Change of Design

Found out the reason the square cake didn't come out even was because the pan was actually bent causing all of the cake to pool in the middle.  I went back to Hobby Lobby to see about getting another pan, but all of them were like that.  So....on to plan B.  

We've decided to change it to a round cake about 2 weeks before the wedding.  Well, I started coming up with the plan of when everything was going to get made and put together and it ended up that one of my co-workers got sick and had to go into the hospital.  We had made plans to swap shifts the week of the wedding so I could be off to make the cake.  Because she is an awesome lady and she is always taking care of everyone else I covered her shift until they made other plans to make sure it was covered. 

The week of the wedding Kathy and I changed our mind again since I wasn't sure how much time I was going to get off to bake the cake. We decided to go with 3 types of cupcakes (Strawberry, white and chocolate) with an 8 in. round cake for them to save for their 1 year anniversary. 

To save time we used box cake mix for the cupcakes.  For the 8 in. round I did half chocolate and half white.  We decided to use my mom's Chocolate Cake recipe and the cake part from a Baltimore Cake recipe.  Because of the time crunch we used store bought Buttercream icing and just used the Wilton's White-White to get it to the color we needed.

Once we had everything baked and cooled we started piping the icing on. I decided to go with a star tip for a rose look on the cupcakes since Kathy thought it looked pretty.  Once we got all of the cupcakes iced I took a small round tip and piped different things onto the cupcakes in pale pink.  

On this one it had the date of the wedding.

On this one I did the initial of their last name. You can also see on the one to the left that I put a Gerber Daisy on the cupcake.

This one has both their initials on the side and the last name initial in the middle. (This cupcake didn't have a good trip on the way to the wedding. It got a little squished on the side of the box.)

For the round cake we decided to keep with the same idea that we had come up with for the square cake. We iced it in the ivory buttercream and added the pale pink dots around the cake with the ribbon on the bottom.  Kathy decided on a "L" with rhinestones for the cake topper so I put it on the top with a Gerber Daisy and a light pink rose. To finish the cake I did a small shell piping around the top of the cake.

We placed the cake and the decorated cupcakes on a tiered stand in the center of the table and had two smaller cupcake trees on the sides with the plainly decorated cupcakes.

We decorated the tiered stand with a couple of the Gerber daisies and light pink roses.

Here is a picture of the happy couple standing behind their cake/cupcakes.

Practice Cake - Take 1

As I said in my last post Kathy and I were taking cake decorating classes and that I would keep you posted on the happenings of that class. Well we ended up not going to our last class. I ended up going to a football game for my little cousin's first time marching in the band. My teacher called me the week after the class and told me to go ahead and decorate my cake and send her a picture though so I could get my certification for taking the class. Soooo....I decided that decorating a cake and doing a practice wedding cake for my brother, Bryan and Kathy's upcoming wedding at the same time would be a GREAT idea.

First I had to talk to Kathy about what type of cake they wanted. Since she was married before and had a round cake then she wanted a square cake this time. We came up with making the cake ivory colored with baby pink dots on the side and brown and pink ribbon around the bottom with pink flowers on the corners of the cake. She really wanted chocolate cake with buttercream and my brother wanted white cake with buttercream, so I decided I would make half chocolate and half white cake.

This was my first attmpt with using square cake pans and I have to say that it was a little harder than I would have thought. My cake rose really high in the middle so I ended up having to cut a good bit off to level it and it still wasn't very level.

I used boxed cake mix for both the chocolate and the white cake, but I actually made my own buttercream. I used the Wilton buttercream recipe, but I didn't use the shorting cause I think it tastes funny. I like my buttercream with nothing but butter in it, but using only butter does have its down falls. When you use only butter it makes the icing butter yellow, so I bought some Wilton White-White and lightened the icing to the color I wanted it.

Here is what my first attempted turned out like. The flowers are just some fake ones that Kathy brought bake from Hawaii for my nieces. For the real cake she is wanting to use Gerber daisies or something like that.

Cake Decorating Class

My sister-in-law, Kathy and I decided that we were going to take some cake decorating classes. The first week in class we learned the basics of making icing and baking a cake. We also learned how to use the star tip and deocrated cookies using the star tip.

Our second week in class we had to bake a 8 in. round to bring to class so we could learn to ice it correctly and do gel transfers. We also learned how to make a ribbon rose, pipe dots and do curvey lines.

We didn't have a lot of time to deocrate the cake after we did the gel transfer (which you can see a little of my purple gel if you look at the top of the cupcake) because it took so long for the cakes to harden after we iced them. Also, my wax paper stuck to my icing (which it isn't supposed to do by the way) so my icing is a little lumpy.

Our third week in class we learned how to do drop flowers, shaggy mums, leaves, and puff flowers

Here is my puff flower. My icing wasn't quite stiff enough to stand up like it was supposed to, but overall I think it was pretty good.

