A "Moo, Moo" here and an "Oink, Oink" there...

Little Miss Ali celebrated her 2nd birthday today and I'm so excited that her mom asked me to make her cake again.  (I made a "Garden Party" cake for her last year and was honored then, too!)  This year, Ali was having a Barnyard-Themed birthday.  Her mom, Mari, gave me full creative power with the cake.  All I knew was Ali's favorite farm animal was a cow and I went from there. 

I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cute if I made a cake that looked like a pig on top of a cow?  And there was the inspiration for this cake.  I think it turned out SO cute!

The inspiration for the cake flavors was the exterior.  My inspiration cow was black and white and my inspiration pig was pink.  I went from there.

The bottom layer of cake was chocolate cake with vanilla and Oreo buttercream and delicious layer of chocolate fudge in the middle!  (This has to be my favorite cake of all time.  No kidding.)

The top layer was a strawberry cake with strawberry cream cheese frosting.  There was a pound of strawberries in that there cake.  And it was scrumptious!

Here's Ali posing with her cake.  LOVE this!

"Happy BIRTHday, dear, Ali!  Happy Birthday to you!"

I hope she made a wish!

My wish is that she has a fantastic 3rd year!  Thanks for including me in your birthday, Ali!  

Ninety-Two Birthdays! Ninety-Two Cakes!

My plan was always to make my Grandma's birthday cake this year.  The original idea was that she was going to come down to my parents' house and we would celebrate her birthday with her.  But, when an unfortunate injury kept her from traveling to see us, I knew it wasn't in the cards that I'd see her for her birthday.  Disappointment followed, but I knew I'd see her sometime this summer and she'd get her cake then.

That is, until my mom came over yesterday morning and told me that she was planning a trip up north to see Grandma...at noon.  What?!  I have to make her cake!  Shoot.  I have another order due.  But I HAVE to make Grandma's cake!

My mom headed off to work and I knew I had 4 hours to get this done so the cake would make the trip.  Mission Impossible?  Why yes...but Mission Accepted.

First things first...I had to work on the flowers.  I made two chocolate cakes and placed them in the oven for Ali's birthday (see next post) and while they were baking, I made most of the flowers for Grandma's cake.   My Grandma's favorite cake is Angel Food with 7-Minute frosting, and yes, I had to make them from scratch which meant another trip to the grocery store (I didn't have an extra 12 egg whites lying around...).  After the grocery store, I picked up my eldest daughter from summer school and I returned home to bake.  I had about 90 minutes left.  The cake took 50 minutes.  The frosting took 12 minutes.  I totally made it work!  My mom fortunately gave me an extra hour because she had to run errands, and I'm so happy she did.  I think this is one of the happiest cakes I've ever seen!  

Grandma, Happy Birthday to you!  I hope you had a great party and I can't wait to see you in a few weeks!

Evan's Baptism

Chelsie called me last week hoping that I would be able to squeeze in a cake order for her son's baptism.  Luckily, I didn't have any cakes due this weekend and was happy to help her out.   She needed a cake to feed between 20-30 people, so we decided on a 10-inch, 2-layer cake.  It was tough to decide between chocolate and yellow cake, so I did one of both.  I torted the cakes and layered them yellow, chocolate, yellow, chocolate with blue vanilla buttercream in between. 

The cake is decorated with buttercream and gum paste/fondant accents.   I hope baby Evan had a beautiful ceremony.  Congratulations to the family!

Cinderella's Chocolate Mountain

Rebecca asked me to do a Cinderella cake for her daughter's birthday this weekend.  Already having a pretty large sheet cake order for a wedding due, I didn't know if I would be able to squeeze that in, but Rebecca ensured me that she just needed an 8" cake and it could be "simple."  I love simple. 

After brainstorming and looking at a bunch of cakes online, I decided to browse the toy store.  I knew I wouldn't have time to sculpt much and that's not really my thing anyway.  I am way too practical to sculpt a bunch of stuff out of gum paste or fondant because where does that go when the cake is consumed?  In the trash...or the daring might even consume it (it IS edible).  But especially for kids cakes, I really prefer toys as toppers.  

So, I was delighted when I came across a little Cinderella boutique at Amazon.com.  I thought this would be the perfect cake topper and what little girl wouldn't be DELIGHTED with seeing this on a CAKE?!!

I couldn't just leave the cake frosted plainly.  I made the time to do the basketweave to add a little more interest and I added some little pink rosettes.  My daughter loved the cake but told me I needed to add grass and she's right - it looked much better with the grass. 

This cake is a chocolate cake with raspberry buttercream filling and frosted with a chocolate frosting.  The chocolate frosting was a new recipe for me from Martha Stewart.  It had butter, cream cheese and sour cream plus over a pound of melted chocolate in it.  Seriously.  Seriously...

I hope the birthday girl had a FABULOUS birthday and felt like the little princess she was!   

