Anna's 2nd Birthday!

Anna's 'Monsters Inc' Birthday cake :)

7/1/11 - So not to sound like a terrible mother, but I do have two little girls (Ella and Anna), not just one. Since I didn't make a big cake for Ella's first birthday, I kept it low key with Anna as well, but for her 2nd birthday I told her I would make her a cake with whatever she wanted on it. So since there was one movie at the time that she literally watched EVERY day, I kind of knew what I was getting into. Her response was "Monsters!!!"

Mike before being painted - rice crispy covered in fondant and carved.

Painted with power food coloring.

We had to make a little Monster smash cake too while we were at it :)

The Elk Hunters' Anniversary Cake

Gum paste Elk...

June 2011 - Was asked to make a cake with Elk on it for a 30th Anniversary... It was all fun and games until the cake was due in an hour and I hadn't put it together yet. Lesson learned: Don't wait until the last minute.... again. I firmly believe this cake would have been rockin' had I not procrastinated so much :(

Rice Crispy trees with royal icing leaves

Cake for a World Traveler

June 2011 - A good friend of mine asked if I could make his girlfriend a cake that had some damask designs and also incorporate "traveling" with maybe a plane... This is what I came up with. Dark Chocolate cake with chocolate ganache, fresh strawberries and strawberry citrus sauce on the side. Globe is made of rice crispies and decorated with colored royal icing and piping gel.

Close-up of North America...

Zero sleep.... But almost done :)

Mom's Birthday!

June 2011 - My Mom's birthday is in June and she asked if I would make her a cake with just a few flowers on it. She loves yellow roses, but doesn't love lots of sugar, so the cake was just a jell-o cake with vanilla pudding filling and whipped cream frosting. I love her so much :)

Getting the knack of Ganache...

June 2011 - So after deciding that I would only do 1 cake a week (maybe 2 if they were small), things started getting better :) More sleep for me = Happy cake maker.

Kicked off the month with a Peanut Butter cream filled chocolate cake with triple poured ganache on the outside and little cakeballs around it. Yum :)

Too Much... Too Fast

A Mother's Day cake for a good friend that I LOVED decorating...

In the time I've been cake making (almost a year) I've already made 4 edible box calls. I think that's more than any other baker combined.

May 2011 - So after pictures went up of the Tinkerbell and Shoe cakes, I was bombarded with cake orders. Completely overwhelmed actually. I ended up missing my husband's birthday and not sleeping 8 nights out of the month, which is 8 more than I usually miss sleeping in a year.

A lot of the time, my husband would come home and say "Got another cake order for ya!... It's for tomorrow" So it was only a tiny bit stressful. That, and I had no idea what to charge people, so I ended up just letting them pick the price basically (usually around $25) and then I'd do whatever I thought looked nice. This whole financial way of thinking came back to bite me when I did my first "expense" report. I realized that a cake I had just charged $12 for, actually cost $56 to make. Crap.

All the cakes pictured here were done in the window of 3-4 weekends (since I wasn't doing anything cake-related through the week)... there were additionally 4 more cakes as well, but two were very similar, one was identical to the first "turkey call cake" I made and the other was just a cake topper.

The orders started coming in for just "cakes"... they wanted them to taste good and didn't care what they looked like. Unfortunately I didn't know how to make a good tasting cake... I just wanted to decorate :(

Tinkerbell

Even later in March - Client #2 wrote back with an idea for a Tinkerbell cake for her daughter's 4th birthday in April. She only needed it to feed about 20 people and she even emailed me several pictures of Tinkerbell cakes she'd found online that she liked... That made it SO much easier, since I had no idea what I was doing :) Of course I waited until the night before the cake was due to start on Tinkerbell (then vowed to never do that again... ) and this cake was actually due before the shoe cake, so it was the first cake I'd ever actually delivered. So, that being said, I also learned the importance of proper structural supports. My dowels in the bottom tier were a little too high, so the second tier cake board was just balancing on top of those dowels. The whole ride over, every turn in the road or bump caused the cake to shift. I actually had chest pains by the time we arrived at the destination. But it was a learning experience, right?

Lots of little pull flowers for this cake...
Tried out a few new techniques with this cake - one of which was "gelatin" wings...
Picture of an "idea" cake from the client (c/o Cake Central)

Doodle of the cake and some concepts...