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 :(

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 :)