Cars

The Pixar movie "Cars" has got to be on the Top Ten List for all children under the age of six - of course, my kids and several of their friends are no exception. In the last three months I have made TWO Lightning McQueen cakes as gifts to two very Car-lovin' boys.


I want to dedicate this first cake to my Wilton instructor, Miss Veronica. Even though I only made it to half of the classes, I gleaned a lot of helpful information that made this cake a success. So, thanks for letting an exhausted 3rd trimester pregnant student in to your class with her lopsided cakes and poorly mixed icing. Oh, and happy birthday, Owen!

The second cake was for our friend and neighbor Cameron - I used the frozen buttercream transfer method (FBCT - see this previous post for details of method):


Finding just the right picture for this cake was tough - none of the online coloring pages had just what I was looking for. I eventually ended up just printing an image of a Cars birthday invitation and used it as a stencil. Thankfully, the birthday boy enjoyed seeing both McQueen and Tow Mater on his cake, making all of the extra effort worthwhile. :)

So there are the Cars cakes... I think I've filled my vehicle cake quota for a while.

KA-CHOW!!!

Frozen Buttercream Transfers: The New Frontier

It's been a while since I've posted. It's been pretty busy around here with two kids, and with the summer quickly approaching we have a lot of celebrations, birthdays, and travel coming up. Time for blogging is scarce and often used to wash dishes and potty train, but I wanted to be sure to post about a recent cake decorating revelation that I hope will inspire a few of you to try in the meantime: frozen buttercream transfers.

A FBCT is a way to trace a design with icing and after it freezes can be transferred to a cake. This is great because it doesn't require drawing freehand on a cake (can we say anxiety attack?) and you can also make it a day or two in advance and keep in the freezer until you need it.

I was actually pretty worried that it wouldn't work or that it would be incredibly difficult. I was wrong on both accounts: It was one of the fastest cakes I've ever decorated with some pretty impressive results.



I won't hash out all of the details, but I will post a link to some great instructions that I found very helpful on Cake Central:

How to Create a Frozen Buttercream Transfer

Some tips I would want to share:

1) Definitely purchase a tube of Wilton black icing along with a #2 Wilton icing tip (very small circle) and coupler. This will probably put you back about $5-7, but it will give you a cleaner image and will be the biggest investment for the project. Plus, the tubes last a long time so you can reuse it for more projects.

2) I just used canned frosting to fill in the image instead of making my own FBCT icing. I guess the benefit of making your own is that the fat content is so high that it doesn't stick to the wax/parchment paper, but I found that the generic canned stuff worked just fine.

3) After filling in the color to the image, gently but firmly tap the image a few times on a flat surface to help remove air bubbles in the icing. I didn't do this and ended up with little air bubbles in the image - not a big deal, but it would have helped clean up the finished product.

4) When you are done tracing/filling in your FBCT image, be sure NOT TO SKIP re-covering your image with more white icing (or whatever color is going to match your cake), and be sure that the extra icing extends a good 1/4 to 1/2 inch past your image on all sides. The edges of the transfer will stick a little and this will keep you from distorting the image that you just worked so hard on.

Good luck! I would love to hear if you try your own transfers!

The happy birthday girl

Bad boys, bad boys...

I'm almost finished playing catch up now - 2009 was not a good year for cake making. Pregnancy was nine months of illness, dizziness, fatigue, etc etc - but on September 30, 2009 the result was a beautiful baby boy, Emmett Abraham!


Though I'm not planning on getting back into cakes yet (helloooo, new baby?), I am hoping to post a few fun recipes and little projects here and there over the next few months. But before I start with the new, I have one more cake from this past summer that I made for my friend Robby who graduated from police academy.

Robby's wife and my long-time friend Rachel wanted to surprise Robby with a cake that looked like the LMPD squad car. She let me borrow a miniature that they possessed and I did my best to replicate it. So here they are, side by side:

I was so out of it that I forgot the cover the cake board with foil, DOH!


Ah well, at least Robby liked it.
Congrats, Robby!

