a bit ago...

It's been a while since I posted. A loooong while. I didn't have a laptop easily accessible to me when I made this cake, so it never got posted. I thought I'd post it now. This cake was for Valentine's Day.

 Rich dark chocolate layers filled with Raspberry chocolate ganache. Oh man...it was delicious. I want some right now!

 The puzzle piece, made of gum paste, before I sprayed it with edible gold paint. And below, the ganache...so smooth.

 The little six inch cake covered in red fondant. The perfect size for one Valentine ;)

From Sketch to Cake

Alisa found me on ksl and asked if I could make a cake for Ashtyn's 16th Birthday Party. She had told Ashtyn she was going to make the cake, but decided it would be cool to surprise her with a custom cake instead. Her birthday party was a week before Halloween. They were having a Halloween costume party at the Wheeler Farm. Ashtyn loves gothic colors, Halloween, and her costume for the party was a masquerade ball gown with a gold mask. When she told me those details my head starting spinning with ideas...always a good sign. Alisa gave me full creative control so I was WAY excited to do this cake. I started sketching that night.

Here are the sketches I made of the cake. I had a few different ideas.

Alisa and her husband came by to help me decide on a final design.

This is the final sketch before I started making the cake.

I had to adjust a few things from the drawing in order to make it work, like the drapes and the tombstones didn't fit as they were drawn. I had originally planned for the feather to black, but everywhere I went was out of black feathers (being Halloween and all). Good thing. I think the red is perfect!

Everything, except the feather and the wires the bats are on, is edible. The skulls, bats, and mask are made of gumpaste, which is basically like fondant, but it dries and hardens.

The skulls are my favorite! Hollowed out eyes and gold ruffles!

It was a bit tricky to get the mask to stay in that position. I used a dowel about 4 inches long, painted it gold with edible paint, stuck a ball of gumpaste on the end and stuck that into the cake and glued the ball to the mask with royal icing. It took several tries to make it stick, but it did, even through delivery!

Alisa brought Ashtyn with her to pick up the cake. Ashtyn was so pleased with it, she gave me a huge hug. The smile on her face was the coolest. They were happy to report that everyone LOVED the cake. Red velvet with white-chocolate cream filling? Who wouldn't love that?

Stack of Books or Cake? Cake, silly.

This cake was for my dear sister's 24th birthday who LOVES books. So much that she would rather buy you a book then lend you one of her own and have it looking slightly worn (that's how I own Twilight). My sister didn't always love reading. It wasn't until she read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" that she fell in love with books. She now owns many many books, several she's never read, and some she refuses to finish, so as to not end a series. So, it seemed very fitting to make her a stack of books cake of her 3 favorite titles.

(inside: rich dark chocolate cake with light whipped ganache and strawberry slices for the filling. It tasted like a chocolate covered strawberry. Milk highly suggested.)

I love you, Taryn. You're one of a kind :)

Happy Birthday Gracie!

It's been a while. I'm really bad at taking nice pictures of my cakes when I'm in a hurry and stressing. So, some of my recent cakes unfortunately were only documented with my trusty iPhone. I'm even worse at blogging about my cakes. I'm a busy woman.

This is Gracie and her doll Julie. Always nice to see the customer with the cake. She loved it!

She was having a Wizards of Waverly Place party. The cake matched the napkins and Wizards of Waverly Place birthday party plates and cups and such. Inside was vanilla cake with a strawberry cream cheese filling.

Justin Bieber!

Mickinzi and her brother Easton contacted me last week to make a birthday cake for their daughters who were having a combined birthday party. They had an idea of a Justin Bieber cake they had seen online and wanted something similar. Inside the bottom tier is Pink Velvet cake with cream cheese filling, and in the top is Vanilla Cloud cake with chocolate buttercream. It was so fun to make! I only wish I could have made it sing "oh baby, baby, baby oh!"

Ally's Wedding Cake

My cousin Ally (short for Alejandra) is my favorite cousin. We grew up together. Spent weeks together in the summer at her home in Monroe, Utah. We both praised the two laziest cartoons in cartoon history, Garfield the cat and Homer Simpson. We have so many memories.

She was married on Saturday and asked me to make her cake. I had another cake to do the same day for Tanya, that I had to deliver to Syracuse. Luckily, I was able to deliver that cake in the morning (talking 7am. 1 hour drive.) and head to Ally's wedding later that afternoon down in Richfield. It was a loooong two days. I'm still learning how to organize my time when I have these big projects, and sometimes things go wrong and end up taking a lot of time to fix. So, I didn't really go to sleep on Friday. I took a nap at 9am Saturday morning for an hour and a half. But I'm so happy with how the cakes turned out.

Unfortunately, with all the craziness that caused me to not have time to sleep, I also forgot to find time to take a picture of Tanya's cake. I got one pic with my iphone, but I'm hoping I'll get some better pics from her photographer.

On top of my cousins cake are black ribbon roses. These are easy to do, which is very convenient when the gumpaste flower you made falls apart the minute you are supposed to be leaving for the wedding :).

PS3 and Mission Farewell Cakes

My sister asked me to make a Playstation 3 cake for her husband's 28th surprise birthday party. She was going to tell him that she wanted to buy him the real thing, but couldn't afford it, so the cake was the next best thing. Little did he know, she had been saving up and he would indeed get the real thing. I've never made a cake like this one before, so I was a little scared. But despite it's imperfections, I think it turned out pretty well! They loved it! And I had a few people at the party confuse it for the real thing (at a quick glance :))

The next cake was for a young lady's mission farewell. She was called to the Philippines and her mother wanted a figurine of her daughter wearing a ponytail. Heads are tough to make. Fondant dries quickly, so too much handling and well, things get messy. After smashing two heads in frustration, I finally got it on the third. The cake is the Philippines flag and she sits on top. Her bags are packed, Book of Mormon in hand, she is ready to go!