Thursday, June 2, 2011

Graduation/Marine Cake

So my little cousin's boyfriend's mom asked me to make a cake for her son's graduation/going into the Marines. She wanted a full sheet cake where half the cake was decorated in his high school colors and the other side done in Marine colors.  We decided to make half the cake white cake with buttercream and the other half chocolate with chocolate icing.  I decided to order edible logos for the high school logo and the Marines logo, but ended up not getting the logo for the high school and had to end up using the piping gel/wax paper trick.  


If you've never used piping gel you take an image and invert it and place it under a piece of wax paper.  Then you take some piping gel (located in the cake decorating section at most craft stores or Wal-Mart) and you can use any color food coloring and mix it into the piping gel.  Then you use a small circle tip (tip 1 or tip 3) to trace around the the picture under the wax paper.  Once you have finished tracing just take the wax paper and place it on your iced cake then fill it in. 


The edible logo was easy to apply.  It came on wax paper and I just had to roll it across the edge of the table to loosen the logo from the wax paper.  Once it was loosened then just you pull it off, place it on the already iced cake and then press the logo down gentle working from the center outwards.  Once I had the logo on I just used some black icing (chocolate icing colored black) to cover us the white edges of the logo. 


For the white cake I used buttercream icing and colored it blue and orange.  I used the blue for the majority of the background and used the orange as the boarder and for the V in the logo. 


For the chocolate cake I used chocolate icing and buttercream icing.  The chocolate was colored black and the buttercream was colored red.  

So here is what the cake looks like after its all said and down.  I placed the white cake on the left and the chocolate on the right. They are pushed together so you can't see the whole cake because of part of it being under the cake box. (Sorry about the picture quality.  It was kind of dark in my mom's kitchen.)


Hope he likes it. :)



Friday, February 4, 2011

Hello Kitty/Mushroom Cake

So my niece, Grace's birthday is in December, but since she is with her mom at that time we normally have her birthday party sometime in January. This year we had to push it back to the first week in February due to some scheduling conflicts. Anywho!  For her birthday cake this year she told me that she needed a Hello Kitty/Mushroom cake. You might be wondering how do Hello Kitty and Mushrooms go together...I will tell you. Apparently in the mind of a 6 year old Hello Kitty is pretty cool. (I totally agree with this!) But apparently so are the mushrooms from Super Mario Brothers. So, in her mind she has come up with the idea of putting these two things together into one cake. 

So after thinking on this long and hard I finally came up with an idea. She saw these things of candy at World Market that are sweet/sour pieces of candy and what do you know....they come in two styles of holders...Hello Kitty & Mushrooms from Super Mario Bros. So I decided that I would make a checkerboard cake (inside and out) and have Hello Kitty and the Mushrooms facing off against each other. My original idea was to go and buy the candy holders and put them on the cake, but after finding out how much they are just for one I decided that wasn't such a good idea. 

I started the cake tonight and to get the checkerboard effect on the inside of the cake I made two types of cake, Chocolate and White. Once you have them both cooled you take a knife (tried to find a cookie cutter, but they apparently don't make them as big as I needed) and a ruler and go to town. You cut a smaller square or circle depending on what type of cake you are doing out of the inside of both cakes and swap the layers. Then in the layer you just swapped you make a smaller square/circle and swap. Keep going until you have reached the middle of the cake. I made my layers about 1 inch in width.
Once you have both cakes done you ice the inside and stack the cakes. Now when you cut into the cake it should look like a checkerboard on the inside.




To ice the cake I decided to use pink and green. I did a pink and green checkerboard on the top of the cake and then alternated the colors on the side of the cake between pink and green. After the cake was iced I decided to make Hello Kitty and Mushroom cake pops. For instructions on how to make cake balls/pops you can see the link below. Bakerella Cake Balls

Below is a picture of the final product.

Hot Pink Cake!

This cake was for my cousin Erin's 13th birthday. She is a princess and was having a costume party for her birthday this year. The 13th party is the last party they get to have before their 16th, so she wanted to make sure he cake was awesome. I pretty much had free reign over this cake. She wanted it to be a total surprise. She did give me input on her favorite colors though. Her favorite colors are all BRIGHT! Hot Pink, Lime Green, Electric Blue, Electric Purple. 

So my idea for the cake was to make her a princess cake since she was going to dress as a princess for her costume party. I planned on HOT PINK on the outside with PURPLE cake on the inside and for the filling to do a rainbow with all the colors she gave me. 

For the cake I used white cake and added electric purple food coloring to it. When we cut into it it kind of looked like Barney got baked inside my cake. :) For some reason I cannot find the picture I took of the inside, but as soon as I do I will post it.

The outside got the hot pink treatment. I added different colored dots on the bottom of the cake and her initials on the top. For the finishing touches I added a glass slipper on top, some diamonds around the cake and some pretty jewels dangling from the cake. The jewels didn't turn out so well. I apparently used the wrong kind of wire when I made them, but now I know and knowing is half the battle. :)

Finished product

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