Berries and Chocolate Drizzles

The Toadstool Cake was for my daughter's friend party. Then we traveled west to attend the wedding of my husband's brother, and it just so happens that his fiance (now wife) and my daughter share a birthday. Their birthday was just a day or so before the wedding, so we had a big party that day. I used my 10 inch and 6 inch pans to bake the cake, and unfortunately I forgot that there are special instructions for baking cakes at high altitudes, so I had to make an extra grocery store run and attempt the actual baking twice since my first cakes fell. Oh well, at least I learned something. I decorated this cake with cream cheese frosting, fresh berries, and white chocolate drizzled over the berries.

Toadstool Nature Cake

In trying to decide the perfect cake for my daughter's 5th birthday party, we decided on doing a bug themed cake since she is always catching bugs. She loves to be outside and exploring. We did a bug cake for her when she turned 2, so we wanted this to turn out a little differently. After a bit of exploring ideas on the web, we decided to turn the cake into a big toadstool. The top is made from a three layer 9 inch round cake (we even experimented with our new checkerboard cake thing--which was actually a little bit tricky to pour the batter into and we made a huge mess). We cut around the top egde to give it a dome shape, then put it on a 9 inch cake circle and frosted it in red and added the white spots. The base of the mushroom was made out of my 6 x 4 inch cake pan, covered in white fondant. Finally, we used some of the cake we cut from the edge to build up around the base of the mushroom, then covered it with chocolate frosting and added some grass. All that was left was adding some little critters. My husband figured out how to make a few of the butterflies and dragonflies "fly" around the cake.

Course 3 Class Final

I forgot to take a picture of the cake we made in Course 3. Oh well, I didn't really like it too much anyway. This cake, though was a lemon cake with lemon pudding filling, and a lemon buttercream icing (which was really tasty). Here's the final cake. The roses are made from fondant, and it took me 10 hours or so to make them all.

Class Cake #3 and Scout Dessert Auction

I feel like there is so much going on, but also nothing really going on. I really have no excuse to not be posting, but I'm just not in a blogging mood lately. Anyway, here is my final cake for the level 1 class. Tonight I'm making the first cake for the level 3 class (I skipped 2 and will come back to it). Also, a few weeks ago was a dessert auction fundraiser for the scout troop in our ward. Our family donated a raspberry filled Oreo brownie cake. Mmmm.

Wilton Class Cake #2

In the second class we learned how to do shell borders (which I was excited to learn as I've never known how to do them correclty before), and we learned the really easy and cute swirl flowers seen all over the cake below.

Relief Society Birthday Cake

Kelsey and her sister and I put together this cake for the Relief Society Birthday celebration for our ward. We didn't really have a plan when we started, so we were pretty much imrovising as we went along, but it turned out great, I think. We obviously weren't very stressed about matching the colors perfectly--the buttercream covering the center layer is greener than the fondant polka dots and stripes on the top and bottom.
The final touch that turned it from a regular old cake into a Relief Society cake was our RS logo.

Star Tip Rainbow Cake

So here's my first Wilton class cake. Don't look too closely, or you will see how horrible the blue frosting job is. Also, when my cakes were cooling on the rack, my little daughter helped herself to a big chunk of one of them. I caught her before she had taken too many bites out of it, so the piece just got toothpicked back in, but I wasn't paying attention, and that section ended up right in front, instead of in the back where it should have been.

"All About Ali"

I can't take much credit for this cake, but I did want to post about it since I think it turned out really cute. This cake was for my friend Kelsey's daughter's 2nd birthday. Kelsey designed it to showcase a bunch of her daughter's favorite things (Disney's Cars, The Little Mermaid, 101 Dalmations, music, learning letters, and princesses/dress ups), and she let me help her put it together. I loved the flowers around the side of the cake. They were molded out of chocolate, and when we attached them with frosting, they ended up sticking out about a quarter inch from the side of the cake, so it looked really cool!

