Cake charms...or a charming cake?

So this was my first experience using cake charms.  And yes, there is such a thing!  They are they little jewels that can be hung on the end of a cake wire to give a cake a kind of different and funky look.  I kind of like them!  Originally I was going to go super simple with this cake and just do pink fondant with brown ribbon and wires and cake charms.  I did that, and felt like it was missing something.  So enter the circles.  I might have gone a little crazy with the circles, but oh well..it's still cute.

This cake happened to be a farewell cake for one of Nathan's coworkers, and she loved it.  Mission accomplished! 

A Sweet Little Smash Cake

I apologize for the lapse in time between posts. It's been such a busy summer and I haven't found the time to keep up with this blog! As such, I am a few cakes behind. Hopefully I'll be able to get them on here in the next few weeks!

So this cake I did for a good friend of mine, Joanne, who has a great eye and talent for photography and has a photography business called, Taken {photography by joanne}. Check out her blog here.

Joanne emailed me one day back at the end of June with the request for a smash cake for one of her clients, and of course I jumped at the chance! She had a picture that she sent me with all these cute little circles. I stayed as true to the original picture as possible, just changing up a few things to suite the sweet little guy that had the pleasure of smashing this cake! Of course I added a "G" to reflect his name, and then we decided on different shades of blue for the circles. It was fun and simple to do. I loved how it turned out and love how these photos turned out! Joanne is one talented lady!

Smash cakes are some of the most fun cakes to make since the resulting pictures are so dramatic! I love it when babies really get into destroying the cake, and this little one didn't disappoint!

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!

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.

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!

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!

Airplane Cake!

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So I took a little trip down memory lane today and read some old blog posts. I honestly can hardly believe the cake I did this weekend in light of how intimidated I felt only one year ago about carving and constructing a cake like this. Yes, it's been one year since I took that wonderful fondant cake decorating course. I never in a million years imagined myself doing cakes such as this one at that time.

I am proud of this cake, and for more reasons than just the carving and decorating. You see, I still tend to approach cakes somewhat timidly and wonder each time if "this will be the one that really flops". I was thankful it wasn't this one for two reasons. First because I really wanted to pull it off, but second, and most important...this cake was for one of my son's very good friends, who is also our neighbor. We have the best neighbors in the world, and I loved doing this for them!


So onto the cake! I began conceptualizing this cake a few weeks before the party...looking online for sample cakes from which to take inspiration as well as trying to deconstruct the entire cake into steps in order that my cake making days might go smoothly. This is one of the most important steps for me. I can have no confidence going into a decorating day if I don't have a very clear idea of each thing I need to accomplish. So I made templates, and talked it over with my husband, who always has really good ideas and is quite the perfectionist (he pushes me to do better and go farther, which, although at times frustrating, is exactly what I need). My neighbors had also left all the creative work to me, so I had full reigns on this one! (scary!)

The first day of decorating came and I carved out a rough airplane shape with my template and stacked my cakes. Then all I had before me was just a monstrous block of cake. Oh my... I wondered once again what I had gotten myself into and how this very "un-airplane" looking thing was going to turn into a fabulous airplane cake! So it was with a pounding heart that I dove into that cake and started shaving away. Somewhere in there I got into a groove and my excitement mounted. This thing was actually starting to look like an airplane! YAY! I kept carving and about an hour and a half later, the shape was done and looked quite fabulous to me! I covered the cake in fondant, decorated the cake board, and called it a night.

The next day I made the wings and tail out of foam core (I tried making the wings out of gumpaste, but they were too thin and light for the size of airplane, so I went with foam core because it's thicker, but very light and wouldn't pull down on the cake) and covered them in fondant. I decorated the airplane, and started wondering how big those engines were going to have to be in order for them to hold up the wings. I went back and forth between a few different ideas, but in the end I decided to cover foil wrapped chocolates in gumpaste (cuts down on the amount of gumpaste needed, and since gumpaste is not terribly palatable, gives a fun treat inside the engines for the kids). After painting on some pearl dust I was ready to call it done. It had been a very long day of decorating and there comes a point where it just needs to be finished! But my husband had other ideas. He wasn't convinced the engines were quite right, yet, so he decided to give them a little more realistic look with a black insert and knob in the centre. I was so happy he helped me with this detail. They look amazing and really do add to the cake as a whole.

After all this it was time to assemble the cake! The wings went on and we were excited (my husband helps me with all these little picky details...he's just the best!) and then after the tail went on I stood back, and honestly couldn't believe I had made that cake. It looked just like an airplane!


Before starting the cake I had no idea how big the airplane would end up being. I was afraid it wouldn't be enough cake for everyone at the party, so since I was completing a cupcake order for Barely Burnt Cookies and More (a fun little cupcake and cookie "non-business" that my sister and I started not too long ago...check out our blog here) I offered to include chocolate cupcakes (the airplane was vanilla cake with white chocolate peppermint filling) just so there would be enough cake...and it also added an extra flavor for people to choose from. I had found a fun airplane cookie cutter and it made for a perfect fondant cupcake topper.


So this was a fun one. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it!