Monday, November 17, 2008

Its Been Awhile So Heres A Lot Of New Stuff!

The Holidays have arrived! Its been awhile since I've blogged, but it's been a few crazy weeks! Lets start with Halloween! I had another pumpkin cake order and this second time around I thought I did such an awesome job! It came out looking great! See for your self...

I really felt the roses came out a lot better and even adding the additional leaf and stem accents made this pumpkin cake all that much better!

After the first baby shower cake, I wasn't too sure if I ever wanted to do another... However, I got an order I just couldn't resist. The order was to make a Winnie the Pooh themed cake with a purple pink topper that welcomed the baby girl. It was a little struggle to think of what I was going to do, but after a few drawings and concept ideas I finally came up with this (well I would say little guy, but its not so little) so instead I'll say, gigantic cake!

The little details were my favorite to do, as were all the characters. This cake pushed me to the edge of creativity and I really think I achieved something beyond even what I thought I couldn't do!

That's Piglet and Pooh Bear, with a jar of honey!

This is Tigger with a jar of honey also... He was so much fun to create, and I had a little trouble painting him because he is covered in them... but in the end I really liked the results!

Mr. Rabbit, he was the only character I wasn't satisfied with. I honestly think his legs were too big, his face was too small, but everyone said he looked alright. I just think I could have done better... and had I had the time and the money too I probably would have remade this guy five times. However, he stands as he does when the day is over.

My favorite part of this cake was getting to try something I never thought I would ever get to try! Eeyore! He was always such a loving caring character who everyone felt sorry for. So, in my addition to this cake I made Eeyore the lucky one! He got a huge jar of honey, and his tail is attached! This one was my favorite to make and shockingly he only took about two hours or so! He was still a lot of fun!

Again, the detail is what made this cake... and as you can see this bee had both wings, a stinger, and yes a face with two eyes and a smile, including all the stripes which were hand painted!

This is the topper, the pink and purple topper with a baby under a blanket. The Welcome Baby sign is all made in Royal icing. The Baby and blanket are made from fondant and are hand painted. Overall, the cake was too much fun, and it was one cake I wish I didn't let go of. I wanted to keep it forever. This wasn't my only cake order for that weekend, I still had another cake for a one year old birthday to do.

This cake was a huge challenge in the sense that the topper in this picture was not the original, and the name broke three times until the last one was dropped off at the house and put together on spot. The petals and leafs on the very top hot so hot they began to re-mold themselves back to normal fondant consistency. I had a lot of problems with this cake but after several hours of re-pairing what the heat damaged I was able to make it look a lot better. Unfortunately, I did not get one last photo of the cake. This photo is of the re-construction... the final cake had a photo of the baby and her new re-made name on it. I wish I had the final photo of it, but I just didn't think about it after all the work I did on it, I was ready to just deliver it...

After a long weekend with those cakes, I needed a break, to enjoy some fun bakery items. I invited my friend and assistant Marissa over to help me make cookies... I found a sugar cookie recipe that I thought would taste good. We doubled the recipe because it said it only made 24 cookies, and we wanted to take the batter and make three different colors. Well, when we doubled the recipe and then started to color and cut out the cookies, 24 cookies started to look like a better number. The final amount of cookies was something over 100! Here's a photo of about twenty or so.

You can see the yellow, orange, and red leafs for our thanksgiving/holiday themed idea. I really was glad with the out come when I tasted the final cookie... It was really simple but the icing gave it a little something extra. I like cookies that aren't over powerful, but just cookies.... and these I liked a lot!
My husband birthday was also coming up, so I took a weekend off from taking orders to practice cakes and flavoring for my husbands birthday cake. He wanted chocolate but I wanted to try something new and different. We eventually came up on a recipe that was called chocolate peanut butter cake. Wow that sounded awesome. So I tried it out and thought it was sooo awesome. The cupcakes below are the test run of this recipe.
This is the chocolate peanut butter cake recipe with vanilla frosting, very taste. This cupcake just needed more peanut butter, soooooo....
Then I thought lets add peanut butter to the icing and see what that's like.... well the cupcakes (pictured above) were the best tasting by far! Then I got going thinking about how beautiful I wanted them to look, so I thought about melting peanut butter and placing that on top of the cupcake and icing... the out come was:
This was sooooo good it should have been served with a huge glass of milk!
The final shot of all three different icings and cupcakes.... yummy!
The cake orders started to come in, and I still needed to make my husbands birthday cake. I wanted to make something special for him, but I ended up getting so sick I was running a fever and was put out of business for almost two days. When I started to feel better i was down to the day of my husbands birthday party to put his birthday cake together. The cake I made was the came cupcakes as you see above just in a cake form. The cake was put together in less then two hours.... this is what we call speed work:
This was the start of the cake, this was about an hour and a half in to the cake work....
This was a little less then two hours after I started and it smelled great, tasted great and all I wanted to do was eat the whole thing! Yum, yum!!!
The last order of the weekend was a new one for me. It was a strawberry cake with a vanilla frosting and a strawberry shortcake princess themed party! I did a little research on this one, but in the end I have to say this cake was all new ideas, and new tastes I have never tried before.
The strawberry shortcake is made of color flow with is a very delicate process, and need to say it broke... of course thought it was hard to see, and it still looked great! While decorating the cake I decided I wanted to try a new boarder and bottom boarder... so what did I do, I just simply started to put icing on the cake and before I knew it the cake looked so cool!!!
The some what side view...
The close up of the color flow detail... and yes when you do color flow its all done by hand... this was color flowed, then some areas were painted by hand... It was a challenge but a great one I learned from and will never forget.
The final top of the cake, it looked great, and was simply yet wonderful. I enjoyed this cake because it took me back to my childhood... Not only that but I got to try a new strawberry cake recipe and some new hand painted art work...
Hope you all enjoy these additions, as they were all from my heart. Thank you to all my customers who let me try all these new design and cake flavors!