Spiderman!

A batch of Spiderman themed cupcakes for a birthday party.

I tried to stay away from fondant as much as possible for this one. Just the little decorations and lettering are made from fondant.

Heck if all those webs started to sag, and I could not get Spidey to stay up on his cupcake. He fell over a couple of times into his webs.

This was the batch I suggested they put the candles into when it came time.

Like I said, cupcakes are awesome. Minimal service needed, and almost no clean up afterwards. Although apparently there were quite afew kids running around the bowling alley with blue tongues.

Elmo's World

I remember when The Kid was little, she loved watching Elmo and Sesame Street. But put her next to a stuffed Elmo doll, forget about it!

Some kids like the real thing just as well.

This is an Elmo birthday cake for a first birthday party.

And of course, for a first birthday party, you have to have the cake dive mini-cake. I don't have the Elmo cake pan, this one was just carved out of a 6" round, and then frosted to give it depth. I hope they changed him out of that white shirt he was wearing when I dropped off the cake.

Here they are both together.


These are both chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, covered over with buttercream(not crusting!! a mistake!) and decorated with fondant deatils.

Lego cupcakes

I can't take full creative responsibility for this one. I had seen Lego cupcakes online somewhere and the image really stuck with me. So when someone requested a Lego theme I hauled it out of the vault and here you go!


Our family visited Legoland this summer. They had lego shaped pommes frites!! I wish I had bought some just to take a picture of it.

Extra

The cakemakers quandry...

You always have to make more frosting than you think you will need. It is nigh impossible to match a color if you run out. I always have leftover frosting at the end of a job. Sometimes if I know I have another cake coming up I can save it, if the colors match. But usually, I just gets dumped.

Well, The Husband came up with an ingenious new method of disposal.



Not so much.

Double Trouble

Double cupcake party!

I love making cupcakes, I like making cupcakes more than I like making whole cakes. People ask me why, as it seems like a whole lot more work. You know, making 24 small cakes, vs. 1 big cake. Well, to me, it seems like with a bunch of small items the margin for error is much smaller (larger?? whatever, it's easier to correct a mistake), and on a small scale like a cupcake it's much easier to scrape everything off and start again. A cake, not so much, you pretty much have one shot at it, and then you have to start all over again.

Anyway, back to the cupcakes.

First Jack, Jack likes tractors...



Second Wes, Wes likes Thomas the Tank...



I always try to sell it as less to clean up.

Taste the Rainbow!

So, I believe that I mentioned Rainbow cake before.

If you have never seen a rainbow cake...

This is the mild and unassuming exterior.

BA-BAM!!!

Curious to make your own? This is where I learned the magic!

They can even be made into cupcakes.

Hinamatsuri!

Hinamatsuri or Girls Day is celebrated in Japan on March 3 (third day, third month) (Boys Day is March 5th, 5th day, 5th month.). As a child growing up in Hawaii we would do things in school to celebrate.

The Kid has a summer birthday, so never really gets to bring cupcakes or treats to school. So I usually try to arrange something with her teacher where I bring in cupcakes and a book and talk about celebrating Girl's Day.

This past year I made up some cupcakes and decorated them with simple origami kokeshi dolls. These could be later used as a bookmark, or slipped over the end of a pencil.

Like a little army of KAWAII!!

First cake

This is pretty much the cake that began the cake making adventure.

It was a last minute birthday cake for a friend.

Store bought frosting, who knew buttercream was so easy to make. But, Betty has been doing it for years, so really, you can't go wrong there.

I had made birthday cakes for The Kid several years in a row, but nothing out of the ordinary. There was a good reception to this cake, so I threw it out there that I could make cakes to order, and it pretty much took off from there.

BOLT!

Yay a Bolt cake!

What a fun movie that was.

I was able to get Mittens and Rhino down pretty well, but when it came to Bolt.... Sculpting a well known character out of floppy fondant in humid weather is not so easy. I'm one of those people, that if the finished result does not look like the well known character, I'm not happy. And well, all my efforts ended up looking like a white blob with ears.

I was having a really hard time. In the end I had to settle on doing a collar with a BOLT tag on it. I really hope that I did not dissapoint the birthday girl.

Here is another shot of Mittens and Rhino...I'm really proud of those two. Rhino is in one of those snap together plastic Christmas ornaments, which worked perfectly for his ball.

Again crusting buttercream! Hooray for crusting buttercream! Over rainbow cake, with fondant and gumpaste details.

Go Cowboys!

Or whatever...

I got scolded today because I had not updated my blog.

So I'm updating with the scoldee's cake.

Lt. Brewer turned 35 last week, so of course he needed a cake!

Again, crusting buttercream. I'm in love with that stuff.

