Sunday, December 9, 2012

Quick post

A cake I made for my mother-in-law's 89th birthday and a cake I made for a Christmas party.


The cake is creamcheese covered in fondant with fondant accents

The cake is white cake, dyed green and red, covered in fondant with fondant accents. The little Christmas tree is made out of gumpaste, painted dark green. While the paint was still wet I added the sprinkles

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Thanksgiving cake

Ever since I started teaching at 2 colleges my time doing cakes has been scarce (not to mention almost non-existent). Add to that my carpal tunnel problem which meant that I was not sure how it could affect me kneading fondant.

Well I am happy to say I can still cover a cake in fondant. I made this small cake for Thanksgiving.



The turkey was done last year out of gumpaste and I kept it in storage. It was an extra turkey I made so I was happy to reuse it. I made sure to take lots of breaks to rest the hands as well.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Just a quick hey

Just a quick post to let you know I am not dead. I'm just too busy for baking and decorating (and now having been diagnosed with carpal tunnel it'll be a definite influence in my cake making, sniff!)

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

quick post

Quick post to let you know I am not dead. Just that I haven't baked or decorated any cakes since the 4th of July.

Speaking of which: 

White cake mix from scratch. I just added red and blue coloring

To create this deep red and blue, just mix colors (and be fearless). For red use: deep red, pink and orange. For blue use several tones of blue. I used royal blue and sky blue.

After baking

Covered in buttercream

Looks yummy

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Pink boombox cake

Boombox 80's theme cake I made for my brother-in-law.  And yes, he is a major Diva, LOL!

   

Cake is strawberry cake with a strawberry filling. It is actually a 9x13 cut in three pieces, standing on its side. It is covered in fondant which I dyed pink with a spray can (I really need to invest in an airbrush). The handle was made with gumpaste, the accents are all fondant. The board and stars are covered with disco glitter

More pictures here

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Two more cakes

The first one is a Goth/Victorian/Edgar Allan Poe inspired cake.
I was told the recipient was into Gothic and Victorian stuff. Since I have this Wilton fondant mold with birds and branches on it, I thought: bingo! let's make a reference to The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. That should cover the gothic, the Victorian and then so more.

The cake is chocolate, covered in white fondant with black fondant accents.



The cake has black branches for a creepy look as well as birds on the side. I wish I should have taken a better picture...


The second cake is a creamcheese cake. It was a last minute request from my sister-in-law for a good friend of the family. I thought, what better than a gift-box since I was basically drawing a blank re: decorations. The pink was achieved using a Wilton pink spray can (I really need to invest in an airbrush... ) Our friend loved it, so all was well.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

A couple of cakes

One was done for Easter in a hurry, (quite literally) and the other was done for a friend of my husband.




Both are chocolate. The Easter cake is frosted in buttercream frosting with fondant accents. The dolphin cake is covered in homemade fondant, with fondant accents. The dolphins were made a couple of days in advanced out of gumpaste. Toget that color I combined sky blue with black. As a last minute touch: I made them "girls" by painting the eyelashes.


Sunday, March 25, 2012

Stopping by...

Nothing much to report. I haven't done any cakes in a while and I am not advertising either. I hope I can bake at least one cake for Easter.

Let's see what happens.

Happy baking!

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Video I made

Wish I could film myself when I bake/decorate. One of these days I'll try do it. In the meantime picture/video will do. 



Thursday, February 16, 2012

Valentine's cakes

Forgot to post about these because of personal stuff happening in my life right now.

Anyway!

These three cakes were ordered for St. Valentine's Day. I was hesitant about accepting to make them because of my niece's cake. It's not my niece's fault that her birthday is two days before St. Vals but holy molly! I will NOT be making any St. Valentine's cakes anytime soon again. I was exhausted by the time I was done with all the cakes.



I didn't take that many pictures because quite honestly my priority was my niece's cake. But these three turned out cute.  It helped they were so small and not too complicated. The one with two hearts is a zebra cake (zebra batter, one half of the batter dyed red). The red one is chocolate and the other one is basic yellow. The red one was crumb-coated in chocolate ganache as well has having chocolate ganache as filling. The other two were crumb-coated in buttercream and had buttercream as filling. All the cakes were covered in fondant as well as the the boards.

The clients all liked their cakes.

But yeah, too much cakes for an amateur like me.  In order to make all these cakes I had to freeze the chocolate cake because I baked it a week before (left over from the chocolate cake I did). The other two were baked at the same time as my niece's cake and stored in the fridge. I did the all the decorating on Sunday before my niece's birthday party. (I have done her cake on Saturday)

Well, that's it for now.

No new cakes for now. I guess everybody is broke after St. Valentine's.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Blue zebra cake

Blue zebra cake that I did this past weekend for my niece's 11th birthday. (She's a tween!!!!!)

It all started with the prep work: making a zebra out of gumpaste:



I also made a bow out of blue fondant and let it dry for a week, and also made some flowers with blue fondant and tiny white flowers. I had an idea about how to use them, but it really didn;t come together until I assembled the cake (like always). Each tier had three layers of cake. Each cake from each tier had a different size. So the bottom tier was composed of one 10", one 9" and one 8". The second tier was one 8", one 7" and one 6". the top tier was 6", 5", and 4". The idea was to do a sort of topsy turvy without too much carving. I ended up doing some carving to make them with the bottom layer smaller than the top one:

   
The bottom tier was crumb-coated with buttercream. The other two were crumb-coated with chocolate ganache.

