An Early Birthday

This summer my brother-in-law got married and most of the Hoeppner clan came out for the festivities. It was a lot of fun, and a gorgeous wedding! In the weeks leading up to the wedding my cousin and I were emailing back and forth making plans for the days leading up to the wedding. She asked if I could possibly make her mom a birthday cake. Mind you it would be early, since her birthday is in September, but what better time to celebrate when the entire family is together in one spot, which rarely happens! I was so happy to make this cake. I love our dear Aunt Myrt and jumped at the chance to do something for her. She is one of the most generous and kind-hearted people we know, and she deserves all the recognition in the world!

So I was excited. Until I realized I had no inspiration. I wanted it to be perfect, and as such I was paralyzed to think of anything. A day or two before I had to start decorating I phoned my cousin and begged her to tell me what she really wanted and what her mom would truly love. We decided on blue and green daisies, since those are Aunt Myrt's favorite colors and flower. So, I went to work making a few three dimensional daisies, but it just wasn't working for me. So I started to think about what kind of person Aunt Myrt is, and a few words came to mind, which were elegant and not at all fussy. So instead of the large daisies which were looking a little out of place and juvenile on this cake, I decided to make a few tiny blue daisies and place them around a vine-inspired design. The resulting effect, I believe is elegant and not fussy. I love it when a cake can reflect a person, and I do beleive this one did.


The cake was a complete surprise to Aunt Myrt, which was the best part. Of course she wasn't expecting a birthday cake a month in advance! It was a lot of fun, and I'm so glad I got the opportunity to do this. This part of our family lives too far away to visit on any kind of regular basis. It was amazing to spend time with them, catching up and celebrating C and J as they walked down the isle! Such good memories!

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!