Weddings, weddings... Part 2

Wow, I've really fallen behind in blogging - between trying to eek out the last few weeks of pregnancy and buying/moving into our first house, there hasn't been much time to post. But I will quickly attempt to at least post a couple of pictures of some fun wedding cupcakes for a fun couple, Jared and Stephanie Manes!

Stephanie and Jared opted for light blue swirl cupcakes with purple/orchid candy hearts. I was excited about the project and happy to be a part of the celebration, and I knew it was going to be a lot of good old fashioned work. The first step: bulk up on icing and start filling those candy heart molds!

Multiply this sheet by 26. and that you are getting the idea.

This is my friend Kasey - she helped make the 6-7 batches of icing for the cupcakes. I think it ended up being about 30 lbs of icing, whoo!!

**NOTE: I began this blog entry several months earlier, and it is now December. So, I'm just going to fast forward to the end product:

The Cupcakes

The Topper Cake

Display Table - construction by the lovely bride herself!

Congrats, Jared and Stephanie! :)

Weddings, weddings... Part 1

Okay, so it's been a while since I've posted - a thousand pardons to all two of you who read this blog. Truthfully, the first half of pregnancy really packs a punch in my case: for a while there I couldn't even GO into a kitchen without wanting to be ill. In fact, I felt so terrible that I had to cancel almost all of my cake baking commitments (thanks to all of you for understanding).

Essentially the only commitments I didn't cancel were two weddings for old college friends: one for Adrienne (Keller) Eisenmenger and her wonderful new husband David, and the second wedding for Stephanie Wilson and Jared Manes. Adrienne and David were married on May 16th, and Stephanie and Jared's wedding were just married this past Saturday, June 6th. I'm going to recap both weddings and their cakes in two parts.

Here are a few photos of the process of creating Adrienne and David's cake:

First, I was still coming out of the morning sickness haze so Adrienne graciously agreed to purchase a pre-made wedding cake from Walmart and I would simply add the decoration. However, when I picked up the cake I was extremely disappointed: the cakes had big gaps in between each other, there were areas where the cake could be seen through the icing, and the cakes weren't even level. GAH!

So, I whipped up a batch of icing and started patching, smoothing, and making some repair on the cake.

Once it was in a somewhat better state, I started on the decoration: an assortment of fondant vines and a matching live green accents. My dear friend Ang came in from out of town and was staying the night because she was going to be doing wedding hair in the morning. Little did she know that she would also be assistant cake decorator as well. :) So we started cutting out the leaves using Wilton fondant leaf cutters... and kept cutting... and cutting...


A few hours and hundreds of leaves later...

WHEW! Done - I think this part was complete by 12:30am.
Thanks, Ang, for your help - it would have been much later if I didn't have you cutting those leaves!

The next morning, I added some more accents with kelly green buttercream icing...

And off to the wedding!

Many congrats to David and Adrienne - may your love continue to grow!

A birthday cake fit for a princess

One of my long time friends, Rachel, has a daughter who just turned four years old. For her birthday, she requested a princess cake - so Rachel decided to hire me for the task. Rachel, her daughter, and I put our heads together and after some internet searching for photo inspiration (other cakes, mainly) decided on a Cinderella castle cake.

(Gulp.)
Deep breath. Hoo boy.

This was by far going to be the most challenging cake I had ever made. Of course, I wasn't going to make an exact replica (I'm not suicidal), but I wanted it to be recognizable. The kicker: due to unforeseen circumstances I was going to have less than two days to make it. YIPES. I had been counting on a week.

One immediate decision was to forego making the turrets and spires by hand using ice cream cones and cardboard tubes (yes, you can do it and someday I will... maybe). For the sake of time, I bit the bullet and decided to go ahead and buy the Wilton Castle Cake kit, which is basically just plastic turrets/spires/roof/door/windows. Thankfully I found it on sale - yes! Whew, that was going to cut down on about 2 days of work. (Keep in mind that I have to do my cakes while G-Bug is usually napping/sleeping or she tries to sneak bites of the "cookie" = anything sweet.)

Now, I had already decided that I wanted the castle covered in little pink blossoms (hel-LO, it's a princess cake!!). So, with the help of my trusty blossom plunger, fondant, white nonperiels sprinkles, and sugar glue....
Ah... God bless the man who invented flower plungers.

