Chanel and Minnie Mouse

Ah, I love baking and I love transforming cake into art!  It's been several months since I had an excuse to make a cake and it felt good to be creative the past couple of weeks.  First, a Chanel cake for a bachelorette party.  I learned two things making this cake.  First, the design on top is not two horesehoes, it's the CHANEL logo!  Second, it's hard to make frosting or fondant black, but marzipan takes black food coloring perfectly.  The cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting. 

Thursday night I put this cake together for a little girl's birthday.  Got to love Minnie Mouse!  It's a white cake with a thin layer of raspberry jam between the layers.  I tried a new product by Wilton called Sugar Sheets.  Basically it's very thin sheets of fondant that you can cut with a cookie cutter or scissors.  It doesn't taste like much but it's edible and I used it to make the Minnie Mouse silhouettes.

My next cake will be a replica of our wedding cake to celebrate our 1st wedding anniversary.  Who needs to save the top when the baker is in-house and cake just make the cake again!

Cakes for brothers

Several weeks ago I made these two cakes to help brothers celebrate their birthdays.  I love the fact that their mom asked for two separate cakes.  I know every year I celebrate another birthday, making sure I celebrate my birthday with family and friends becomes more important.  I’m not always happy to turn another year older, but I’m happy to celebrate my blessings from the previous year and excited to see what the new year holds.  The themes that Spencer and Riley chose were Spiderman and Pikachu.  I knew of Spiderman but I wasn’t sure who Pikachu was.  So, off to Pinterst to find ideas and here are the results!

 

My husband delivered the cakes to his co-worker and I haven’t heard if they liked them or not.  I sure hope so! 

Fun Wedding Cake

My Mom and I worked together to create this masterpiece this weekend.  The bride, Emily, wanted to include the colors of her wedding which were navy, guava, watermelon, and tangerine.  So fun!  The flavors were white and chocolate.  What exactly is white cake flavor?  To me white isn't a flavor but it's not exactly vanilla either since it has a touch of almond.  I've also heard some say the difference between white wedding cake and white birthday cake is that wedding cakes have almond.  I use the same recipe for wedding cakes and birthday cakes so that's not true for my cakes.  As I was helping cut the cake, I will tell you more people took white cake over chocolate cake.  I will stand by my theory that most people want to eat white wedding cake when the go to a wedding :)  Congratulations Emily and Jordan!

Happy 30th Chelsea!

My good friend and former housemate, Chelsea, turned 30 on July 4th and I was asked to make the cake.  Blue and classy was all the design help I was given.  So, here's what I created!  Shhh, don't tell anyone it was super easy to frost the cake like this. 

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SpongeBob SquarePants comes to life in my kitchen

This weekend I got to see the smile on Huston's face when he saw his SpongeBob SquarePants birthday cake!  I don't have a clue what SpongeBob is all about, but give me a picture and I will make it come to life in edible form.  I think this was another successfull cake!

A nice December day for a wedding

Who would have guessed it would be sunny and 60 degrees on New Year's Eve?  It was a nice weekend for a wedding!  I was asked to make a cake for a bride who's father ate a piece of one of my cakes at another wedding.  My little business is growing outside of my friends and family circle which is fun!  The theme for the wedding was drinking!  So, I topped the cake with a pair of champagne glasses.

I think this might have been one of the few cakes where I  designed the cake without much help from the Internet.  The idea was the champagne was being poured down the side of the cake.  I think it turned out beautiful thanks to my assistants, Mom and Lindsay, who help adorn the cake with flowers.  I sure hope the bride and groom enjoyed the cake! 

The best wedding cake ever!

As a kid I loved to be in the kitchen with my Mom!  When I graduated from high school people used to ask me if I would grow up and put my culinary skills to work.  Quickly I would answer "no" but I think it was because I hated to do dishes.  The day after I graduated from K-State I looked into going back and getting a degree in baking science but didn't because it required too many science classes.  When I moved back to Kansas City after a year of voluntary service in Seattle, I helped my Mom with a few wedding cakes but thought it was way too much work for something that got destroyed and eaten so fast!  But, after helping my Mom so many times I thought it would be fun to make one myself.  So, in 2003 I made my first wedding cake!  With a few more wedding cakes under my belt since 2003, deciding to make my own wedding cake was the easiest decision I had to make when Scott proposed earlier this year.  I know everyone thought I was crazy, but there is no way I could trust that feat to anyone besides my Mom and she had enough on her plate!  So, I narrowed the design down to 3.  One Scott liked, one he disliked, and one I don't think I showed him.  I picked the one I never showed him!  Let's just say his vote didn't count on this decision.  So, this is the picture I based my design on.

And this is the final result!

Yeah, not sure why it looks a little crooked in this picture, but I happy with out it turned out!  Let me not forget to tell you that on Thursday when I was putting it all together, I looked at what was supposed to be the bottom layer and decided it was too small.  So, Mom and I baked 3-14" layers to replace the 12" layers that I had baked the weekend before.  That added a little stress to the job but it all worked out in the end!  The flavor of course was "wedding cake".  I think it's funny that a lot of people love "wedding cake" flavor.  I my book that's the same as white cake with buttercream frosting. 

Last week as I spent many hours working on the cake at my parent's house, Scott kept asking how the cake was coming along and I kept saying I had a little more to do.  I didn't put the finishing touches on the cake until Saturday morning!  However, there was a little secret I was keeping from him.  With much design help from my Mom and Dad, we constructed a John Deere tractor cake as a surprise for Scott!  So, as "Big Green Tractor" played on the speakers, out rolled Scott's cake with the wheels spinning!  Thanks Dad for rigging up that small motor!  My brother liked to point out that it kind of looked like it belonged on the movie "Cars" which was kind of true.  You can barely see the bride and groom figurine next to the cab, but that is the cake topper that was on my Grandma and Grandpa's cake many years ago!  The tractor cake was a new yummy chocolate cake recipe that I decided to try. 

So, the most important cakes I have ever made are in the history books and I barely tasted either of them!  In a few weeks I'll be baking again...another wedding cake for another happy bride.  I'm so glad I can use my talents to make others smile!