Platelet Disorder Support Association Cake

I was having my co-planners of the PDSA 5K (www.pdsa.org) over for lunch and I was in charge of dessert. Of COURSE I'd make the cake. We had just learned the basketweave technique which is almost too much fun! The colors for PDSA are pink and purple so I coordinated the royal icing flowers to match and had them cascade down the side.

Now this was a yummy, yummy cake and definitely one for people who love buttercream!

I Can Do Logos Too!

So for my husband's work party, he asked that I made a cake for him and his team. It was a no-brainer. He just wanted the group logo on a white cake. That was easy enough.

The cake itself was a chocolate cake and buttercream filling. Looking back, I would have done the logo using Color Flow, but at the time I made the cake, I didn't even know what that was.

Not to be Mistaken with Buzz Aldrin

So at Josie's party I was asked to do a Buzz Lightyear cake for one of her friends' birthdays. He was having a Toy Story themed-party and this was going to fit in perfectly.

Making the cake was pretty much the same as making the Elmo cake in terms of the assembly and crumb coating. However, unlike the Elmo cake, the Buzz Lightyear cake itself was a mirror image of the picture that was included in the pan. This made decorating poor Buzz a little challenging. Luckily, my brother helped me out and scanned in the Buzz image that came with the cake pan and reversed it so that I could successfully complete the cake.

Even doing the outlining was a challenge. I'm definitely not an artist, but my husband is. Danny was able to etch in the buttercream with a toothpick and I went over it with black buttercream and continued on with decorating the rest. This was a true group effort.

But I think Buzz turned out great!

And there were no complaints from the cute birthday boy!

This cake was a chocolate and buttercream cake. I used Ina Garten's "Beatty's Chocolate Cake" recipe which is by FAR the BEST chocolate cake I've ever had.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/beattys-chocolate-cake-recipe/index.html

Elmo is Made of Rainbows

The whole purpose behind my taking the Wilton Cake Decorating classes was so that I could make awesome cakes for my daughter, Josie. She is the biggest Sesame Street fan you've ever met so it was appropriate for her to have an Elmo cake for her third birthday.

I had seen a friend of mine post pictures of rainbow cupcakes that she had made for St. Patrick's Day and thought that concept would be neat for Josie's cake. I started with a WHITE cake recipe. Only a white cake will do for this because it won't affect the colors of the food coloring used to dye the batter. Each cake pan (I made two Elmo's) used 6 cups of batter. So, I separated each of the 6 cups into separate bowls, dyed them each a different color (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple) and poured them into the pan and swirled.

And...voila! What a neat design, eh?

The next step was filling and crumb-coating the cakes.

And then I began to work on the colors. Getting that red took quite a bit of work and entire bottle of food coloring!

It's beginning to look a lot like...

ELMO!!!!

The guests at Josie's party were certainly surprised to see how colorful Elmo was inside!

And you can't forget about the goody-bags!!!

What a fun day!

Thomas the Train Cake

My nephew, Connor, turned three this summer and he is absolutely IN LOVE with Thomas the Train and all that comes with that franchise. His parents asked me to make the cake and purchased a kit from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Train-Cake-Kit-bonus/dp/B001E4Z7VI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1287538776&sr=8-3). I was VERY thankful that I had a few cakes and classes under my belt so that I was comfortable taking this on. It was definitely harder than I thought it would be.

Connor's parents wanted a marble cake and finding a recipe that would be big enough for a sheet cake was a little harder than I thought. I finally ended up using this recipe:

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=10000001842433&cookbook_id=5204683

I doubled the recipe to make ONE sheet cake and made that twice. There was enough cake that way. (As an aside, this same recipe also makes two 10-inch and two 6-inch round cakes. With my fancy convection oven, I can bake them all at the same time and it's fabulous!!) The filling I used on Thomas was a plain old buttercream. Yummy!

There's nothing better than seeing a cake at its' final destination. Thomas the CAKE certainly found a very loving home.

And here's my adorable nephew, the birthday boy. He was a very happy little 3 year old which made it all worth it!

Janice's 60th Birthday Cake

This was a fun one to do. It's based on a cake that was in my Wilton workbook but the customer wanted a brown cake with blue flowers and that's exactly what she got. The bottom tier was a butter cake with white buttercream and strawberry preserve filling. The top tier was a chocolate cake with raspberry preserve filling and raspberry buttercream. Both cakes were covered in a homemade chocolately fudgey fondant. Delish!

Wilton Class - Fondant and Gum Paste

The next class I took was Gum Paste and Fondant. I really didn't care for this especially after the deliciousness of the Buttercream class. That is, until I received a recipe for homemade fondant. After that, things got better and more tasty!

This first cake simply incorporated some of the techniques we learned. Flowers, overlays, the fancy-schmancy box on top. Pretty.

The next cake is supposed to look like a present! I think it does, actually. :)

Looks good enough to eat! (And it was.)