Here are my shaggy mums and leaves on top of my cupcakes. I thought they turned out pretty well and they were fun to do.

Next week is our final week of class and we are supposed to fully decorate a cake. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Transfromers

My friend Rachael decided that she wanted to make a cake for her son's birthday party and I told her that I would help her with the cake. We decided on making 2 - 12 in. chocolate cakes and 2 - 8 in. white cakes. Racheal found some recipes online for chocolate cream cheese icing and some kind of raspberry icing (I'll have to find out exactly what it was from her.)

Well, the cake making went okay. We got the white cakes made without any problems and 1 of the chocolate cakes made without any problems. The second chocolate cake that I made got stuck in the pan and ended up falling apart when I got it out of the pan. The second attempt went much better. When we started putting the cake together we quickly realized that the chocolate cream cheese icing was not meant to be a filling. Within 20 minutes after putting the second layer on top of the chocolate cream cheese icing the cake started splitting in half and eventually fell right off, so we ended up taking the top layer off, cutting the bottom layer in half and flipping the top part with the icing on it around so it made 2 smaller layers. I did the same for the white cake so it wouldn't be disproportionate.

We decided to try to make the All Spark from the move as a topper for the cake. We made some marshmellow treats and shaped it into a square. We then we had our first run in with fondant and lets just say...it didn't go so well. After I covered the marshmellow treats with fondant I took a skewer and made the marks from the All Spark. I then took glitter dust and brushed it on to the whole thing then took black petal dust and brushed it into grooves to make them stand out.

I wasn't completely happy with the results, but her kid liked it so that's all that matters.

My First Tier Cake

So it's that time again...another birthday party, but this time it was for my niece, Hope. It was her 7th birthday party and since getting a Wii for Christmas last year she has been obsessed with Mario, so she decided she wanted a Mario birthday party. My brother found some cakes online that he thought would be cool for her birthday, but all of them were tiered. The cake we decided on trying to make was a 2 tier cake with the basic scenes from the Mario game. On the original cake that we were basing this off of had miniture Mario characters on it, but we weren't able to find any characters online that we could buy, so my brother found a Mario chess set that he ordered.

I started the cake off with Funfetti cake mix since it had the Marioish colors inside the cake. It took me 6 boxes of cake mix to make 2 - 12 in. layers and 2 - 8 in. layers for the cake. I have to say that these cakes turned out a lot better than my attempts with the Hello Kitty cake. :)

I started working on the cake the Thursday before the party. It took me the majority of the day to bake all of the cakes and letting them cool.

Here is a picture of the cake put together and dirty iced.

Friday after I got off work I iced the cake in a sky blue and started to pipe on the grassy hills. And after a half day of work on Saturday I went home to finish up the cake by piping on the bricks for the stairs to the flag, the flag pole and flag, the mushrooms, stars and coins and the question mark boxes for the mushrooms and coins.

I had a little issue with the coloring of the green icing for the pipe, but you get the point. :)

For the coins and star I bought some yellow edible sparkles.

My awesome question mark boxes. I was super proud of them. :)

I put her initial for the flag to make it a little more special for her.

That completes the 360 view.

Better late than never

So my friend's little sister started a blog to show off her baking skillz and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea, so...here I am.

The first cake I ever did was for my niece, Grace's 5th birthday party. She had been running around since October telling everyone that her Aunt Anna was going to be making her a Hello Kitty cake for her birthday, but since she changes her mind every 5 seconds I didn't really think anything about it until my mom called me the Thursday before the party and asked me if I needed any help with the cake.

This was the first cake that I had ever baked that was larger than just an 8 in. pan. The first 2 cakes I did broke as soon as I tried to take them out of the pan. The 3rd cake I tried to make I got out of the pan in one piece, but ended up cracking later on when I was transporting it. Once I FINALLY got the cake out and partically in one piece I started to put on the icing.

So to start this cake I took her birthday invitation and blew it up on my computer. I printed the paper out and traced it onto the cake with a toothpick once I got the dirty icing on. (Since then I have found out that there is a much easier way to transfer, but like I said before this was my first cake. )

This is a picture of my icing in progress. Originally the invitation had Hello Kitty flying over a city skyline, but since Grace's favorite color is blue ("Hey. I have to tell you something...my favorite color is blue!") I decided that I would put her on a sky blue background to make it look like she was floating through the sky.

Here is a picture after I got all of the icing filled in around Hello Kitty. It took a while to do because most of the spaces were really close together so I actually had to use a toothpick to pull the frosting around and fill in the spots.

I started icing the cake around 7am on the day of the party...while I was work...and finished around 2pm, with 3 hours to spare before the party started. Here is the finished cake at the birthday party.