Let It Snow!

Snowman Christmas Cake

White Cake with Creme DeMenthe

Chocolate Filling

This is such a fun and festive cake to look at! I love how the colors turned out and they really make you think of winter and presents and of course...SNOW!!! The woman I made this cake for, Amy Mills, is a friend of my friend Mary, and we met at Mary's daughters party. (wow, that was a mouthfull, if you don't understand, it's okay) She was hosting one table out of many at her Church Christmas Dessert Party and so asked if I would make her dessert cake that would also serve as the centerpiece of her table. She had already decided on and bought all the decorations, plates and cups and so I asked to keep a plate or two and then also some of the decoration pieces to get a better feel for the overall idea. After I drew a couple of ideas and then met up with Amy, this was the design her and I both liked the best. As you can see, my snowman is just a 3D copy of the 2D design on the plates she had bought. (I have to admit, I forgot to ask Amy if it ended up tasting as good as it looked? I only taste tested the cupcakes in this flavor, not the cake? Amy if you read this, please give me an honest answer!)

Our Mr. Snowman is just styrofoam balls covered in fondant and then covered in eatable shimmer sprinkles. His hat is florist foam also covered in fondant and eatable shimmer sprinkles. The nose, buttons and mouth are all fondant then his nose was painted with gel food color. The arms are the un-eatable item on him, they used to be part of a cranberry garland, but were sacrificed for the sake of realism. His scarf, now that was a bit tricky... also fondant, but with gum-tex added in order for it to dry very hard. I put strips of white and strips of blue together and then rolled it out and cut out a strip for his neck and then strips for the ends of the scarf, let them try and then attached them the way you see in the photos. It just wouldn't have looked the same if his scarf wasn't flowing in the breeze like his plate photo, so the extra effort was worth it!!! For the large and medium snowflakes I used cookie cutters and cut out fondant and then cut out center shapes to make them look more pretty along with more shimmer sprinkles, and the small ones were simply snowflake sprinkles in different sizes. I used butter cream icing for the blue and divided it into five shades in order to give a little more depth to the design. The snow-bank our snowman is standing on is just more fondant with shimmer sprinkles layed over the blue icing. And that my friends is how this beautiful cake came alive. I hope you enjoy viewing it.

Holiday Spice & Everything Nice

Spiced Pumpkin Cake

with Cinnamon Cream-Cheese Filling
(can the Holidays taste any better?)

Yes! I know what your thinking.... "...but that's a wedding cake...?" and you'd be right! It is a wedding 'styled' cake that I was required to make for my finale cake in my third course of cake decorating classes. It just turned out that my last class was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and so... this is the dessert that I brought!

It all started with the color of my Rose...

I have always loved this dusty rose color, but I got married in the summer and no florist had them available being that they are a fall color... so when I found out that we got to decide what color we wanted to make I thought of the dusty rose. But even after I got my rose color right I thought I would just do everything else the same... white fondant on top, white cake inside with the same strawberry cream-cheese filling I did for Hope's cake (I loved that flavor combo). Then a week before class I figured out that it was going to be done two days before Thanksgiving (yes, I was a little busy and didn't realize it before then). I hate wasting things if I can help it, so naturally I didn't want to make this much cake and then have to throw it all away just to keep myself from eating it alone and I didn't want to bring a 'birthday cake flavor' to Thanksgiving and set it out with all the holiday pies, pumpkin rolls and cookies. So I started thinking about some other cake flavors that I could use and it just happened that my favorite cake site that I go to for ideas was featuring this flavor recipe. Let me just tell you, if you like pumpkin bars or rolls at all, then this cake flavor is definitely for you! Well now that the color was right and the flavor was figured out I had only one last concern. I didn't want to show up with a white wedding cake, no matter what the flavor was inside, a white wedding cake next to those same pies and goodies just wasn't going to look good....and so the ivory fondant was the solution. Come Thanksgiving day this was what I ended up with for my cake dessert.

And now you know the WHOLE story of this slightly odd Holiday dessert cake.

The bottom tier is a 10in. round three layer and the top tier is a 6in. round three layer. Both tiers once stacked and covered stood just under 4 1/2in. in height.

The roses' are all hand rolled, cut and formed from fondant, along with the leaves. There are three different shades of color on the roses and then also three different sizes. The color change is hard to see in the pictures, but if you look between the full open rose and the small bud's then you can tell a little bit.

The ruffling on the bottom is ivory colored butter cream icing.

The small leaves on the fondant are also cut from fondant and then 'glued' on. (luckily my glue is just clear vanilla extract).

I hope you all like my Holiday Spice Cake.

Princess Jewels

Created on 11-14-09

I made this cake for my friends, Mary and Peter Farr's daughter, Hope, who was turning three, and she was such a beautiful Little Princess. It was such a fun cake to make! Thank you Mary for letting me have creative freedom on your daughters cake! It was really fun having it be a surprise.

