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Monday, June 27, 2011

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!

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Roses are Red...



Back when I was taking my fondant class and had to make 40 fondant roses for one practice cake, I swore I would never make another rose. Not that they are difficult by any stretch of the imagination...just labor intensive. And they have to be done over a couple of days. No banging these puppies out in a few minutes!

When my mom saw pictures of that cake with the 40 roses she gasped and declared that was the most beautiful cake that I had ever done (I couldn't agree since it was very much a practice cake, but I do agree that the roses are pretty). She has bugged me ever since to make her a cake with roses.

So this weekend was her birthday and I made her a cake with roses. My mom's favorite flavor of cake is lemon, so this was a 6 inch lemon cake with vanilla Swiss Meringue buttercream filling. I really love how simple and pretty this cake turned out. My mom loved it too! She was so surprised when she opened the cake box! It was a lot of fun to make her something that I knew she would really love.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

A Smashing Good Time!








It's a little late in coming since L turned one at the end of February, but these pictures were well worth waiting for! I love that we did this smash cake photo shoot with our little man! A million "thanks" to our dear friend, Cory Loewen, who is passionate about taking photos and was kind enough to come and take these amazing pictures of our baby demolishing a cute little cake!

Sunday, June 5, 2011

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!