The first tier is basic yellow cake with a twist. At the last minute I decided to dye blue two of the layers.

Funky looking cake, right?

The middle tier had two layers of chocolate and one layer of chocolate. The top tier tier was all chocolate.

Covering the top tier in fondant turned out to be the most difficult to cover. It ended up with some mistakes which I was able to cover with the zebra stripes.


The other two tiers were "easier" to cover, but the problem if having the bottom smaller than the top was a factor when covering them. But I got them done! Then it was a matter of adding the zebra stripes. Also, I realized that I didn't have enough blue to cover the bottom tier, so I decided to go with white for the bottom tier, and black for the middle and play with the stripes.  It turned out to be a good decision.


I then drove to my brother's to finish the cake there. My brother, s-i-l and niece were out, but my 22 year old nephew was there, so I put him to work making balls out of fondant. Good thing too, because making that many balls is a PITA.

And once I put the middle tier on top of the bottom, that's when I decided how to use the flowers. My nephew came out with how to put the balls on the top tier.



In the end the cake was a success. One of the moms asked me about how much would it cost to make another (I answered at least $250) and she took my card. As a "marketing tool" I brought some of my cards and left them in the table by the cake.

And this is what was left after singing "Happy Birthday":

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Chocolate cakes

Just decorated two chocolate cakes. They're both for the office tomorrow. I hope they like it.  Both cakes are chocolate covered in chocolate buttercream with chocolate ganache for filling. I was thinking that I'd use the ganache to crum coat the cakes, but it was too thin. So filling it is.

Flowers were made with regular buttercream.

     

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Oakland Raiders themed cake made with the strawberry cake I baked yesterday.  The top layer is strawberry and the bottom is basic yellow, as per client's request.


Due to the short notice I didn't really have too much time to be too creative with it. (and let's face it, with black, silver and white as the colors there's nothing much I could do.)  But, I thought, let's make the logo out of fondant.
 

I thought about a buttercream transfer, but I was leery and I have never done one of those to be honest. And I had a hard time dyeing buttercream black, even with adding cocoa powder to the buttercream. Turns out I did things right, I just needed to let it rest overnight.

The client asked not to cover the entire cake in black, and requested, if at all possible, not to use fondant. So, I had to do buttercream. Which I am not still 100% confident working with. I tried as much as I could to smooth it out.  Had I have more time to work with, I think it would have been better looking.

If there's one thing I am proud of is of the way the logo came out. I had the hardest time tracing the images over the fondant and then cutting them with my Xacto knife... It's a miracle I didn't cut off a fingertip.

I am now waiting for the client to pick it up and hoping she'll like it. The cake is for her husband's 40th birthday.

More pictures here in my photobucket album.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Strawberry cake

I just baked a strawberry cake, using this recipe.  I have to say it was very easy to follow and most important: no jello, no cake mix in the picture.  Nothing against cake mix, but one thing I proud myself is in the fact that all of my cakes are from scratch.

So, first thing is to puree the strawberries.  Took a while, but I got it done.


Then mix the ingredients. I was curious as the way the batter is mixed. First you whip the egg whites and the liquids, then sift the dry ingredients, put them in the mixer, start the mixer and add the butter to the dry ingredients. Almost like making biscuits.  THEN you add the liquids, and see the magic happen.



Then, pour batter on two 8 inch pans.  As you can notice I lined the pans with aluminium foil and damp towel paper. This prevent the "dome" to form during baking.  It worked beautifully.




The cakes as they are cooling.  I will use this cake for an order I have pending. I am planing on using the leftover puree for a filling.



Happy cakeing!

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Coach purse cake

Cake I delivered today. Took two days of work. After this cake I don't know if I ever do another purse cake, but I do know I won't be doing a Coach purse anytime soon. Too many darned C's...

The cakes are both zebra cakes. The bottom tier is vanilla and chocolate, and the "purse" I dyed one half of the batter pink with food coloring.
  

pink zebra cake:


purse:
   



bottom tier:


I had a HARD time with the C's. Thought about cutting out C's with my small cookie cutter. Didn't quite worked out. Then I was thinking about hand painting them but I am not a painter, and my hand is not that steady. Then I created a stencil with some old transparencies I have here that I am no longer using (who needs them when you can use PPP). Went to the store, got me a can of edible Wilton pink spray. Tried to stencil the C's in and... disaster.
Ended up painting the whole purse a bright pink to cover that mistake. Turned out for the best.
  

So, I went back to the original plan: cut outs. Only this time I rolled the fondant really thin and instead of C's, I cut O's, to which I cut out a small piece in the center. Much better. (but those were way too many C's, ouch)
 

Final cake before stacking:


Final cake all stacked and ready for delivery:


So, I got the cake into the car, and after a nerve wracking drive (thankfully it was a short one), I delivered the cake. The client squealed when she saw it: "That's so pretty! My boss will love it!"  And I got to say it got me all fuzzy feeling inside.

As an added bonus today in the mail my business cards arrived:


So along with my label (as per TX cottage food law), I slip one of my brand new cards in to the box.

BTW, The business cards I got them from Vistaprint.  They have this offer of 250 cards for $10. (plus S&H).