Whale Baby Shower Cake

Today I finished and delivered a baby shower cake for (are you ready for this) the daughter of a co-worker of my mother-in-law.  This was the second cake they asked me to make for them and I was very excited to hear that they enjoyed their first cake enough to want a second.  The flavor of the cake was Chocolate Lovers with a cream cheese filling.  I have never put those two together and hope it tasted as great as it sounds.  The theme for the nursery is whales and so was the baby shower.  The grandmother-to-be sent me a picture of the invitation so I tried to replicate that as much as possible.

Here is the top half of the invitation

Here is what I came up with. The L is stands for the little boy's name.

Teal & Coral Elephant Baby Shower

This cake was made for a woman who I have done a couple cakes for now.  She needed a cake for a baby shower.  The mother-to-be was doing the nursery in gray and white with teal and coral accents. She also was doing elephants.  So at first I had several ideas running around in my head.  With the help of the lady needing the cake we can up with this idea.  I thought this cake would be pretty simple.  It was just strips of fondant.  But my perfectionist tendencies kicked in and I couldn't seem to get the edges straight enough nor the buttercream smooth enough.  I was just thankful the lady emailed me and told me several people loved taste and the look of the cake.  Yet again I am reminded that the little things that I notice other people might not.  This was also the first time at making a marble cake.  It looked pretty neat inside when I was cutting it to level and stack it. :)

My Nemesis: The Sphere Cake

So I have meet my nemesis, the sphere cake.  This cake was for my sister-in-law's surprise birthday at the beach.  She has done so much for me and this website that I really wanted to make the whole day special starting with the room decorated when she got up to a doughnut cake for breakfast and ending with a little birthday party after dinner with a ball of yarn cake along with her four cats on it.

I was able to do the first 2 pretty well.  The room was definitely decorated all over the place to where we were dodging things all day. :)  The doughnut cake was DELICIOUS.  I can't take credit for making the doughnuts though.   

But the cake...oh boy! My plan was to make the cake at home and transport it 4 hours to the beach.  I should have known when I tried the ball cake the first time and it collapsed that it would collapse after being transported 4 hours away.  I always say this is a learning experience for me and this one definitely was.  After the first ball collapsing I researched a better way to make it and I thought I had had it.  It looked like a ball of yarn which was exactly what I was going for.  I loved how the cats turned out and the board that they set on really looked like their wood floor at their house.  I even thought that I would take pictures of the cats before we left.  I hadn't dusted off the powdered sugar but you can still get the idea of what they looked like. She has 4 cats like I mentioned and I tried to use this picture to make them look like her cats as much as possible.

 

The actual cake was going to be a ball of yarn because she loves to be crafty like me. :) When we got to the beach late Friday night the cake looked OK.  It has settled a little but I thought it still looked ok and would be ok time we celebrated by Saturday night.  Midday the next day I checked on the cake and it had started cracking in the back.  I knew it wasn't going to last until that evening so we went ahead and had cake after lunch.  I feel really bad that this happened but I am happy it was for a family member and not someone else.

 The cake flavor was chocolate with a chocolate buttercream in the middle and was covered in chocolate ganache.  My brother-in-law said she loved chocolate so I made it a chocolate lovers cake.

To the ball cake:  You may have won this one but it ain't over. I will make you again and not travel so far and it will be perfect.  (Half sphere cakes:  I'm not intimidated by you.  You are much easier than your half sister. ;)  )

Jungle Animal Sheet Cake

A previous customer contacted me again to do another sheet cake for her but this time it was for her son's 1st birthday.  I was thrilled to hear back from her and of course agreed to do a cake for her son.  She told me that the theme was jungle animals and that I could come up the design.  My first idea was just to do a few animal heads on top of the cake but as I started working I got a little carried away with it.  But I liked the way it all turned out. 

It was a vanilla sheet cake, iced in buttercream and decorated with MMF and some buttercream piping.

First of Two

This weekend I ended up having two cake orders.  I thought it would be pretty easy since one of them was just a sheet cake but it ended up that the sheet cake took more time than I had imagined.

This was my first time just doing a traditional "sheet" cake.  Boy did I learn a lot about sheet cakes.  First off when ordering a sheet cake you need to know if they want a traditional sheet cake which is a 1 layer rectangular cake or a layered cake.  My first thought was it would be a single layer.  When the cake came out of the oven it probably was only about 1 1/2 inches high which I thought would be way too short for a single-layer sheet cake.  So I made another layer to go on top.  After doing some more research I found out that now I had a cake to feed 45 people instead of the 20-25 people that was requested.  Oops.  (But who doesn't love more cake.) The cake was also very high for a traditional sheet cake you would get in a store. 

The next thing that happened was when I had the cake all done I noticed some imperfections which I am sure no one else would have noticed but it bothered me so I tried fixing them.  I ended up messing up a corner so bad I had to re-ice that corner the day I was to deliver it. 

