Barbie Swan Lake

This is an older photo I just found in my basement last week. It's a dome-shaped cake with a Barbie stuck into it and decorated like Barbie Swan Lake. This is also one of the dairy-free cakes I did for my friend's daughter's birthday one year.

She turned out pretty cute, I think, but I could've done better with the royal icing on the doll's body. Not too bad for my first attempt at it, though. I learned a lot from doing that cake, so I do much better work now...Promise!

Baby's 1st Birthday

My neighbor's cousin's other cousin - (how's that for livin' in the South?) - called me a few weeks ago to see if I would be available to make a cake for her daughter's 1st birthday. When she sent me the image of the napkin from the paper products she was planning to use for the party, I immediately knew I'd done one previously for a friend in Arizona using the very same images. It's really cute, with pastel colors, flower, ladybug, butterfly, etc.

Anyway, she said it needed to be enough to feed 50 people, plus she wanted a "smash cake" for the birthday girl to dig into. So, this 2-layer French Vanilla cake is 12"x18" covered in buttercream, with decorations made of fondant. The "smash cake" is just a 6" round decorated as a flower, with a fondant bee on top.

It took me all day from start to finish - making the icing, crumb coating the cakes, making more icing, coloring icing, making fondant pieces, painting some of the fondant, affixing all the fondant decorations, and piping the details and borders. (Whew! It wears me out just typing all of that!)

She just came to pick up the cake with her sleeping baby in the backseat. I hope they enjoy their party tomorrow! And I hope you enjoy the photos!

(I just feel bad that my own kids never had such fancy cakes for their first birthdays!)

Cake Decorating with Kids - Part 1

My girls are involved in a group called Keepers at Home. It's like a Christian version of girl scouts where they can earn badges or charms for learning different life skills, or learning about different animals, sports, or academic subject areas. Today, I taught the younger half of the group about cake decorating! We split the group in half (younger girls & older girls) for this activity so it would be a little less chaotic. And I hosted it at my house. So, today we had about 7 girls and their moms here.

I taught them smooth icing, piping dots and lines and letters with the small round tip, as well as making shapes with the large round tips. I also taught them stars, flowers, zigzags, etc. with the star tip. They each practiced on a sheet of wax paper. Then they each got to decorate their own cupcake (and eat it if they wanted to). I was really impressed by how even these younger girls really paid attention and caught on to what I was telling them.

I had lots of fun, and I think the girls did too. It's always interesting to see the artisic kids being creative, and the serious kids concentrating; then there are the ones like my daughter, Hayden, who just PILE on the icing so they can EAT IT!!! (I must admit -she comes by it honestly!)

HSM2 Cake-tastrophe (almost)

Here's a picture of my latest creation. (Actually, if you'd asked me last night, I would've said it was my LAST creation!) Obviously, it's a HSM2 cake for my friend's daughter (& my daughters' friend), Lexi. When she requested a High School Musical 2 cake, I had to turn to my favorite cake decorating website for ideas on this one. So, that's where I got the idea for laminating the printed image. (Believe it or not, there ARE some brave souls who have drawn all those characters with icing. I'm way too lazy for that, though.)

So, the icing is white buttercream, sprayed blue on top. The border is supposed to look like waves (but I was kind of in a hurry). I just painted a few blue stripes inside the bag before loading it with the white frosting. The lettering is fondant painted with gold & silver sparkle dust. And the image of the characters (Chad, Sharpay, Troy, Gabriella, Ryan & Taylor - scary that I knew 5 of the 6!) was printed from a website, cut out and laminated.

Hopefully it holds together. I have a feeling it may fall apart when we cut it tonight, though. The top layer broke into about six pieces as I was transferring it from the cooling rack to the cake board. (Then I shattered into about a million pieces!) But I finally pulled myself together, put the pieces in order and glued them in place with buttercream. One of the biggest challenges in cake decorating (besides not licking my fingers) is fixing my mistakes, or making things appear to work out. Thankfully, most of my mistakes are only seen by me! Keeping my fingers crossed.....

****UPDATED to add : The party was fun, Lexi LOVED her cake, and best of all...it didn't even fall apart. Anyway, what if it had? People have to break it up to eat it anyway, right?! I got lots of compliments on the flavor/moistness of the cake too. It was a Duncan Hines French Vanilla mix with some extra stuff added in (including White Chocolate pudding mix and buttermilk instead of water). Yum-O!****

Christmas Cookie Tree

This is a Christmas Cookie Tree I made several years ago. Now they sell kits to make these (with the cookies already made), but I actually rolled out all the sugar cookie dough and cut out the star shapes with a set of graduated-size star cookie cutters I bought specifically for this project. I made quick-pour fondant icing to cover the cookies. The snow tips are royal icing with mini-M&M ornaments. Turned out pretty cute, but it was a lot of work, and I haven't made another one since!

I made this cake for a surprise birthday party for my neighbor (Stewart). I copied one I found on CakeCentral because I had never seen The Family Guy show. I guess this baby character is named Stewie, so I wrote, "Stewie's 38! What the Deuce!"

The blue background is all done in buttercream; Stewie's head and body are covered in fondant. It was like making a puzzle, but it was pretty fun. I used Wilton black icing for the outlines, but next time I would use something easier to work with, like black piping gel.

It was hard to get a good photo angle on this cake because of Stewie's 3-D head. Anyway, this is the first cake I've made in a little while, so I felt a little rusty at times, but everyone at the party seemed to enjoy it. I just hate when they make me cut the cake, though!

Star Wars cake

This was my son's 5th birthday cake. It was actually pretty simple. Just a matter of matching the buttercream color to the table decorations. The important parts (Anakin & Darth Maul) were plastic. Gotta love doing a relatively easy cake once in a while!