My first wedding cake!

Wow. What a weekend it's been! A few weeks ago, one of my close friends, Beatriz, told me that she was getting married and asked me if I would make their wedding cake! Of course I accepted. The bride had too much going on with the planning so she said I could make whatever I wanted which really stressed me out. I wanted her to LOVE it and was nervous about not having much direction.

Anyway, I found a few inspirational photo's with one specifically that she liked. I was excited to finally have something to go off of. I chose to make a white almond cake and have different fillings in each layer. The top layer was filled with chocolate ganache, the middle layer had a strawberry filling, and the bottom layer was filled with a banana custard.

I was so confident until I was about half way through. I filled the bottom layer with too much of the banana custard and it started sliding on me! Talk about stressful! This was especially nervewracking because the bottom layer needs to support the rest of the cake! After having a mini meltdown, and wondering if I should ever attempt another wedding cake, I felt better and got back to work.


The second meltdown came the morning of the wedding when we were driving to the ceremony. It seemed like we were hitting every pothole in the Chicagoland area! My poor husband had to deal with me yelling at him to slow down the entire way! After what felt like forever, we finally got there with the cake still in one piece! Yay!


It took quite a bit of time, but it all came together in the end!

Here are some pics of the finished product!


Congratulations Beatriz and Tony! Thank you for allowing me to add to your special day!!

Happy Birthday Dad!

Our family celebrated my dad's birthday yesterday. This is a guy who hates when his family make a big fuss over him. I've gotten to the point where I know better than to ask him what he can use or what he wants for his birthday. He just won't tell me!


Anyway, We love to celebrate him but he never allows it. This year, he made it pretty easy on us by calling his brother and sisters over for a Labor Day BBQ. Little did he know that we had other plans! After dinner, as we all sat around catching up and spending time together, I brought out his cake and we all sang happy birthday to him. What do you get the guy who never lets you get him anything? A cake in the shape of a present! I hope he enjoyed it! Happy Birthday to the best dad a girl can ask for!

Now for the details on the cake! This was a white almond cake with strawberry filling. Everything that you see in the picture was edible and made of fondant.

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!

Today marks the 31st wedding anniversary of my wonderful parents. Wow...... in this day and age, that is definitely an accomplishment! Especially when you have three very headstrong and stubborn children!

To help them celebrate, I decided to make them an anniversary cake in their wedding colors. My mom tells me that she wanted the wedding colors to be white and pink but my dad wasn't having it and demanded blue and white. Somehow, my dad won that argument! My mom did kind of get her way though and had her maid of honor wearing pink with one of those big floppy hats! I'll have to find a picture so that you get the true awesomeness of these outfits! LOL

I made them a pink champagne cake iced in vanilla buttercream frosting and covered in fondant.


Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!

Tinkerbell!

A friend's daughter turned 3 and had a Tinkerbell birthday party this weekend. Her mom asked me to make some confetti cupcakes with green icing. I decided to take it a bit further and instead of making a standard rainbow confetti cupcake, I set out to find purple and green sprinkles. How hard could it be right? Wrong. I didn't really want to order them online for reasons that I don't remember now... but that would have been the most logical choice instead of driving all around Chicagoland trying to find sprinkles. I finally found them so all was well by party time! I thought it would also be fun to sprinkle some "pixie dust" over the tops :-)

Here they are: Green and purple confetti cupcakes with lime green vanilla buttercream frosting and purple "pixie dust"


All ready for the party!

Happy Birthday, Kayla!

Becoming a teen

To those who know me, it's no surprise that I love bright (and sometimes borderline obnoxious) colors. I think that's one of the reasons why I like making kids birthday cakes so much. You can be creative and bright and it's ok!


A friend's niece turned 13 this weekend and asked me if I would make a cake for her birthday party. The birthday girl requested a chocolate cake with strawberry filling. She also wanted the cake to be "hot purple" and mentioned that her other favorite colors were blue and green.

This is what came of it:

Front view-

Back view-

This cake was really fun to make even though my hands are still purple and blue from tinting the frosting. It's so bad that I wonder if they will go back to normal. How did I make such a mess?!

Want to know what's scarier than purple hands? Delivering a cake! It's especially scary when you need to cross over train tracks to get to the house. Stress, stress, stress, but the cake and I made it in one piece!

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Jordan!

Peanut Butter!

So I am continuing to test out recipes that I want to offer. I stumbled across one today that is definitely a keeper and will be added to my order form. Peanut butter cupcakes with chocolate buttercream. YUM! While it was baking, my place smelled like I lived in a Reeses Pieces candy. It smelled so good that I didn't even know what to do with myself. So good.

As with many of my other recipes, I test them out on my family and my co-workers. My family got to enjoy these tonight and loved them. My husband even said they were the best cupcake/cake he had ever tasted. He's a good husband! ;-) The to making these today was that my cousin's Liv's birthday that is right around the corner. The cupcakes gave us an excuse to embarass her by singing to her at the top of our lungs in the middle hotel lobby that she is staying in. My family sure has a ton of fun when we get together!

Cakes to celebrate our old campus!

I was approached recently by the president's secretary for the school that I work for. We are moving to a new campus soon and she asked if I would be interested in making a cake for the goodbye celebration in honor of our old campus. The only requirement that she had was that she wanted it to include both our old and current logo's. There were so many options running through my head, that it was difficult to narrow things down and create a game plan. What kind of cake to make? What kind of design to use? So many possibilities.

Ultimately, I decided that it would be cool to make individual cakes to portray each of our logo's. Doing things this way also solved the dilemma of what kind of cake to make! Everyone has a favorite right? The photos below are results of that idea. I'm pretty happy with how they came out!

The old logo was a chocolate fudge chocolate chip cake covered with an almond buttercream frosting and fondant accents.

The new logo was a yellow butter cake covered in almond buttercream with fondant accents.