Little Antique Clutch

This past weekend I threw a bridal shower for my sister-in-law-to-be! Of course I had to make a cake for her, and this one was so much fun. I've been wanting to make a purse cake, and since C & J's wedding has an antique theme, I figured an antique clutch was the perfect cake for this celebration. The whole shower was a tea party, complete with scones, Devonshire cream, beautiful antique tea cups and plates. Super girly and fun!

I had originally found an antique clutch cake online that I really liked and was hoping to make. I started out carving that particular shape (it was more rectangular), but ended carving more of an oval. Of course I panicked. That just has to happen at least once in a cake-making experience. But once I stood back and re-thought my cake strategy, I realized that this was now my design, not someone's that I was trying to re-create. This afforded some sort of freedom for the rest of the carving process. So I visualized a new cake...my cake...and got excited once again.

After carving, then came covering the cake in buttercream and fondant. I have found that Gum Tex and cornstarch are my new best friends when covering a cake in fondant during the summer. I used to struggle so much with soft fondant, and now by adding Gum Tex to the fondant and rolling it out with a combination of icing sugar and cornstarch I don't get all the pulling and stretching that result in stretch marks (yes, cakes can have stretch marks) and cracks. Covering cakes has become much less stressful. Doesn't mean it always goes amazingly well, but it sure is going better than it used to for me!

The flower and pearls were so much fun to design and I love how simple and monochromatic the whole cake turned out. I had a leftover rose from the cake I had made for my mom's birthday last week, so I put that on the cake board as just a last finishing touch. I love it.


The great thing was that the cake was just as much fun to eat as it was to stare at. Of course this was C's favorite...chocolate cake with peanut butter filling. Yum. My favorite, too. It was such a pleasure to do this for C. She's so wonderful, and I'm so excited for her to be my sister-in-law!

Pink and Pearly

A dear friend of mine asked if I could make a cake for a bridal shower she was organizing for her sister-in-law to-be. She showed me a napkin with the picture of the cake she wanted and I figured this would be the easiest cake design ever! Unfortunately that was not the correct assumption. This is one of those times were I was humbled by a cake. The colors were easy enough to match, but the issue came in when I was doing the pearl swags along the sides. I kept wondering why it was looking so strange...

First off I realized that the pearl sprinkles that I was using were all sorts of different sizes, and the larger pearls were making the swags look really messy. I remedied that by picking off all the larger pearls and replacing them with smaller ones. It was a time-consuming job, but well worth the effort. It was looking better, but still unfinished in some sort of way.

My DH and I kept looking at the picture of the cake and then at the cake not understanding what the issue was. Then it hit us...in the picture you couldn't see where the pearls start on each tier, since it's a two dimensional image. This means there was no reference on the cake for where the pearls were attached. So after a bit of head-scratching (and a whole lot fear that this was just going to be a less-than-beautiful cake) I thought little flowers would be cute and give the pearls some reference. The great thing was that there were these exact cute little flowers floating around the cake on the napkin. The flowers on the napkin were pink and blue, but I thought that those colors would make the cake too much like a little girl's cake. Since this was for a bridal shower, the slightly more sophisticated brown won out. Thankfully, my friend was just as excited about this change as I was and loved the cake.


So I learned a valuable lesson through this experience. That a two dimensional image does not always translate well into a three dimensional cake. Who would have thought?! Next time I think to myself "wow, that will be super-easy!" I am going to think twice, deconstruct each part of the cake into steps, and visualize how it's going to look. I do that with any complex cake I am considering, so I need to do it with the so-called "easy" cakes as well. Good lesson!