The Amazing Safari Cake

My friend Kelsey showed me this cake that a friend of hers had made and posted about on her blog. (You can view the original artist's cake here.) With my youngest daughter's 2nd birthday coming up, and since I knew I'd have Kelsey's help, it was decided that this would be the perfect cake for my daughter. We spent two nights working on it--a total of about 20 hours between the two of us. Without Kelsey's experience in working with rolled fondant, this could never have happened for my daughter, because I honestly didn't even know what rolled fondant was before this creation. The bottom/zebra, and top/giraffe layers, are both decorated with fondant, and the middle layer is buttercreme. We also cheated and just covered cake pans for the bottom and top layers (we still ended up with a ton of cake left after the party).

Kelsey is an amazing cook, and while doing this cake she suggested using creme cheese frosting, and adding frozen berries for the filling between the cake layers. Wonderful suggestion!! One of my favorite parts to this cake were the palm trees. They added such a cute touch. We formed the leaves on a bunch of my daughter's plastic balls out of Royal Icing.

I also loved the vine and elephant on top.

Littlest Pet Shop Garden Cake

This cake was for my oldest daughter's 4th birthday. We had a lot of fun with it!! Again, I used the store bought frosting, but it worked well enough. The cake had been baked and pieced together the day before, so before her party on her birthday my daughter helped me decorate it.First we had to mix the colors and frost it.

Next, we added the borders and icing decorations.Last we put on the Littlest Pet Shop picnic pieces. I think it turned out very cute!

Turtle Pull Apart Cupcakes

For my younger daughter’s 1st birthday we made her a turtle cake made from a turtle cupcake mold. Not too much creativity involved here; I just copied the picture on the package. And I used store bought frosting. (I was still in my phase of thinking I couldn’t make my own buttercreme.)

The Traditional Castle Cake

This cake is a traditional cake for my family. My parents made it for me a few times when I was little, and I know it was made for my sister, and I think it was made for my brother also (with more masculine decor). For my oldest daughter's 3rd birthay, I was too busy to make a cake, and was planning on just buying her one from the store, but my parents were in town with us, and told me they would make her cake, so they made her the castle cake. She loved it, and is telling me she wants one for her next birthday.

Bugs on a Log

This cake was for my oldest daughter's 2nd birthday. She loves catching bugs, and she said she wanted a bug cake so we designed this cake to look like a fallen log with mushrooms and vines on it, then added some gummi worms and plastic bugs.

First Cakes

Where did this blog come from, exactly? I have to give credit where it's due: First, Baskin Robbins and Mrs. A in Woodstock, IL. That's where I learned to make my first cakes by watching and being instructed by some of my co-workers over the course of 3 summers. When we weren't dipping ice-cream cones for customers, we were often making and decorating ice-cream cakes to fill the display case or to fill orders. Jamie, Sara, and a few other girls, most of them college students at home for the summer, were the ones who showed me how to make some flowers, do shell borders, and otherwise decorate an ice-cream cake (which is a lot different than making your own cake at home as I found out the first time I tried to do so when I made my husband's Lord of the Rings birthday cake the next February). Here are a few of my first cakes that I took pictures of from Baskin Robbins. The next step toward this blog would have to be having my girl friend Kelsey move back into our area. She helped me make my little daughter's 2nd birthday cake, and I discovered I could, and really liked, making cool cakes. I managed to make a few birthday cakes for my daughters, but it's only now that I'm really getting into it. After the first disastrous attempt at making my own frosting for the Lord of the Ring's cake I had kind of given up on the idea that I could figure out serious home cake decorating by myself, until Kelsey helped me with my daughter's Safari Cake. (I was so spoiled at the ice-cream shop--working with frozen cakes, and having all my frosting ready-made.) We have plans to make an awesome cake for the Relief Society birthday in a couple of weeks, and we are making some cool cakes to auction off at the Scout camp desert auction fundraiser. Third is Jon and Cyndia. They asked me to make their wedding cake this June. I won't be doing so even though I think it would be awesome to be able to contribute to their wedding in that way, and to be able to say I've made a wedding cake would just be so cool! But I really don't think I'm proficient enough to not stress way too much about it. However, it got me thinking that I would love to take some classes to learn to be proficent enough, and so because of Jon and Cyndia, I looked into the Wilton classes at Michael's.

And that's the final reason this blog got started. I'm going to be learning to do some cool things, and I'm so excited to be creative and see what I can come up with. So this blog is meant to be a place to journal about, and share what I come up with. Enjoy!