W's Firetruck Birthday

Since I mentioned my son's firetruck birthday in the previous post I thought I should also include a post with pictures from his birthday.  I get carried away with kid birthday parties.  My husband just told me the other day as I was planning for my son's next party, "you know they don't need a party every year".  This is true but I just love doing it and now my son has come to expect it. (which might not be a great thing after all)  What can I say I LOVE celebrating birthdays!

Frozen Birthday Party

Life has been pretty crazy since the last time I posted.  Unfortunately I haven't been able to do many cakes because of being busy and exhausted from watching after our 2 kids, a friend's little boy and being pregnant with our 3rd child due in about 5 weeks. Finding time to put them on my blog has even been more of a challenge but I'm hoping to catch up in the next couple of weeks. 

The first one that I want to share was from last summer for Billy's co-worker's daughter. I actually was able to do her daughter's birthday cake the year before and was happy to help out.  She wanted me to do a Frozen theme and asked me to make the cake and party favors.  This time she asked me to do cake pops which is something I don't do often so it was fun to be creative in a different way. This cake was a lot of fun to do.

Hopefully I will have time to post more cakes soon.  For now it's nap time so got to go.

Sunshine 1st Birthday Cake

I never thought I would say this but I am starting to fall in love with fondant!!! What?! I know.  I have been against it for so long because I love the taste of buttercream better.  But that is even starting to change for me.  When I cover a cake in fondant I use a fondant made out of marshmallows which many people who make cakes refer to it as MMF.  This fondant actually has a decent taste unlike the store-bought fondant that some others use.  The reason I enjoy using it is because as a cake decorator is really helps you to achieve that smooth finish you see in so many pictures.  If you know me I can be a little OCD about how smooth my cakes are and I can never get them completely smooth which drives me crazy.  This is where my love for fondant is growing.

With all that said I did a cake a couple weeks back for a little girl's first birthday.  Her theme was going to be a sunshine theme and they asked for a cake that would look something like the picture they sent me.  I really loved how this cake turned out.  It may even go up there with one of my favorites.

I will have to tell a funny story about this cake.  When the father and mother were emailing me they asked me to do a yellow pineapple cake.   So I made a pineapple cake and decorated it in yellow. The day before the party I was looking at the finished yellow cake a thought hit me which made me panic.  "Did they want a yellow pineapple FLAVORED cake or a cake decorated with a pineapple yellow?"  I was all in a panic and immediately searched for their email to see if I was going to have to completely redo the cake I just did.  But thankfully the email read a "a pineapple flavored yellow cake."  I am so glad they put in that extra word "flavored".  It reassured me that I had done what I was suppose to do.  Oh man!  Sometimes I can be such a stress bucket. ;)

Baby Carriage Baby Shower Cake

You gotta love late night (12:00am) trips to Walmart. (I really had to talk my husband into letting me go.) There are times when I have gotten down to the wire on a cake and it has to be delivered the next day and you realize something isn't right, you have to start over, and/or you need more of something.  Well that happened to me on this cake.  After covering the cake in MMF I realized the color I had done was way to bright.  The woman who contacted me even requested a more lighter green than I first made.  I tried to tell myself it was fine but I couldn't continue without redoing it and it was already almost midnight.  So I made a trip to Walmart to get marshmallows.  People were probably thinking why does one need 2 bags of marshmallows in the middle of the night.  :) I was also surprised how many people (some with kids) were at Walmart shopping this late.

But I got it done in time and was pretty happy how it turned out.  If I had more time I probably would have fixed a few things but I always think that about a cake.  I guess that is my (self-diagnosed) OCD tendencies. :)

 

Trashy Nashy's Birthday

This cake was designed for some friends from our church.  It was their dad's 60th birthday and they wanted to throw him a surprise party.  Their dad had worked for Republic Services which is a waste management company for over 30 years so he had gotten the nickname, "trashy Nashy".  So for his birthday they wanted to do something with a trash truck or dumpster.  They decided they would do a trash dumpster.  What they didn't know was I was going to incorporate their dad into the cake as well.  I thought it would be cute if he was peeking out of the trash.  This cake was a lot of fun to create.  Who knew creating trash would be so much fun.  Everything you see in the picture was edible.

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. ;)  )

First Fondant Covered Cake

Back in November my sister-in-law saw someone post on Facebook that they were looking for someone to do their son's 1st birthday cake.  She knew I enjoyed making cakes and I was also trying to start making a little money with it so she so graciously gave her my name. This was the first cake I made for someone I did not know and that made it a little more stressful.  To top it all off she wanted me to cover the cake in fondant which is something I had never done and usually try not to do because I prefer the buttercream taste over the fondant.  (I did use a marshmallow fondant which I have found to taste the best among other fondants.)  So this cake made me nervous.

The mom sent me some pictures of cakes that she would like and said that I could come up with whatever I would like.  The birthday party was going to be a transportation theme as I like to call it.  So I created a cake with a transportation scene and on top I had one big car made of fondant and gumpaste and an one and stars made just out of gumpaste.  There were a lot of things I was able to learn from this cake but the one most frustrating part was the car on top and getting it to be a red instead of a pink.  It takes so much Wilton red coloring to make something red so I took some advice I got from someone and went and got a color called Super Red made by Americolor.  This color gel is the best to use when trying to get a red and you don't have to use as much.  I had to go all the way to Clayton to get it but it was worth it.  Next time I might just order some online.  I made the car on top about 4 times.  I ended up throwing out a lot of fondant/gumpaste.  The first one I did I took a picture of it and sent it to my husband who told me it looked pink (which I agreed).  But after I finished the 4th car and time had run out, I looked back at the first picture I took and realized the first car (even though it was pink) was the best one I did.  Oh well.

After no further adieu, here is the cake I came up with: