The journey begins into fondant and gumpaste flowers

One of my cousin's is celebrating her birthday this weekend and asked me if I would make her a cake. She didn't really have any specific guidelines of what she wanted, she just told me that she wanted it to be more traditional since she doesn't like the modern cake look. I got to work!

She chose a white almond cake with chocolate ganache filling. YUM! The best part of someone choosing chocolate ganache as their filling are the leftovers!!!


Anyway, her and I are eerily similar in our interests and likes/dislikes. I LOVE calla lillies so I was pretty sure that she would like them too. I checked with her sister first who gave me the green light! I made the flowers over the course of three days since you need to let each layer dry on it's own. It was lots of fun so I am looking forward to making different all different kinds in the future.


Here is her cake:




This pic allows you to see the fondant ball border better.

Happy Birthday Kristina! I hope you enjoy your cake as much as I enjoyed making it for you!

Minnie Mouse

My neighbors say they are tortured by seeing me carry all these cakes out my door and never being able to have a taste of any of them. To solve the problem, they ordered a cake for their daughter's 3rd birthday.

She just told me that they were having a minnie birthday and to make a cake that would fit in with that theme. So this is what I was able to do for them.

This cake was a french vanilla with 1/2 strawberry and 1/2 banana filling. The frosting around the base was whipped cream and the polka dots, 3, ears, and bow were made of fondant. I hear the birthday girl really enjoyed it! Happy Birthday, Emma!

Elmo!

The daughter of my best friend had her first birthday party this weekend. Naturally I said yes when my bff asked me to make her daughter's birthday cake. Once she told me that she had decided on an Elmo theme, I spent an obscene amount of time online searching for some inspirational photos on what to make. I finally decided to purchase an Elmo pan from Wilton and put it on a sheet cake to make sure that it would feed everyone at the party.

For weeks I was so excited about making this cake- I couldn't wait to get started! I wanted to make sure that everything would be perfect. That turned out to be much harder than I thought since I hurt my left hand (I'm left handed) the weekend before the party.

The entire week before the party I worried about how I would decorate these cakes with a left hand that I could hardly move and that was very swollen. What did I do to it? Who knows! When I realized that I couldn't hold my coffee mug, I began to wonder if I had broken it! I iced it practically every second of the day in hopes that the pain would just magically go away before I started baking. Wishful thinking that unfortunately didn't work!

I finally decided to just start baking when I realized that my hand wasn't going to get much better. Needless to say, piping individual starts to color in Elmo's face was torture! I finally got it done in an amount of time that I am embarrassed to even type out. The sheet cake was a lot better since there wasn't too much detail that I was planning on adding.... although it still took me longer than expected.

The day of the party finally arrived and I was excited to have finished the cake! I drove into the city and the terror started. You don't realize how badly city drivers are until you have a stacked cake and cupcakes in your trunk! Thankfully, the cake and I made it to the party in one piece, but we had a few close calls and a few choice words on my part along the way!

So here is the cake! Elmo was a confetti cake iced in a vanilla buttercream. The sheet cake underneath was a triple chocolate chocolate chip (chocolate overload? ;-)) filled with banana filling on one half and strawberry whipped cream on the other.

I also made smores cupcakes. The elmo head on top was candy.


And in case you are interested, I sit here typing this post out one handed with my right hand while the other is still wrapped and under ice :-(