Dolphins...Principal's Cake

Lenae designed a new logo for our Elementary School's spirit wear. Our Principal absolutely loves it and is not putting it on everything that he can.


Naturally when his birthday rolled around, the Vice Pricipal ordered a cake with the new logo on it.

iTouch

The #1 item on most teen wishlist in the area is an iTouch.

Here is an iTouch cake I did for a 13 year old.

The time and date on display are her birthday and birth time.

It took quite alot of time to get these apps made out.

Luckily I had all of the right colored dragees to make a blinged out iTouch cover.

Heide Red & Black

Here is a small cake done for an adult's birthday. The overall design was left up to me, I was just given the recipient's favorite colors.

They happened to be red and black.

As a general rule, I don't like to use too much red or black frosting. Both colors take alot, and I mean ALOT of icing dye to get a true color. Grey and sort of dark pink does not really do it for me, it looks very faded and just not right. Anyway, with that much icing dye the taste of the frosting becomes very sharp and bitter. Not really what you want to go for when making cake. Black frosting also tends to turn your mouth and teeth a very strange color.

Using the colored frostings as accents worked out pretty well.
As a note, it does not take as much dye to color fondant, and the taste is rarely affected.




This cake/cupcake combo also ended up on The Cupcake Blog. Woot!

Bakugan Brawl-Day Cake

I'm brshing off my cake baking doldrums here to post some of the cakes in my backlog.

Here is a very simple cake I made for a Bakugan birthday party.

Super simple, but at the same time, time consuming. All of those flames are indivdually cut out and then hand shaped.

Woo-Hoo!

I guess I was up on Thecupcakeblog.com this month, or some month, who knows!

My Cupcakes!!!!

Woo-Hoo!!!

Topsy Turvy!

O-M-G!!!

FINALLY!!! I mean, seriously, finally!!

I put on my big girl decorator pants and attempted a topsy turvy cake again.

For those of you reading from the beginning (I know there are not many of you, but that's ok) you might remember my very first post. My first attempt at a topsy turvy cake was a pure disaster. And since then I've had unintentionally crooked cakes, but not an actual true, meant to be wonky cake.

Until now.....

Ta-DAH!

This was an Alice In Wonderland themed cake.

Really how else should an Alice In Wonderland cake be, but a little off balance.

Granted, there are some areas that could have been improved, and things that I would have done differently. But overall, I am incredibly happy about the way that it turned out.

A very merry unbirthday indeed!

Chill in the Air

It has finally been getting chilly here in the Eifel. We had been experiencing a pretty nice indian Summer for awhile, but I think that the cold has finally, really arrived.

And, I seem to be on a bit of a scarf kick lately.

Here is my first ever neck warmer/cowl scarf.

This is my absolute favorite yarn. I bought it about 5 years ago at a shop about 3 miles away from the Husband's famiy home in Maine. It's been sitting, waiting for me to make it into something.


Finally! I was winging it, so I did not account for anything like a hole for the button, so that's a FAIL for me!! DOH! So I ended up sewing metal snaps to the back side, and so it snaps on, which works too.

The first day I wore this, one of my friends commented on it, and so I asked her if she would like one too.

Here's hers.
This time I planned ahead a little better, and was able to make the button holes.
It can be worn with both buttons done up

or just one.


Cute! I love the ruffle action.

I also had the time to finish this crochet scarf I've been working on.

I attatched the ends together, so it forms a long loop, I did not add a twist to it like I was supposed to, so the wrong side turns out sometimes. Again, DOH!

It is also a little too long, I think I got carried away, so I might gather a bit of it together to make it ruffly.

This looks like a rather complicated pattern, but it is really a simple fan pattern repeated over and over until you reach the length you desire.

Cold weather I'm ready for you!!!
OK, not really.

Hallow-Weenies 2010!!

Serious Weenie action here.

Last year Lenae and I spent most of our time on costumes for the kids. This year, we decided to spend more time on our costumes, and allow our children to tag along. Our plans sounded good at first, and then quickly took a turn into what the hell were we thinking territory.

Here we are starting out

The majority of our supplies.


Getting paper mache-ed.

Lenae under our high tech drying lamp.


Fitting my hat.


I somehow escaped the whole paper mache my head thing, and now that I think about it, we probably did not need to do it for Lenae either. Oh well.

Craft foam makes great armor. You can heat it a little and form it to whatever shape you need. Don't heat it too much, and don't heat it before adding whatever under paint embelishments you want....like I did. Check out this tutorial for more information on creating your own craft foam armor.

Here also you see the apalling lack of storage in my kitchen. Though, for a German non-fitted kitchen, I have lots of space, just not alot of storage.

This is Lenae's hat that has been filled with expanding foam. We will cut it down later to form the top.


Any ideas of who we will be?