I tried to do a frozen buttercream transfer. This is where you trace a mirror image of the picture/image of what you want on your cake onto a piece of wax paper. Fill it in with buttercream in the apropriate colors, and then freeze it. You should be able to then put the transfer onto your cake and then peel off the wax paper.
NOT SO MUCH!

As I told them at the party I had to do the "angry dance" around the cake at several points. But the fail transfer left a nice impression and I was able to get the name looking pretty uniform. And a Fondant star and sleeve stripes look pretty good.

Birthday boy spent some time pondering who player #35 was.

I do, I do, I do...

Holey moley! My first wedding cake!!!

How stressful was this?

Very.

Lucky for me the reception was very casual and low key.
I only managed to stab the frosting inadvertently about 4 times, each time was a heart attack, but fixable.

Driving it to the venue was an event itself as well. There were 4 traffic circles between me and the restaurant. Each time I went around one I clenched and hoped nothing fell over.

A couple of firsts here as well.

Crusting buttercream. Went very well, I liked the look of it, and the taste was fantastic. A good alternative to fondant, and it makes a nice smooth finish. It was a little humid here so that caused a little too much sheen.

Chocolate decorations. To add a little more depth to the whole thing I made these white chocolate sticks, and while they were cooling I added the little green flowers, and "buds". There was some trouble sticking them into the cake without breaking them, but I think they looked pretty nice. Fancied the whole thing up a little bit.

The bottom square was a chocolate cake, and the two top rounds were white cake. All covered with buttercream frosting and fondant decorations.

The happy couple!

CONGRATULATIONS!.

Cheese Cakes

First fully fondant covered cakes ever!

It's kind of funny because the fact that they are supposed to be cheese wheels kind of lends itself to the lumpiness of the cakes.


These cakes were made for a cast party at The Kid's elementary school. They did a production of The Pied Piper.

There were two casts, and two performances, so two sets of cakes. I turned around and did it all over again the next night.

Second time, a little better...


Still lumpy. Especially right at that point where the two layers meet under the fondant.

Still, kind of cute! And they were all demolished at the end of each night.

Care Bear Cupcakes

I could not imagine making a whole carebear on a little cupcake, so I settled on making some of their tummy "tattoos". If I had to go back and do another set like this, I would probably have done more of the "tattoos" and less of the clouds.

These were stored covered overnight, so they ended up absorbing a bit of moisture and getting shiny and a little sticky. But I did not seem to be a problem taste wise.


I think these were rainbow cupcakes with buttercream and fondant frostings.

Beauty and the Geek Dining in Cake

Here is another cake done for the TV themed spouses dining in.

This table's theme was Beauty and the Geek. The beauty part was pretty easy, but the geek bit was a little thought provoking. I got some physics equations from one of the participants and used a frosting pen to write them on the fondant.

This was also the first time I'd done a 3 tiered cake. There was not too much trouble with the stacking, but about an hour after stacking the whole thing a HUGE air bubble appeared on the bottom tier. It was like a large boil...ugh.

Here is a detail of the little bird I made to represent the "beauty" side of the topper.

For the "geek" side I downloaded a robot cubee from this site. I also used some of these on my daughter's Star Wars themed birthday cake.

This cake had white confetti cake as the first and top tiers, and plain white cake as the middle layer. The pink fondant was strawberry marshmallow fondant, and the others were plain marshmallow fondant. And I think the decorations were made with gum paste, I can't really remember.

Dipping Olive Oil

I love food. I am an EATER! Love to eat just about everything.
A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner at a friend's house. She had out these dipping oils for bread. They were seriously nommy.

Of course she gets hers from Pampered Chef. And I'm just too cheap to go that route.

So I made my own.


And pardon me for saying it, but DAMN!! It's good!

Here are my ingredients. All things I already had at home.

Just mix together until you like the flavor. I diced the garlic up really fine, and crushed the pepper to release some of the kick. If you prefer a stronger tasting olive oil then use it, but I found it to be too overpowering for my taste.

I also made some with dried basil and oregano instead of the pepper. But I do prefer the pepper one.

Yummy! Good thing Olive Oil is good for you.

Happy Birthday

To ME!!

Yeah, I made my own birthday cupcakes.

I got a new fondant cutter over the weekend, and just had to try it out.
Cupcakes + Gerbera dasies = FREAKING FANTASTIC!

Chocolate Banana Cake

This is one of my first normal cakes I made. Up until this point I was doing theme cakes, the weirder the better. I didn't think I would be able to pull this one off.

The request was for a chocolate banana cake. No Crisco products.

Hmmmm....

Well, it ended up being a chocolate banana cake with whipped chocolate ganache. Yum.


I also dipped some strawberries and banana slices in chocolate and used them to garnish the cake.

The rooster on the egg was some kind of inside joke for the recipient.

These are terribly dark pictures.