I do!

Robot cake anyone?  Here's a fun cake for a cute couple married yesterday!  I didn't make the Robot
topper, but it is just too too cute!  The cake itself is a 6/10" carrot with cream cheese frosting. One of my favorite recipes!

Let it go!

Well, the Disney Frozen cake requests have begun! A dear friend requested this cake for her little gal's 6th birthday.  Just in case you've been living under a rock (I had been until yesterday), this is Olaf, the lovable snowman character from the movie.  Since my boys have had a vehement disinterest in watching the movie, I went ahead and watched it with my younger daughter yesterday and thought it was actually pretty good!  One of my boys even snuck out to watch the first half (and then returned to his legos, singing "Let it Go!" LOL!)  Anyway, this cake is my usual buttercream with fondant decorations and various sizes of sprinkles.

Cake: chocolate fudge cake with vanilla buttercream
Cupcakes: vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream with fondant decorations

Meow!

I love cats, and I love cake, so I loved making this cake!  This dear friend has a couple of cute kitties I wanted to include in this birthday celebration. So I made the cats, their cake and the uninvited mouse friend from fondant a few days before.  For the cat whiskers I used cut pieces of Wilton flower stamens… and they were puurfect!  This was also the first time I plastered the sides of a cake with sprinkles, and I have to say I rather like the turnout.. looks like I'm going to be pushing more and more sprinkles on my kids these next few rounds of birthdays!

Cake details: 12" round chocolate cake filled with whipped cream and sliced cherries.
Fondant decorations and traditional sprinkles.

Twin Tinks!

What's better than one Tinkerbell birthday cake? Two! What a magical experience. I googled around to see how other decorators have interpreted the tinkerbell cake phenom, and I found a design very similar to this one I used.  The actual cake is iced in purple and blue buttercream, and Tinkerbell and the flowers were made from fondant a few days prior. For the flowers, I took the plunge and  ordered some cute plunger cutters.  They were half the price than the local cake supply store, and well worth the money.  I wish I had purchased these ages ago!  And with lots of colors and cutters to choose from, one can get quite carried away -- especially while watching figure skating. :)

cakes: 8" golden cake with strawberries and cream filling, buttercream icing and fondant decorations.

Baby, baby!

Oh, do I love making baby cakes! It's been a while since I've made a baby shower cake. Little fondant shoes, teddy bears, pinks and blues, oh my! This cake was fun.  I decided on carrot cake so I just had to make cream cheese frosting.  And cream cheese frosting can be finicky in the consistency department, but I'm happy with the outcome.  I had originally planned on putting pink polka dots all over the sides, but after I put the shoes and bear on, I liked the simple look.  So voila!  It is finished!

cake: 6/10" carrot with cream cheese buttercream and fondant decorations.

Flower Shower

Well, howdy do, another cake this month (and a few more in the coming weeks).  It's amazing how cake demand really happens in clumps. It's kinda like when you go to the supermarket and everyone decides to check out at the same time!  I've been in a bit of a slump lately, overwhelmed by a number of little things, but cakes have been going pretty well lately. I'm almost tempted to revisit my bakery idea..
Anyway, this little beauty was for a friend's bridal shower.  It's a 10" square golden yellow cake with raspberry whipped cream filling.  The exterior is iced and decorated with vanilla buttercream. I really love doing the "lace" look on cakes.  It takes a little longer but alleviates so much stress.  In other words, I don't have to spend forever trying to get the icing perfectly smooth, because the lace piping goes over it and really transforms the look.

Minnie Mouse!

Happy Birthday to my little baby girl - even though she no longer lets me call her my baby!  She requested Minnie Mouse with pink frosting and a pink bow. Minnie was made from fondant, and the rest of the cake was iced with buttercream with some sprinkles thrown around the edges.
Inside we have yellow cake with strawberries and cream-- her favorite! Nine-inch round.

A few weeks later, I received another Minnie Mouse request! The second time around is always a little more fun! :)

70th Birthday

Last week our church choir director celebrated his 70th birthday.  He's a lover of yellow cake and strawberries, so I made him a 12" vanilla cake with whipped cream and sliced strawberry filling and iced with vanilla buttercream and sprinkles.  Many Years to Him!

Chem 110

In the midst of my midlife career change, I'm taking nurse's chemistry at the local college.  After quite an exciting first semester back at school, we gals needed a little sugary celebration.  So this was my contribution to the party.  The frostings are a variety of flavors, topped with chocolate wafer cookies and handy chemistry compounds.  Who doesn't love a little ethyl or methyl cuppie after a hard final exams week!

