An Elegant Farewell

Once again my husband, N's, boss asked if I could make a farewell cake for someone leaving the office. I asked N a few questions about what design and flavor she would like, but he wasn't entirely certain what were her favorites. Since this request was coming just before Christmas with the cake due the day after N was to return to work, there was no time for detective work. I had met this co-worker of N's on a couple of occasions and although I did not know her well, she had struck me as an elegant person. So this is what kept in mind as I started conceptualizing the cake. This was the first time where I had all creative control on a cake, which was great, but also intimidating for me, so I went online in search of an inspiration cake and found something beautiful. I wasn't hoping to copy it exactly but just simply take inspiration from the cake's colors and lines. It made me very excited.

N and I decided that a small 2 tier cake would be best since we were not sure if her favorite cake flavor was chocolate or vanilla. This also gave me the opportunity to try out some new recipes. The bottom tier is an incredibly moist chocolate cake. I am in love with this new recipe. And the top tier is vanilla. I am usually not a fan of vanilla cake, but this cake is moist, fluffy and very tasty.

Decorating day came and I was just starting to recover from a terrible cold. I was still excited to decorate, but was hoping that it would go relatively quickly. In my head I was very organized and figured that things would go off without a hitch. Man, was I ever wrong! I've never had so much trouble with a cake before!

First off my buttercream separated. If you've read previous posts, this has happened to me once before so I knew I was in for a hard time covering the cakes. In hindsight I should have made another batch, but eventually I got the cakes covered in buttercream. (this type of buttercream can still be eaten and tastes very good once separated, as it does not become soupy, just hard to spread)

Next was the fondant. Since the buttercream was a bit lumpy the fondant went on terribly. There were air bubbles everywhere! I went to work popping the bubbles, knowing that the decoration on the cake would cover any small pin holes, but I still wasn't satisfied. I smoothed and smoothed...stood back and just about ripped all the fondant off and started again. After the cakes stood for a bit they looked quite a bit better, so I just left it. But I was starting to feel like it was a loosing battle against this cake.

So it was with discouragement that I started decorating. The resulting design was looking okay, but not amazing. I had lost any previous inspiration for this cake and was just being random. I took a break while I put my boys down for a nap and thought about what I had originally wanted this cake to look like. Went downstairs, studied my inspiration cake for awhile and ripped off all the fondant decorations (not the fondant base). After putting the first few new strips of fondant on I felt like the cake was going to have some potential. I kept going and started to get very excited. I was loving the colors and how the cake was flowing and elegant which was exactly what I wanted. I debated for awhile putting the silver ball details on, but figured that they added some dimension and a bit of shine. I couldn't believe how much I was loving it! Mind you it was 8 hours later, but I had conquered the cake!

Before I did this cake I had talked with a very close friend and amazing photographer, Rebecca Croft Photographer to see if she would be willing to take some photos if the cake turned out nicely. So after my marathon cake decorating day I gave her a call and she popped over for a little cake photoshoot. The pictures you see in this post as well as my blog header are all her photos. Thanks Becky!

Hands down this is my favorite cake. I mean, I love them all...but this one has a special place in my heart. Partly because I fought with it and won, but also because this is the cake that says "Julia". The design, although inspired by another cake came from within, which felt incredible.

I'm a Little Teapot

So much pink! I was very excited to make such a pink cake. A good friend asked if I would consider making a three dimensional teapot cake for her daughter's third birthday this past December. I needed to do just a bit of research before saying "yes" to this cake, since I had heard that covering a sphere with fondant can be tricky. I needed to be sure I could pull it off.

After researching a little, I realized that it probably wouldn't be that hard, and agreed to the cake. We went into planning mode and decided on two shades of pink with some simple flowers.

The day came to cover the cake. It went fairly well...except for the moment when I was holding the cake upside down in my hands yelling for my husband to come help me! We managed to get the cake upright and after smoothing out the fondant I was very happy with how it covered. I was so excited to get decorating that I sat at the table that entire evening, playing with pink fondant coming up with a few extra cute details to the cake.

The next day I made rice cereal treats and molded the handle and spout. The spout was a little tricky, but the handle came together quite easily. I covered them in fondant and went to work adhering them with piping gel and toothpicks. The handle was pretty easy to place, but that spout was giving me some trouble. I had placed it too low and was nervous to move it higher. In the end, I did move it higher, and was so glad I risked it.

I spent the rest of that evening placing the flowers and finishing the cake with a little pearl dust. I was truly happy to see the finished product. The hours of planning and work were worth it, for sure!

I had also made 24 mini cupcakes with pink icing and flower fondant toppers to go with this cake. They looked absolutely adorable together. My son and I were lucky enough to attend this birthday party and sample the cake and cupcakes. So tasty! The birthday girl was also thrilled with her own little teapot!



