into the ball shape using more melted candy as "glue."

Then, roll out some white fondant and cover it. I left a little bit on the bottom for a "base" even though that wasn't in the instructions. I just thought it'd be more stable that way. Something I would've done differently is to cover the chocolate ball in more candy or buttercream to help the fondant adhere better. But it didn't mention anything about that in the instructions, so I didn't know any better.

OK... to start decorating the "teapot," first I added the door and window, which were cut out of light brown and dark brown fondant. I used a knife to make the door look like it's made out of wood planks. Then, I rolled dark fondant and made a door frame and a brace across the bottom portion of the door.

Next, I used some more white fondant cut in a 1/2" strip to go around the doorframe. Then, it was time to make the little awning look like a teapot lid. It's really just about 1/3 of a circle cut straight across, and then I notched out little "v" shapes from the rounded side. I attached it to the doorframe and curved it. Then, I made a little knob out of fondant too.

Next, I added a little cone shaped lump of fondant on top for the roof leaves to attach to. I also used gold Wilton Pearl Shimmer Dust (mixed with Wilton's Clear Vanilla flavoring) to paint the base and knob and the swirly design around the door. It's starting to look so cute!

I iced the cake in a light green color, and then piped some curly stems all around the sides of the cake.

The bottom border of the cake went on next. First, a layer of leaves, then pink drop flowers, then Wilton Sugar Pearl centers.

Back to the teapot, I made the handle and spout (of fondant) and attached them with melted candy. The tree trunk is also made of fondant - light and dark brown marbled together. The flower dangling from the branch is also fondant. I had cut out the large leaves for the roof out of green fondant the night before and let them dry leaning up against a plate. I was supposed to have a pattern, but never bought the book, so I just cut them out freehand and scored them to look like they had veins. Then I painted them with more of that gold shimmer dust. When I attached the leaves to the cone with melted candy, it was difficult to get them arranged. Two out of the three leaves had the stem break off too. I put them on and stepped back to snap a photo. But this just didn't look right. Too much Tiger Lily for Tink's house, if you know what I mean.

Much better... and those little pink flowers cover a multitude of sins, I tell you.

Add the Tinkerbell candle, and the picture is almost complete. Now the cake is ready to transport to Bayley's birthday party! (Actually, for me, transporting cakes is the most nerve-wracking part!) Soon, I'll post another shot or two of me assembling the cake and the excited birthday girl.

aaarrrgh!!!

If ever I've had an honest-to-goodness CAKE-TASTROPHE, this one takes the cake!! Anyone else looking at how the cake turned out probably wouldn't be able to tell, BUT I KNOW. I'm sure it's going to seem like I'm beating myself up, but I had a very specific vision for this cake, and I was sorely disappointed with how it turned out. Yes, I made it work out OK in the end, but it was not at all what I originally had in mind. I was debating whether to even post pictures of it, but I decided that in the interest of honesty, I need to post the good, the bad & the ugly.

My friend Terri's youngest little boy, Cameron, just turned 4. He came up to me at church and asked me to "pwease" make him a chocolate Pirates of the Caribbean cake. How could I refuse?! Anyway, I called Terri the week of the party to ask what pirate-y image he would like best - treasure chest, jolly roger, pirate ship, Jack Sparrow, treasure map, or something else - the possibilities are endless, you know. She thought he'd like Jack Sparrow or a ship.

Somehow, I got the inspiration to do a transfer of the face of Jack Sparrow. I had it all planned out, and it wasn't a difficult task. Or shouldn't have been.

First, when I baked the cake, I deliberately added a second mix of batter so that I would have one tall cake instead of baking two layers. I was trying to be efficient (read: lazy). When I took the cake out of the oven, it looked absolutely perfect. I let it cool for a few minutes before turning it out of the pan, and when I came to release it, the entire center had caved in. It truly looked like a volcano. So, I sliced off the top half and baked another regular cake layer. That set me back a few hours.

Then, I started decorating. I iced the cake with a crumb layer, and then also iced the sides of the cake in white. Then I colored the icing for the top of the cake a parchment-y tan color. I had found an awesome pumpkin-carving stencil of Jack Sparrow's face online.

- So, I tried it in black piping gel as a transfer. No luck. Had to scrape it off and re-ice the cake.

• - Then I tried it with black icing. Still nothing. Not enough of the icing would "stick" to the cake icing. Scrape it again and repair the icing.
• 
  - Tried poking the stencil with a toothpick to play connect-the-dots. But when I removed the stencil, I couldn't tell which dots went together. Roll the icing smooth again.
• 
  - Tried again with black piping gel, but only outlined the shapes. Still not working, and it's 2 a.m.
• 
  - Decided the design was too detailed for caking. Printed out another stencil of a pirate ship.