The Jewel Box (in my mind, I viewed it more as a box to keep the Princess's Jewels in, not just a Jewelry box, so I did mean Jewel Box) on the cake was all hand made out of chocolate by my husband and I and then filled with all different kinds of gem and jewelry type candies. The flowers for the decoration on the box and cake were all piped by me using Royal Icing and then dried two days before assembling the cake. When I tried to count how many of the purple I had piped, it was a ruff multiplication of the average per line on the cookie sheet and it came out just under 200, and I made more pink than purple, so in all I piped over 400 small flowers, individually piping in the center dot as well. However, I did have about 1/4--1/3 of them left after it was all done, but I wanted to be sure : ) The Cake itself was a 16 inch square (that barley fit into my oven) white cake with a strawberry- cream cheese filling and then iced and bordered in butter cream icing ( it was mighty tasty, if I do say so myself!) 'Hope' you all enjoy it : )

Plain + Simple = Brian

For my Brother-in law Brian

Sept. 29th 2009

This is a simple cake 'for me'. In fact, I continually had to repeat this to myself in order to keep it that way. It is not a normal style for me, though doing a guy's cake at all is not normal for me. It's a very good thing for me that my brother in law is a very simplistic guy and this cake will be just enough for him. Thank you Brian! This was a very good challenge for me in many ways. I always over shoot on design ideas, my actual abilities and time needed to complete those ideas. But this week my time availability has been put on a very strict time frame. Along with Jason, Shelby and Korah all having the flu this week and being home from both work and school, I wanted to make this cake for my brother in law's birthday and had already asked my sister if I could make him a cake over a week ago and so didn't want to let him or my sister down. I am also completing my first course on cake decorating and have to bring a 'final' cake on Wednesday night to class. To bring my week to a conclusion my good friend Jeana is having a baby shower on Friday and I have the pleasure of making her a cake. So, in order for me to not go out of my mind this week I bought the 'cake' part of both Brian's and my Wednesday class cake from the Fred Meyer Bakery to save me time and energy at home for my sick family. However, I am baking Jeana's cake. All the icing and decorating is homemade and done by myself. I figure at this point that my major priority is learning how to decorate different styles of cake's for all kinds of people, events and occasions.

I iced this 8" round store bought chocolate cake with chocolate icing. I torted and filled this single round with vanilla pudding and used a pre-packaged kit for the decoration (tree's,quad and sign). In all this cake cost only $8.50 to make and it will feed eight to ten people, more or less depending on your piece size. I hope you all like it.

Wilton Class Cake

On Wednesday nights for the last two weeks (and the next two coming up) I have been spending the evening down at the Michaels store in Keizer with my Mother-in law taking the Course 1 Cake Decorating Class by Wilton. Let's just say I have been on cloud nine! The instructor is Brenda, she's young, has children and is very talented at what she does so it's been really fun and I'm learning a LOT. Last week, class 1, was just the basics and all listening, no 'doing'. Ahh, but yesterday we got to bring in a cake we made and decorate it in class!! During our class we learned several new decorating techniques and then got to apply them to our cake. How does it look? It's one from the class book and I think it turned out okay for my first attempt at this 'star fill-in' technique! My cake was a store boxed yellow cake mix baked in two 8" round pans, both filled with chocolate pudding and then stacked up, iced and decorated to what you now see before you! I'll fill you in on how it actually tastes once I eat it tonight with our connect group from church. Talk to you later.

P.S. still working on figuring out how to attach a slide show so I can share all my past cakes...to be continued.

P.S.S. YEP! It was good!

Jason say's it needed more pudding next time though...? Any more thoughts about ways to help me improve my cakes are VERY welcome (to any one who ate this one or other cakes of mine) I need to know how people really feel the cake's taste and look so I can continue to make things better and also learn how people want them to taste and look!! PLEASE comment on any cake anytime.... complements are good too :)

The Cake that started it all

Picture was taken on 1-11-2006

Yesterday we were going through photo's and during our searching I ran across a pictures of my earliest cake! Now I know what your thinking..."it looks like a coloring book page..." "that's not that hard..." (I'll agree to some of that!) But the thing that makes it a little bit more challenging is that it was all done using liquid food coloring (it thins out the frosting the more you use) and ZIPLOC bags!! You got it! I put the frosting in the bags and cut a small bit off one of the corners and that was my piping bag : ) Also I free-handed the drawing of Mini on the cake (by looking at a picture on my daughters dress) before I filled her in with the frosting. (I just wanted to add that I ran out of time when the guests started arriving and couldn't spend more time with the flowers, they look a little sad to me). I loved creating it and I definitely loved eating it and I loved the reactions I received from doing something that I loved (sorry for the repeated 'love' It just fit's for the emotion). That's all it took...I was hooked! I have done at least one or two fancy cakes every year since. Until this summer... I made four cakes in less than six weeks and I just keep loving it more every time I make a new cake!

Just Getting Started!

Hello Everyone~

So this is it! A place to showcase my cakes! Also a place to talk about how things are going for my future cakes! I'm very excited to have one site to show everyone all the cakes I've done so far without the lame excuse of not bringing my photo album. I hope you all enjoy veiwing them. I can't wait to keep adding more as I continue to learn and decorate new cake's (maybe YOUR'S!!!)