Princess Birthday Sheet Cake

This sheet cake was from a mom who was ordering for her daughter's Princess birthday party.  This made the 3rd cake this lady has ordered from me.  :) When we were talking about the design of the cake she told me she would like the princesses on the cake and that her daughter really wanted Pocahontas to be one of them.  When you search for Disney Princesses Pocahontas is not a popular one so it made a little bit of a challenge to get a good example of what Pocahontas looked like when grouped together with the other Princesses.  Another challenge that I never knew was so difficult is getting the characters to look like the actual characters.  I have created a lot of human figures in fondant but you have some creative leeway with those but when you are trying to make them look exactly like another persons creation it is a lot harder to get all the features to match up so that it resembles the character. It was a neat challenge and I think you can at least make out who they were suppose to be. :)

Non-Traditional Wedding Cake

The woman who contacted me about this cake needed a wedding cake for her daughter's wedding.  Instead of a tiered cake she asked if I could do a sheet cake.  So we talked about how big of a sheet cake she would need for the number of people they were planning on having.  This was a rather small wedding so the cake did not need to be really big nor did they need multiple sheet cakes.  I wanted to make it a little "fancier" then just a regular sheet cake because this was for an extra special occasion.  I feel this sheet cake turned out very elegant and wedding-worthy. :)

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).