- Went to bed and prayed that it would work in the morning, and I'd have enough time to get it all done.

In the end, little Cameron recognized what it was and loved his cake, though, so I guess that counts for something.

And, of course, after I finished it, my brilliant son suggested that I should've traced the Jack Sparrow face onto some rice paper I have, instead of trying to transfer it, because the rice paper just "melts" into the buttercream icing after you set it on top of the cake. You know, come to think of it, THAT probably would've worked... AAArrrgh!!!

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

Here are some pictures of my most recent original creation. My girls both had birthdays last month, and so we invited about 10 of their friends to watch the new movie Kit Kittredge: An American Girl at the theater. So, I was going off of a picture in the American Girl catalog for this special cake.

So, there's a 10-inch square 2-layer cake for the base, and then the house was made with the Wilton Stand-up House pan. I ran out and bought it the day I was baking because I decided to do the 3-D thing, instead of a two-dimensional image.

The base cake is covered in buttercream, with green "grass" on top and a graham-cracker crumb pathway. (Ace of Cakes I'm not, or else I probably would've attempted the tree!)

Anyway, the clubhouse is covered in fondant "planks." (Good thing it's supposed to look rustic!) I actually made them all a little longer than they needed to be, and then snipped along the roofline with scissors after they were attached.

As for the rest of the house, the "stained glass window" was white fondant with pink, green & orange icing colors swirled in. I used one solid piece of fondant to cover the back of the house. And the roof pieces are just scored to look like shingles, (although Hayden said they looked like chocolate bars).

Obviously, the main character, Kit, and Grace (the bassett hound) are made of fondant as well. I used Wilton's Pink Pearl Dust mixed with clear vanilla to paint Kit's sweater, and her skirt was brushed with Wilton icing colors - pink, green & orange.

My girls are among the very few people I know who request lemon cake. Lemon is one of my favorites too, (especially in the summertime), but I rarely make it because people don't request it very often. So this time I mixed two lemon cake mixes with a French vanilla one, and the flavor was perfect, if you ask me. Not too sweet, not too strong.

The only hitch was convincing the girls that chocolatey-caramel ice cream and mint-chocolate chip were NOT good pairings for lemon cake! I finally got them to agree on Rainbow Sherbet!

The cake barely survived the drive to the movie theater, (see the house leaning backward?! and the smushed icing border on the front?) but I think I can put a tally mark in the "success" column for this one. The birthday girls liked it, and that's all that really matters in the end, isn't it?

futbol at forty

Our good friend Tobe turns 40 in a couple of weeks, so his awesome wife Stacy threw him a party last night, and I made the cake. She gave me a couple of guidelines: Tobe is 1/2 German, and loves soccer, so she wanted to incorporate both of those elements. Then said she trusted me and gave me complete creative license. I told her that would be fine, and hung up the phone feeling so good that I was going to be able to do this for them, especially since Tobe has NEVER had a homemade birthday cake before.

Then I googled an image for the German flag, and I was a little shocked. The German flag is 3 stripes: black, red, and gold. If you know anything about making icing, you KNOW that black and red are the most difficult colors to produce, especially without adding so much coloring that it tastes bad. I considered using fondant, but I didn't want to cover the cake in fondant.

So...I guess this is where I'll have to admit to cheating just a little bit. Instead of spending hours trying to get those icing colors to come out red & black (instead of pink & grey), I used storebought Wilton icing. It comes in tubes or cans and is pre-colored. I discovered that the canned icing is thinner, but it tastes better. The tubed icing has kind of a weird aftertaste sometimes, but you can use regular decorator tips on them. I ended up using tubed black icing, and canned red icing, since it was just being spread smooth anyway.

I really had no idea what I would do as far as the cake design until it came down to the day I had to bake the cakes. I prayed for a last-minute inspiration, and I got it. A German flag with a soccer ball "bursting" through. I was happy that it was simple enough that I didn't have to be working on it "down to the wire" too. Especially since we had to drive an hour and a half to deliver it!

Despite those minor challenges, the cake was a huge hit. Tobe & Stacy loved it, and I had several people tell me how impressed they were. One lady asked me if I was a professional pastry chef; someone asked Stacy at which bakery she got the cake; and a few people thought that I should go into cake decorating as a business. For now, I'm happy just doing an occasional cake for friends and family. But, who knows? It's been 12 years since I took that cake decorating class at Michael's. It was definitely a good investment ($10), but maybe I should take Level 2 someday. Ha ha!

the best present of all...

...is a present wrapped in pure sugar!  

My neighbor, Chase chose this cute cake out of the Wilton Celebrate With Fondant book for his 15th birthday, because he LOVES fondant. I'm telling you, he would eat that stuff right out of the box!

So, without further ado...