So the cake was ready to go or at least I had to go deliver the 2 cakes I had done.  I packaged up the cake in a cake box which I don't normally do but I thought since it was a sheet cake and there weren't any other tall decorations on top I would just go ahead and supply the box.  I placed it on my back seat which has a very little incline in it but I didn't think this large of a cake would move.  Well I didn't get out of my neighbor when I heard a sliding noise coming from the back seat.  Sure enough, I opened the box and it had slid forward and smashed up against the side.  I had to race home (now late to deliver the other cake) and get some tools to fix it.  I then moved it to the floor board where I thought it would have less chances of it sliding.  Luckily it didn't slide again and I was able to fix it after I delivered the other cake.  What I usually do is place the cake on a board that is exactly the same size as the cake and then later move the cake and the cake board to a bigger board.  This just gives your final presentation a better look.  What they usually tell you is to put icing down as a glue to hold the cake to the board and so I used the same concept for a board and a board.  Well the icing isn't that strong of a "glue" to hold 2 boards together without sliding. Now I am going to find a better way to secure the 2 boards together so it won't be prone to slide.

All this to say a simple sheet cake turned into a lot of little learning experiences. 

Here is a picture of what the top looked like.

It was a french vanilla flavored cake iced in buttercream and decorated with MMF (marshmallow fondant).

Snow that Leads to Freezing (A Cake)

This past Saturday we saw our biggest accumulation of snow here in and around Raleigh, North Carolina for this winter thus far.   Since snow is not often seen here and many southern people are unaware how to handle it there are many precautions that are taken.   I am sure many people back home in Ohio would have a good laugh to see what happens when we get a light dusting as they would call it.  But if you don't drive in snow very often you probably should take more precautions.

With that said, I also had a baby shower cake to do for a co-worker of my mother-in-law's.  The shower was to be that day.  Once the snow starting falling the mother-to-be's husband thought it would be best to reschedule the baby shower.  Which again if you aren't used to driving in snow (and are very pregnant) then you probably shouldn't risk it.  By the time I got the message, the cake was almost complete.  I had a few last minute touches to do but for the most part it was done.  So now I had this cake done, the shower was cancelled but rescheduled for next Thursday, and they would like to have the cake still.  I knew the cake wouldn't last if I left it out.  I could have remade it but that would mean more time and supplies.  So after some Googling and talking with my mother-in-law, we decided that we would try and freeze the cake.

I researched how to freeze an already iced and decorated cake.  I wrapped it up good and placed it in our freezer.  I am praying that when I unwrap the cake on Thursday that the cake looks as it did when I first made it as well as tastes just as good.  Check out what the cake looked like before placing it in the freezer.  I will post an update with a picture of when we thaw it back out.  I am really hoping this works, but I guess this is how you learn if things work or not, by trial and error.

The cake is iced with buttercream and decorated with marshmallow fondant and some gumpaste pieces.  The mother-to-be also requested Funfetti cake which is her favorite I was told. :)  I also received the baby shower invite and tried to model the cake after the invitation.

The invitation/inspiration

 

The cake before it was frozen...

The cake all wrapped up and ready to be frozen...

UPDATE:  So after I let the cake completely thaw to room temperature I unwrapped it.  It looked exactly as it did before it went in the freezer.  The only slight flaw was that a few fondant pieces on the cake board cracked because they became pretty flimsy and I accidentally bumped them when I was unwrapping it.  I didn't get the chance to taste the cake but the people at the shower told me it tasted great! That was a blessing to hear.  So it is possible to freeze an already-decorated cake.  I just hope I don't have to do that again!

First Time Travelling With Cakes

This past August I was planning a trip home to see the family.  Since I moved to North Carolina I have been baking and decorating more cakes so I hadn't gotten the chance to make very many cakes for my family back in Ohio. I had planned to go home the first part of August because that is when the county fair near my dad was going on.  Also around that time my mom and sister were celebrating their birthdays.

So I decided to make three 6" cakes, one for my mom, one for my sister, and another one to take to the fair for my family camping there.  All the cakes were iced with buttercream and I made all the fondant accent pieces at home and transported the cake and accent pieces separate.  When I got there I put all of them together.  This meant I had to bring many of my supplies along for the ride. 

For my mom's birthday cake I decided to make her a cake that represented her, our mom.  Around the top of the cake I made the faces of each one of my sister's and me. As a topper I made the letters to spell out "Mom".  She was currently in the middle of decorating her house with brown and teal so I used those colors on the cake.

For my sister's birthday cake, I made it a cat and dog themed cake.  My sister just recently graduated with her Vet Tech degree and she loves animals so I thought this cake was fitting.

For the fair cake, I made a barn themed cake.  I added small fondant animals that you would see at the fair as well as a barn made out of Rice Krispie treats and then covered with fondant.  This was the first time I had made a figurine out of Rice Krisipes.