Wedding [Sheet] Cake

Carmelina and I met when I worked as a Cake Decorating Instructor at Michael's.  She is a great cake decorator and was getting married and wanted to do her own wedding cake.  But she had quite a crowd to feed and needed additional cake and asked me to make some sheet cakes as supplemental cake for her guests.  I was happy to oblige.  Many of you know that I "retired" from doing weddings, but cupcakes or sheet cakes or a small two-tiered cake I can handle.  Big ones, not so much.  So this order was just my style. 

Carmelina and her beau, Garth, requested white cakes with raspberry buttercream filling.  So each one of these cakes is two-layers with a delicious raspberry buttercream filling inside.  Simply decorated as no one will see them!  LOVE this!  (Also, I used 60 egg-whites here...SIXTY!!!)

The only challenge I had with all of the cakes was storage, but my 'fridge turned out to be the hero.  It's very versatile and I held out on grocery shopping for a couple of days to ensure the room! 

I hope that Carmelina and Garth had a fantastic wedding (the weather was BEAUTIFUL!!)!  I wish them the very best!  Congrats!

A Pirate Cake Fer Connor

A little over two weeks after my daughter turned five, my nephew turned five as well.  These two cousins have gone through everything together and it's so perfect that we live just down the street from one another.  After Josie's big princess/villains party a few weeks ago, I knew I had to get one more party under my belt before the month of June was over.  Connor was having a PIRATE party and I wanted to make sure that his cake was a cool, piratey kind of cake.  

After looking at what seemed like thousands of cake images online, I really couldn't find one that I loved enough to duplicate.  So I took some ideas from here and there and came up with my very own design.  Connor's only request was that it had the pirate skull on it.  I made sure that there were FIVE on there.  Can you find them all?

At Josie's party, Connor came dressed up as a pirate.  Fortunately we got a great picture of him at the party and I included it/him on his cake.  Awesome, eh?!  Arrrrr!  The treaure here is a candle I ordered from Wilton.com.  I thought it was perfect for the occasion!

I also wanted to incorporate a treasure map or an "X" marks the spot motif which you can see below.  The cake itself is a chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream filling and frosting.  The ship is made out of rice krispie treats and covered in modeling chocolate.  (Special thanks to the hubby for molding it for me.)  I used paper and skewers for the ship's masts, but everything else on the ship is edible.  

And here's the birthday boy...I mean, the birthday PIRATE!   

Happy 5th Birthday to you, Connor!  Auntie Ann loves you very much!

Disney Villains and Princesses oh my!

We celebrated Josie's birthday yesterday.  We had a GREAT day for it!  Sunny, almost 90 degrees and NO CHANCE OF RAIN!  Since our visit to Walt Disney World last October, Josie has been wanting and wanting a Disney Villains-themed party.  Her favorite villain is Malificent and she requested [last October] a Malificent cake.  Okay....?  Needless to say, I had some time to think about design. 

Getting back to the party, I added the "princess" bit for her because I think most her her 5-year old-ish friends would have more to do with princesses than with the villains.  We encouraged all of her friends to dress up as their favorite Disney villain or princess and also come with their swim suits.  Because it was so warm, we made it into a water party!

Josie's Grandma Marcia was able to secure this wonderful Snow White cut-out which we had all of her guests pose with.  What a beautiful addition to the party!  

I still can't believe I was able to find Villain-themed plates and napkins, but was so happy I did.  (These were actually for Halloween parties!!)

We had all of Josie's guests find their goodie bags right away after arriving.  We had them hidden throughout the yard.  The girls got foam tiaras with adhesive jewels to decorate, lots of fun jewelry, princess tattoos and silver wands.  The boys got knight masks and knight shields to decorate, knight tattoos and a foam sword. 

Here are all of Josie's guests.  A few Cinderellas, Snow Whites, a Rapunzel and even a Darth Vader in there!

After the photo-op, we had the kids get their suits on and that's when the fun began!  Sprinkler time for everyone (while also watering the veggie garden)!

We played Cruella's Dalmation [water balloon] toss game.

And Hades Hot Potato.

We finished up the water games with water limbo!





Then it was time for cake.  Like I said, Josie wanted a Malificient cake (the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty).  It was so hard to make such an evil cake for my 5-year old daughter, but this was really what she wanted.  I kept the color scheme very Malificent and added the dragon (made out of gum paste & fondant) and included some little pink flowers around the cake, per the story. 

The top tier is a yellow cake and the bottom tier is a chocolate cake.  Both are filled with green buttercream frosting.

 I think she liked it!

 If cake didn't provide enough sugar, we had the kids take down this pinata. 

 And here they are enjoying the deliciousness of the candy, after their cake sugar high. 

....and then we quickly sent all of the kids home.  :)

Happy Birthday, Josephine!  I hope you had a wonderful day!  We sure did!