This is the last of my "past cakes" series! I have three cakes that I've just done this January to share with you in the next couple of weeks. I do believe they are some of my best work so far. I feel as though I have come really far in my creative journey these past months!

The Barnyard Cake

I have to say...I loved making this cake! All the little farm animals were so incredibly fun to make. Thanks to my friend, C, for doing this cake with me!

It all started when C and I were talking about cakes one day this past Fall. She expressed some interest in learning how to use fondant, so I offered to do a cake with her for her baby's first birthday and show her a bit about working with fondant. My sister had made this cake a few months before and it had turned out so amazingly, I wanted to try my hand at it. Since C didn't have much of a preference for a theme, I showed her a picture of this kind of cake and she said that sounded good to her! So we planned to get together one night to drape and decorate the cake just before her daughters birthday this past November.

That week I spent a few evenings making all the little farm animals so they would have a bit of a chance to dry. I started molding animals and realized how much fun I was having! The ladybugs were my favorite. They were so cute and terribly fun to make...even though they were so small. I finished the cows, pigs, sheep, ducks and ladybugs and set them aside to dry for a few days so they would be a bit easier to put on the cake.


C came over the night before the party and we decorated late into the evening. She took charge of the top tier, covering it in fondant and putting the fence on. She did a fabulous job! We then figured out where each of the animals was going to go and placed them on the cake with toothpicks and piping gel (the cake-makers glue). C went to work cutting out flowers and I made the pond on the top of the cake. After a quick little bit of buttercream around the cakes for some grass (I had lent out my grass icing tip, so we improvised on that one) and we were finished. We were so proud of our work!


This was my favorite cake to make so far. I absolutely loved how it turned out and everything went so smoothly!

C's daughter seemed to love the cake (at least the picture she sent of her daughter munching on a pig suggested she was having a good time with it!) And all the kids at the party had fun with it, too. That's the best part of making cakes...seeing people enjoy it.

Dee Dee Doodlebop

So this past September a friend asked if I would be able to make a Dee Dee Doodlebop cake for her daughter's fourth birthday. My first question was "Dee Dee who?" But I agreed and asked what she would like me to do. She said that her daughter really wanted a cake with Dee Dee Doodlebop's face on it.

After I Googled and You Tubed the Doodlebops, I was not confident that I could pull off this face on a cake. Especially a face that was human and had only a little cartoon-like quality. Creating a likeness of a character is a difficult thing to do. Too many times characters like this look nothing like what they are supposed to, and this is what I was afraid of. So I asked my friend if we could do something else, and she gave me a few other ideas, but I kept thinking about ways that I might be able to make that face. It is after all what her daughter wanted.

I remember not being able to sleep well that night because I was thinking so much about how I could make this face! I decided that I could probably pipe it on the cake using a gel transfer (the image is traced onto wax paper using clear gel and then transferred directly onto the cake where the outline can be piped in icing) and told my friend I would give it a try. So we decided that the face would go on an 8" purple top tier that was sitting offset on a 10" pink cake. Around the bottom tier would be a keyboard (Dee Dee is the band keyboard player).

During the planning stage of this cake I had the opportunity to talk with a fellow cake maker and she asked if I had considered doing a buttercream transfer. She explained that the image would be traced in layers with buttercream and frozen so the buttercream could be peeled off the wax paper and be placed onto the cake. This seemed way too complicated, but I decided to research this technique to see if it might be a better option. It was. Less room for failure with this type of transfer since I could actually practice!

If I'm honest, I'm not sure I love how the face turned out, but it sure looks better than I had ever imagined! I do love the bouffant (molded out of cereal treats and covered in fondant) and headband, and really like the way the keyboard turned out. The face isn't perfect, but it sort of looks like Dee Dee, and my friends little girl loved it. And that's really what matters!

A Fun Little Bridal Shower Cake

This past Fall, my Mom was organizing a Bridal Shower for a cousin of mine and asked if I would make a cake. So I phoned the Bride to check on her wedding colors and decided on a cute and simple design of a 7" and 4" tiered cake with white fondant, silver and black oval details with dark purple ribbon around the base of each cake. It was quite uncomplicated to decorate...but oh the buttercream issues! This was my first time using Swiss Meringue Buttercream for the filling and crumb coat on a cake, and I was not prepared for the drama!

I made the frosting a day ahead and thought I had taken it out of the fridge in plenty of time to soften before covering the cake. Apparently I tried whipping it up too soon, since it separated! I was in shock...I was decorating this cake out of town and had no ingredients to make another batch of buttercream! I made an emergency call to my sister (who had worked with Swiss Meringue before) and we figured since it still tasted really good and was spreadable, it was usable...it was just going to be a major amount of work to get the frosting smooth (when this type of frosting separates, it doesn't necessarily become soupy, but just really hard to spread). It took three or four times as long to crumb coat that cake than it should have. As a result I was up into the wee hours of the night decorating that cake. Thankfully the fondant went on without a hitch and was smooth. A rough crumb coat under fondant can make the fondant appear lumpy, which is not so pretty.