Keep in mind that we live in Germany, it's not as if I can drive down to Wal-Mart, or Jo-Ann's for a supply run. We had been collecting odds and ends here and there for a year. Our best find was a couple of glittery gold "dresses" from the thrift shop, our most difficult find, stretchy shiny fabric for our shirts/armor. I swear we walked all over the city of Trier looking for something suitable, and we finally stumbled onto a tiny fabric shop that had just what we needed.

That is pretty much it for the in progress shots. We get too absorbed in what we are doing that we forget to take pictures of the process.

Here we are skipping ahead to the end product.
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BA-BAM!!




Here is a reference comparison.


The kids rounded out the rest of our group, with Sacajawea, Amelia Earhart, Jedediah, and Octavius. Plus my little kid as a non-matching witch on the end there. I'll post a litle more about her costume later.

Down Time

So the blog has been down for awhile. I have been reassessing my business and other activities.

The Kid and I are currently working out our differences.

This photo was taken at the Film Museum in London. There is a Star Wars set built there, and you can have your photo taken. This in itself was worth the price of admission.

Posting will resume with photos from Halloween! Forever to be known as "The BEST Halloween EVER!!!" by The Kid.

Lenae's Un-Birthday

So we were going to surprise Lenae on her birthday this year. Long story short, it did not work out, but she got a new nephew out of the whole deal.

Of course I had already prepared the dessert for her party, so here are some gratuitous cake shots

Last year I made her sunflower cupcakes, this year I figured I had to go one a little better.

Her favorite colors are a turqouise/teal green, and greens, so that's where I got my color combination from. This is the first time I've ever done a two colored cake like this, and separating it with that swirl of brown really made it work.

And here she is looking not a day past 29 (again!).

Dora!

My first ever Dora the Explorer cake!!

The kid absolutely loved this show when she was a toddler. I remember once when my mom came to visit, and was talking to her. Grandma asked "What's the magic word??" The Kid's response, "ABRE!!" Awesome.

Anyway, I had the cake and background turned the wrong way, so my photos all came out dark and a little blurry. I am a rubbish photographer. So these are a bit flashy.

The cake was served along with some flowery cupcakes.

And here is the birthday girl with her cake! I love it when people send me pictures of the recipient enjoying the cake....hint-hint...

yay!

Racing to Finish

So, easing back into things, my first cake after a fantastic summer vacation was a pretty simple one.

Now, like many of the themes I deal with, NASCAR is a big mystery to me. Many, many times I give thanks for Google.

So, I turned out a slightly modified Jeff Gordon logo for this cake.

I found these little chocolate cars in my stash to add around the edge. They were not racing cars, and some of them were pink, but I hoped the birthday boy would not mind.

It's OVER!!!

Summer that is.
The calendar is open again, be gentle on me, I'm out of practice.

But, let's celebrate with some awesomeness!

Cake and classic Star Wars!

awwww....booo...it's cut off on one side!
Ok, fixed a little bit, thanks Mrs. S.
And yes, Jen this one's for you!

Kate's Cake

I really love making baby shower cakes. There is just something about them, it does not matter if it's for a boy or for a girl, I can make them as sweet and cute as I want to. Lenae and I had a discussion that the cake is really not for the baby, it's for the mom, so you can't go too girly.

This cake was for Lenae's little sister who is having her second baby, we had a BBQ and a little party while her family was here for a visit.

Kate likes cherry blossoms, so I used that as my base. I was wondering what a masculine "Maggie" cake would be called. A "Magnus" cake???

In the usual manner of planning my cakes, the idea to use the bird family came to me as I was lying in bed the night before.

The cherry blossoms worked their way around the whole cake, and it looks like I've perfected that robin's egg blue I love so much (a little bit of teal Wilton's dye, and an even bittier bit of sky blue).

They already have another boy-child, so I thought it would be a good idea to include him in the little bird family.

So Tweet!

Tink 3

Tinkerbell seems to be getting popular again, after saying I did not make too many of these cakes, I've had two requests in the past two months.

Each time, it gets easier to make this cake. It helps alot to know exactly what I need in order to pull it off.

And I'm still in love with those toadstools.

Mario

Here is a small somewhat last minute Mario themed birthday cake.

Very simple, none of the game's characters were represented, just the platform background.

The last time I made these...whatever they are...I got dinged by a 9 year old for not putting teeth in them.

The last time I make that mistake!

Blossoming

Here is another one of my "Maggie" cakes.

It's getting easier and easier to make this one. It's also becoming one of my most requested styles.

Lovely.

Little Einsteins

I'm not all that familiar with the Little Einsteins show. The Kid was past that stage when it came out. She did watch the heck out of those Baby Einstein videos.

Anyway, this is supposed to be the ship that is in the show.

It sort of came out looking like a cartoon version of a cartoon ship.

Of course there were cupcakes to go along, you can kind of see them there in the background.

It's been a long time since I've done a really carved cake. I was not too sure how well the crusting buttercream would go on, especially around the shapes like the rocket engines (which were cupcakes...on a stick!), but they ended up smoothing out pretty well.