Fall Birthdays

Well, here we are.  Another Fall birthday season at my house.  For son #1, we celebrated his 9th birthday with a Minecraft party topped off with a minecraft cake straight from the game!  I made marshmallow fondant and topped the cake the best I could to resemble the cake found in the gaming realm.  The red squares (I think) represent strawberries, and we decided to ice the rest of the cake with chocolate buttercream.  Oh what fun!

Later the next month, son #2 celebrated his 7th birthday with my tried and true Lego cake.  Here we made a chocolate cake, iced it with chocolate buttercream, and topped it with candy legos fashioned from melted and tinted white chocolate candy melts in our handy dandy silicon lego ice cube tray.  This cake, as with all things Lego, was a hit.

40 years

Our church, Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco, celebrated our priest's forty years of service with a little celebration at the beginning of October.  This cake, commemorating the event, was designed for both Fr. John Takahashi and his wife, who together have dedicated the majority of their lives to serving the church.  One cake was chocolate and the other vanilla, both filled with strawberries and cream.  It was iced with vanilla buttercream and topped with fresh flowers and a marshmallow fondant "40" dusted with gold lusterdust.

Cake: 6/10" squares

Berrylicious!

We had a lovely double celebration for two wonderful priests at our parish back in August (yea, I'm a bit behind in posting!), and here are their cakes.  One priest loves chocolate and the other vanilla, so it was a perfect opposite cake match!  Both cakes were filled with strawberries and cream and iced with either fudge or vanilla buttercream.  Yum!

10" square chocolate and vanilla cakes with fresh fruit.

Le Petit Buttercream 2

Ah, yet another lovely wedding this summer, and yet another sweet sweet couple! We decided to make
this cake similar to the cake I made a few weeks ago with the "striped" buttercream.  Boy do I love this look!  This bride had more bold colors in her wedding party- hence the oranges and purples in her flowers.  I really do love how this came out!

cake: 6"/10" chocolate cake with whipped nutella cream filling iced with vanilla buttercream
not pictured: 2 more sheet cakes of the same yummy goodness

Photo credit: Alex Akamine

Le Petit Buttercream

My sister-in-law married a really great guy last weekend.  I've been really looking forward to this wedding for many reasons- great couple, great location, great colors and flowers, great caterer, and lots of my baking!  The bride wanted a small and simple buttercream wedding cake- primarily for the cutting.  The bulk of the dessert was to be cheesecake, which I was to make, as well, to compliment the BBQ dinner served by their fantastic caterer.  So I made six cheesecakes- two chocolate, two vanilla, and two lemon with blueberry sauce. The beauty of cheesecake is that it tastes better the second and third day.  So I was able to make those ahead of time and then devote my entire Saturday to the wedding cake.

Despite our awful heat wave (and my house with no a/c), her cake was one of those cakes where everything just seemed to go right. Cakes baked up nicely, torted and set well in fridge, frosting consistency was really nice, etc.  After I frosted the tiers, I rested my spatula on the sides and spun my turntable to get the striped texture look, and it worked on the first try!  We put some pretty fresh flowers on and voila! All done!

cake: 6"/10" (top) carrot cake with cream cheese buttercream filling, and (bottom tier) chocolate with chocolate cream cheese filling, both iced with vanilla buttercream and adorned with fresh flowers.

She sells seashells..

A really sweet couple I know was married in June in San Francisco.  Their wedding's theme was a sort of seashell, nautical type of decor and the bride asked for a simple cake with seashells (she was making the cake-topper).  She also really like a batch of Italian buttercream I had whipped up, so we decided to use it for the cake!

Making Italian Buttercream is a rather fun adventure.  This is the frosting that requires you to boil sugar and water and add it to egg whites in your mixer.. all while beating the heck out of it while it cools.  I found the challenge rather fun and watched as the frosting went from a curdled looking mess to a very delicate and not-too-sweet, spreadable icing.  

Since this was my first time using this frosting on any cake order- let alone a wedding cake!  I learned lots of little lessons and would, of course, do things better next time.  But the cake had a little whimsy feel, and I thought it came out pretty good for a first run.  