So many adventures! I had a piece at the shower the next day and it was still really tasty. Since it's not only important for a cake to LOOK good...it's got to TASTE good as well!

(I apologize for the terrible pictures...it was late, the lighting was terrible and I forgot to bring my camera to the shower the next day to take pictures)

An Attempt at Topsy Turvy

The topsy turvy cake has always intrigued me, with that top tier looking like it's going to slide right off the bottom. So this past August, when a friend asked me to make a cake for her sister's bridal shower and didn't have a specific design in mind, I asked if I could make a topsy turvy cake. She gave me the go-ahead to try something new and different (which was a bit of a risk on her part) and I started my research.

You Tube is a wealth of information for cake decorating. I choose my inspiration cake, watched a few videos and then wondered what I had gotten myself into! But the challenge was what excited me so much! Through my research I learned how to balance that top cake and went to work.

Unfortunately my cakes didn't turn out as high as I had hoped, but I didn't have time to make more so I worked with what I had. After carving the cakes (which was actually less difficult than I thought it was going to be) I was cautiously hopeful that this cake was going to work out.

If you can believe it, the biggest hurdle to this cake was actually the humidity! If you're familiar with fondant at all, you'll know that heat and humidity are not a friend. The fondant was sticky and I should have turned on the air conditioning much sooner than I did.

Once the cakes were covered, I started decorating, which is my favorite part of any cake. All those details give cakes their personality, and this cake was going to be fun! It took forever to roll all those fondant and chocolate balls, but in the end it was worth it. I was very pleased with how it turned out, and I learned so incredibly much. I would love to make another topsy turvy cake again someday, and really play up the angles with higher cakes.

The Doctor Cake

This past summer I was asked by my husband, N's, boss if I might be interested in making a nice cake for a farewell party they were having for one of his co-workers. This co-worker had been accepted into Med School and was leaving the organization to pursue this new career. So, N and I took a look online to see what some possibilities could be. We saw this design and thought it was really fun, but I can remember distinctly saying "No, I don't think I could do that...it's too hard!" However, I thought about it that night and after deconstructing the cake into steps, it seemed like it could be do-able. I did, however, have a back-up plan. I figured if the cake was awful, I would whip up some cupcakes and make little fondant bandages for toppers. I don't think I could have done this cake without that back-up plan!

So I forged ahead. I covered the cake with fondant twice. Yes, twice. The first time I had rolled the fondant way too thin and hadn't made the piece big enough to cover the cake properly. So I chucked it and tried again. Success! That was half the battle to me.

I spent the rest of that evening getting the tie and shirt just right. The shirt collar was also a hurdle. After several attempts, I can remember telling myself..."do it one more time and call it good"...and it was perfect! I couldn't believe my luck! I propped up the collar with some plastic wrap and went to bed. The next day I put the lapels, the stethoscope on. It was looking so good! I could hardly believe it! I gave it a few extra details and stopped working, stood back, and was truly proud of what I had accomplished.

In light of those huge and impressive cakes that you see on T.V. it was nothing, but in terms of my creative journey, this was a massive step!

How this all began...

Never did I imagine myself to become a lover of cakes, especially seeing as I haven't been one to eat a lot of cake. But I really wanted to make birthday cakes for my kids. Really nice birthday cakes. This was important to me as I have very fond memories of the homemade cakes my mom lovingly made and decorated when I was a kid and wanted to give my kids the opportunity to have those same memories. So I took a couple of short decorating courses.

The first course I took was all about buttercream. It was fun, and I made a cute basketball cake for my oldest son, O's birthday, but fondant is what really intrigued me. So I took another course. This time to learn how to work with fondant. The course was pretty basic but gave me the tools to tackle a few cakes. The first cake we made was to look like a present. This was my first attempt at rolling and draping fondant. I had fun with it, but it certainly was far from perfect. The second cake was a two tier design with 40 handmade fondant roses. I made each and every rose on that cake. Not difficult, but incredibly time consuming. I was skeptical that they would make the cake look nice, but in the end I was pleased with the effect. Of course it would have had a much nicer look if the cakes had been stacked higher, but I wasn't sure what to do with all this cake! So it just made sense to do each tier with one layer in order to cut down on all the cake lying around my house!

With my new skills I was ready to tackle O's third birthday cake. A football. Simple design, not much to mess up. I felt like it turned out beautifully and gave me the confidence to try something a little more difficult.

Through the next few posts I will be going through the cakes I have done in the past. I am starting in the past in order to give you a feel for the creative journey I am on. I have never considered myself a creative person, but always wanted to be one. I have been thrilled this past year to find out that I just might have one creative bone in my body, and that I can express it through cake!