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...

The Shoe...

Later in March 2011 - So after the pictures of the jumping fish cake were posted on Facebook, I had 2 people send me serious requests for cakes (there were a few people that said they wanted me to make cakes for them, but no specifics, so they don't count). Right away, I turned both of these people down before even asking what they wanted in a cake. I was so nervous to make a cake for someone other than a 2 or 3 year old that I pretty much wimped out. About a week later, I sent one of them both a message asking what they were thinking of and when they needed the cakes. I thought that if I had enough time, then I could learn the things I needed to learn in order to make the cakes they wanted. Plus, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking "Heck, they know I've only made 2 or 3 cakes, so they'll probably request something simple!". Oh man, was I wrong. Within a few hours, client #1 wrote back and said she was looking for a bridal shower cake for May (Phew!), but she wanted it to serve 50 people, be two or three tiers and have an edible shoe to match the brides shoe on top! I nearly fell off my chair. So of course I wrote back and agreed. I'm crazy like that. And after a few messages back and forth we'd nailed down what she wanted and had a little doodle of the cake to go off of... As well as a picture of the shoe I needed to make... out of sugar... holy cow.

Picture of the shoe from the client...

The client's doodle...

One of the many failures...

Finally the shoe stayed together... heel broke off twice, but was repairable...

So needless to say, after several sleepless nights (literally several...) and more than several failures... I cranked out a 2 tier, 50+ serving cake with fresh strawberry and chocolate filling, actually baked the cakes myself, covered it in fondant, knocked out an edible shoe, airbrushed it (gasp!) and hand painted on some swirls. I had never been so happy to deliver a cake... and never see it again.

The finished product. Ribbon is a little lumpy, but I was just glad that the whole cake stayed intact for the hour drive to the delivery destination :)

My 1st "Public" Cake

The 'jumping fish' cake :)
A little sign I made by pouring the hot lollypop mixture into the bottom of a 6" round cake pan.

Fins...

The picture I worked from to figure out what colors to use...

March 2011 - Just a few days after Ella's Dora cake hit Facebook, my church asked if I would consider making a "fancy and fun" cake for our pastor's 60th birthday. Since I was trying to get more practice in, and since I was flattered by their assumption that I knew what I was doing, I said "Sure!" Then spent sleepless nights trying to figure out what the heck I could do for a cake. I ended up deciding on a fish, jumping out of water... Sounds easy enough, right? The fish was done the night before the cake was due. And I don't mean, I 'finished' it the night before. I mean, I started shaping and painting it at around 10pm the night before it was due. (There is a trend here... The Dora cake was done overnight too... no sleeps for me!) Either way, I liked the way it turned out and to make the spashes, I ended up making a batch of lollypop liquid, then pouring it over a bucket of ice once it hit the hard crack temperature. That was probably the most fun I've had while burning myself :)

Another year goes by...

Ella's 3rd Birthday - Dora the Explorer Cake
A little taste...Isa the Iguana
Backpack & Mapthe notorious Dora head...

2/21/11 - So it's another full year before I really even think about cake and what does my soon-to-be three year old ask for on her birthday cake? Dora. Dora the Explorer... in a car, with some cheese and a rainbow. Now she didn't get the rainbow, or the cheese and the car didn't quite pan out, but she did get a cute little Dora and even an Isa. I was still trying to master covering a cake with fondant and I'm pretty sure I hadn't figured out the technique of actually covering a cake without having to cut bits and pieces off of the edges, but it turned out alright for a 2nd cake. (Still having been crappy in the baking department, I actually bought a sheet cake from the grocery store (uniced) and cut it into the shape I wanted it, filled it (using a combination of ingredients I saw Buddy use on the Cake Boss) and covered it up. Chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and fresh raspberry filling.

CakeCentral and the Castle Cake

The finished product. :)

Gum paste roses and pull flowers.
Putting it together...
Drying the towers and flowers...

2/21/2010 - A full year later and I hadn't thought about cake one bit until now. For some reason, I thought it might be a good idea to make a humongous castle for Ella's 2nd birthday, so I started looking through pages and pages of Google images until I found the perfect one. Being that this would be my very first cake using fondant, gum paste, templates, more than one box of cake mix, filling and any decorating supplies whatsoever, I pulled up my boot straps and emailed the woman who made the castle cake in the picture I'd found. As luck would have it, it was posted on a website called CakeCentral.com and the user was still active. I never thought I'd get a reply from her, but within a day, I received an email with detailed instructions, templates, measurements and all kinds goodies... including a bunch of talk about ingredients I'd never heard of. So over to youtube I went to find instructional videos on how to use fondant and make a cake that has more than one layer. (I seriously knew nothing about baking.) After all that research, and studying 100's of short videos, I came out with Ella's 2nd birthday castle cake. My first fondant covered cake, my first gum paste flowers and my first "big" cake. Ta-da!
To this day, I still don't know what made me think that I could make such a ridiculous cake.

How it all started...

2/21/2009 - My very first cake... Not much to look at, and afterwards I never even thought about cake until Ella's next birthday, but this was the start of it all. Boxed cake mix with colored whipped cream and some sprinkles. I guess you have to start somewhere...