Okay, I didn't take many pictures of the actual cake making/icing/fondant covering because - honestly - I didn't have the time to grab the camera. Just use your imaginations. :)

BUT I did get a shot of the pre-fondant turrets - I took this after my dear friend Jen (who came over to help with G-Bug) helped me decide on the placement to maximize visual appeal.

She did a pretty good job, huh?

Okay, I had to break after that for G-Bug's sake - you can see that his part was finished while it was still light outside. Once she went down for the night, it was time to get down to business:

Several hours of grumbling, mixing, cutting, wrapping, dusting, and pasting later:
Hmm... not bad. WAIT. The door is too big!!! DOH!!!!

I used a new chocolate cake recipe and it fell significantly after it came out of the oven. To make it worse, when I inserted one of the top turrets into the cake, the side bulged out and cracked the fondant covering. I almost cried, but I decided it was too late to worry about it and maybe I could decorate it in a way that it wouldn't be noticable tomorrow.

The next morning:
Well, the flowers were definitely a nice touch, and I think it actually made the door look nice. But the castle still seems like it needs a little more UMPH. So... let's make a few more fondant windows for the turrets.

Now THAT's better. Oh, and a "flower vine" to disguise the crack... (hoping no one will notice the huge thumbprint right next to it from trying to save the cake)

And... voila! A cake fit for a princess!

Happy birthday, Hannah - Aunt Donna loves you.
And now she needs a nap.

Cupcakes are poppin' up everywhere

Hope you all had a great Christmas with your friends/family... ours was a nice and quiet one overall, and we enjoyed spending time together at home this year. But I have to share one magnificent gift that my amazing husband got for me as a complete surprise:

TA-DA!! A Kitchenaid Artisan mixer!!
No more hand mixing icing, cake batter, or cookie dough for me!
It's time to step into the 21st century... er, the 20th century.

Ahem.

Okay, so I know I've already featured a Bakerella recipe, but as a new follower I am continually inspired to try some of her recipes/ideas. So, when I started seeing more and more cupcake pops on her site... it was only a matter of time before I would make them. And since Christmas Eve sneaked up on me and I still needed to make gifts for our neighbors, I decided the time had come:


I was surprised at how much easier they were than the bon bons - the sticks really make them easier to dip (and that you're only dipping half of the bon bon at a time). The only thing to remember: make sure to insert sticks while the chocolate on the bottom is still unset - since your bon bons have been in the fridge prior to dipping, the melted chocolate doesn't take very long at all. But if you DO make the mistake of forgetting to insert sticks (or if you don't have any), you can just make little cupcake bites, like so:


Either way, you can finish them off by using small candy bags and ribbon to gussy them up and they are ready to give away (or eat them yourself, whatever). :)


Bakerella also has other incredibly cute designs for these cupcake pops (themed for holidays, like Thanksgiving turkeys and reindeer pops), so check them out and get popping!

Oh, Christmas wreath, Oh Christmas wreath...

Well, I finished my second official cake order last night: a cupcake Christmas wreath from Karen Tack and Alan Richardson's book "Hello, Cupcake!"

I was pretty pleased with the end result - I just hope my neighbor is too. The key to a realistic wreath? Chocolate coated mint leaves.




Yep, and it's surprisingly easy! Just melt candy wafers and paint with food grade, high quality paint brush onto fresh mint leaves.












Then let harden for a few minutes, and peel off mint leaves (they come off easily).

Add a few atomic fire balls for "holly" (the book recommends a kind of chocolate candy made by Cadbury, but I couldn't find them), and voila!

A few things I would probably change the next time: stick to mint leaves that are no longer than 1 1/2- 2 inches (I had a few mammoth ones 3-4 inches and they were too big). Also, the book recommends painting the top of the mint leaves, but I found that painting half of them on the underside allows for some of the leaves to be more textured or "veiny".

Karen Tack is my hero... a couple of my friends (thanks Rachel & Ang!) brought to my attention that more of her cupcake genius was featured on the cover of Taste of Home magazine.

Be sure to check it out - she has the how-tos of making beautiful blue poinsettia cupcakes and other adorable and DOABLE designs.

Have a very merry and bakeriffic Christmas!