I decorated the cake here and there with white chocolate shells (to match the bride's tiara) and marshmallow fondant pearls I painted with luster dust.  We also had a bunch of matching cupcakes that turned out gorgeous, but, alas, I forgot to take a picture of them!  Maybe one will turn up in the next few weeks. :)

cake: 8"/12" chocolate cake with layers of fudge and whipped cream filling with fresh strawberries inside. Iced with vanilla italian buttercream.  

April Showers

April showers bring wedding flowers!  This past weekend was my dear sister-in-law's wedding shower.  And what better way to celebrate than with cake! (and a lovely party).  This cake is an 8" carrot with cream cheese frosting adorned with fresh spring flowers.

You know, like many other bakers and decorators out there, cream cheese frosting has been a bit of a thorn in my foot.  I love its taste, but it often turns out too creamy to actually hold piping.  So over the years I've had good luck and bad, but I think I finially figured out how to get it right almost every time.  Rather than adding the cream cheese during the butter phase of traditional buttercream, I go ahead and make a normal batch of vanilla (maybe a tad stiffer than normal), then I add diced room temp cream cheese at the end.. not too much, but enough to give it a twang of yumminess. I've done this a few times, and what I get is a nice, spreadable frosting that holds piping just great! Yay!  Try it, it works!

Oh, and I made some wedding cake cookie favors for our guests.  Good old sugar cookies with marshmallow fondant and royal icing. Enjoy!

Springing forward

Ah, March, the time of year where one week is chilly and the next feels like summer... and what better way to navigate this flurry of meteorological indecisiveness than with some cake!  This past weekend yielded 2 little projects.  One was a classic chocolate/chocolate cake with a painted fondant "31," and the other a mass of cupcakes for a double baby shower.

The chocolate cake speaks for itself, but the baby shower cupcakes deserve a line or six about the decoration.  I've seen lots of cakes with mini-bunting decorations all over Pinterest. Most are made from paper or fabric resembling shabby chic or indy or whatever.

For this order, I picked up some flowered and blue paper, some blue and some pink ribbon and a pack of sticky letters from Michaels.  I used some circle cutters I had on hand (a plain circle and a slightly larger scalloped edge) and sewed them onto some ribbon I tied to a few lollipop sticks.  I have to say, I rather like how these turned out!  Sometimes it's hard with cupcakes to sort of convey that party message, and this just may be the way to go!  Next, I'll have to try a much smaller version on a cake - maybe using skewers and twine... :) We'll see!

Birthdays and Baptism

Well, I've fallen a bit behind in my cake postings, so I though I'd lump my last few cakes into one update!  My little one turned two back in January.  I can't believe two years have gone by!  She was really into Caillou and Pooh at the time.  So it was a bit of a toss up what to make for her. I settled on Pooh, and I think it came out kinda sweet.  She loved it. It's just simple vanilla cake and buttercream icing filled with strawberries and cream.  Maybe we'll do Cookie Monster next year!

Our priest turned sixty in January, and his wife requested a vanilla/chocolate cake with berries.  Mmmm, one of my favorites!  The insides are layers of vanilla and chocolate cake filled with strawberries and cream, and the outside is iced with buttercream and decorated with fresh berries.  Yum!

My third cake these last few weeks was made for my little god daughter's baptism. It's chocolate cake filled with strawberries and cream filling (my, quite a popular filling these days!), and iced with vanilla buttercream.  This cake was fun to make in that it was my first time venturing into the world of fondant roses.  I've made little fondant flowers before- like daisies and such, but I was always a little nervous doing the rose.  I ended up buying a little ateco 5-petal rose cutter- quite a handy contraption.  I followed a few you tube tutorials (from expert village), and they came out pretty okay!  Since I had the ingredients on hand, I went ahead and used marshmallow fondant which yielded petals a little thicker than real life.  Next time, I think I will splurge and get some real gumpaste so I can roll them nice and thin.  But I think I'm off to a good start!

Lego Party

My turkey turned six on Thanksgiving, so we had his party on Sunday at the local Lego store.  It sure was a blast.  Being a sort of quiet guy, we just invited a few of his friends and savored the day- in more ways than one! Like his brother's cake a few years ago, we did the whole candy Lego design. This cake really is fun and easy to make.  I just buy candy melts at Michaels, melt them on the stove, and pour them into my little old silicon lego ice cube tray.  We picked it up at Legoland a few years ago for like $6. What a great investment it has been.  If you would like to own one but can't make it all the way to the theme park, they are usually on ebay now and then.

Cake: chocolate fudge.  Filling: Oreo cream

Happy Thanksgiving!