August 27, 2010

One more Birthday...

I haven't done much in cakes in the past few weeks, seems to be on the slow side for me right now. Mind you, at 8 months pregnant and summer heat here, I don't exactly want to be baking cakes unless I can make sure my a/c is running all day long!

Anyways, just one more to share to keep my blog up to date with all the cakes. 
Mason celebrated his first birthday with a cake smash photoshoot. This was a last minute request before I left on holidays and the request was for Aqua and Orange, as that was the color scheme of the room the pictures would be displayed in. I do hope the clients loved it and the pictures turned out great!

July 31, 2010

Some more Cake Smashes

Had a busy few weeks making some cakes for my photographer friend Melinda  who had a number of photo shoots lined up.  I was happy to oblige and had fun making each cake for its prospective destruction.

Sometimes I really enjoy my hobby/job!

Anyways, the cakes

 

July 27, 2010

My Baby Girl is Two!

Like any parent, I was both happy and sad on my daughters birthday. Happy because it was her Birthday and it was a happy day, but sad because she is another year older, and I have no idea where the two years went!
We had her birthday party on the weekend, and of course Mommy had to go all out for her birthday cake this year!

I had come across an article on www.cakecentral.com which talked about a newer technique called a "Frozen Buttercream Transfer". I had done transfers before using piping gel to get the image on the cake, and then you "fill in" the design with icing in either a star pattern, or with piping gel itself, but I had never seen this FBCT technique before. Essentially you find your design that you want to put on the cake. Since my daughter is a Mickey Mouse fan, I had to do a Mickey and a Minnie transfer. once you have your picture, you cover it with wax paper and tape it down to something solid, like a cookie sheet, or a cake circle. Then you begin to outline the design in your desired color. I chose black.

Once the outlining is done, then you begin to add your colors to the design. Now when doing this you have to think in layers, so usually this means the "small" details are put down first. (for example: the white dots on Minnies Dress.) Then you continue to layer your colors up until the piece is all finished. Don't worry about making it look nice at this point. Esentially you are "coloring" in between the lines. 
Once all of the colors are down, the piece will look something like this:

 Once the fill in is done, then you cover the entire design in the same color icing as your cake will be iced in. This is so the whole thing will blend into the cake better. When complete, the pieces do into the freezer for a minimum 45 minutes. I left mine in for 24 hours with no issues.

When ready, it is as easy as flipping the design onto the top of your cake and peeling off the wax.

You will notice my background color on the transfers is not quite the same color as the cake is. Thats because they were two different types of icing. Not a huge deal, and really, only I noticed!

Overall, I was pleased with how the transfers worked. It is something I would definitely do again for a future cake design. Plus I found it so much easier and less time consuming to do than a normal piping gel transfer would have been.

Now the cake itself was my greatest accomplishment with these cakes. I got the idea from another blogger, and kept the link for future reference. I figured what better cake to do it on than my daughters!
Anyways, here is the link to Cheeky Kitchen

The cake was a 6 layer rainbow cake, each layer being different flavors of fruit. It actually didn't take as long to make as I thought it would be, so that was a bonus! I won't bore you with details on the actual baking, and the recipe is on the link above for your viewing. 
Once the cakes were made, I had to frost them for decorating. I decided to make the White Chocolate Buttercream recipe that was also posted on Cheeky Kitchen, and I was loving the taste of it. It is however REALLY SWEET, so use with caution!

The Vat of White Chocolate Icing.   

Starting to decorate  


While doing this, I had a little "helper" standing next to me, directing me on what I needed to do to finish off the cake. She was quite happy when it was all covered and the Mickey and Minnie came out on top!

The best part was after singing "Happy Birthday" at the party, and cutting into that first slice and hearing all of our friends and family gasp in awe at my amazing Birthday Cake. I was incredibly proud to have made this one for my daughter. Too bad she was too young to appreciate it! Guess I might have to make it again someday soon!

Happy Birthday Sweetheart!

June 26, 2010

A Weekend of Birthdays

This weekend I had two birthday cakes to do. I was really looking forward to doing these as they were for two - two year old's special days.

First up was for Miss Natalie. Natalie and her family are in town for a few weeks on vacation. They actually live in Hong Kong, but Calgary is their "home base" so to speak. Natalie is a Sesame Street fan, so her mother wanted a simply done Sesame Street cake. I had a lot of fun making this one! I sure hope Natalie had fun eating it!

The cakes were a chocolate cake, with buttercream filling on the bottom, and a french vanilla with buttercream on the top. The cake is iced in buttercream with fondant accents, and a fondant "Sesame Street sign" The figurines were plastic. I unfortunately do not have the skills to sculpt characters!



Happy Birthday Natalie!!!


My next cake was for Graham. Over the last year Graham and his mother have become friends to my daughter and I. We have had great fun watching the kids grow up considering they are only 4 days apart. Graham's birthday was being held a month early this year to account for missing family and friends unable to attend at the end of July. And Graham is a HUGE Thomas the train fan. 


Graham's cake was simple. His mother wanted this specific "train cake" pan which contained 9 individual train cars, basically the equivalent to a cupcake size. The engine was to be one up like Thomas. Well it took a while to actually find the pan, as neither one of us really wanted to pay $45 for it! Thankfully another Mommy friend had the pan and offered it up. (Thanks Fi!)


So to make Graham's Thomas car special, we decided to make the cake batter Thomas "rainbow" colors. So like my previous rainbow cake, I split the batter up into three colors - red, blue and yellow. Thomas was a rainbow of all three, whereas the rest of the train cars and cupcakes (for the adults) were just red, blue and yellow. So hopefully the Birthday Boy will have a nice surprise when he eats his cake!


I apologize for the look of my photos for these. Unfortunately I have a pretty simple camera and the reflection off of the base was too much to handle! But you get the idea.




Happy Birthday Graham!

June 4, 2010

I love a good Cake Smash!

Most of the cakes I do lately are for my photographer friend Melinda, who contracts me out for "Cake Smash" photoshoots. I love doing these cakes. The are happy, cheerful and best of all, get destroyed by a child.

Like Melinda, I was a little surprised to hear she had a client who wanted to do a cake smash shoot for a 2 year old's birthday. Almost all of these shoots are done to commemorate a child's First Birthday. But I think all kids should be able to smash cake, no matter their age!

So this was the cake I made for the client. I hope they enjoy it as much as I did!

 

May 24, 2010

Nothing Beats a good Cake Smash!

I named my blog "Cake Smash" because that is the term photographer's give for a photo shoot with a baby, usually celebrating their First Birthday. You give them a cake, and take pictures as the child demolishes the cake, hence the term "Cake Smash."


I have been working with a local photographer, Melinda Gombert (www.melindagombert.com) making the cakes she uses for her cake smash photo shoots. Our most recent collaboration, we decided to try a different kind of cake to see what the results would yield. This type of cake had been demonstrated on an online forum we are both a part of, and we thought it would be an interesting idea to try for a photo shoot.


It starts off with a regular cake batter, but you divide it into separate bowls, and color each bowl with food coloring.


 Then you layer each color individually into your cake pan.


And bake as you normally would. The result turns out like this:


Thankfully the bottom layer of one of these kind of fell apart, otherwise I wouldn't be able to show you what it looked like!
Then you just decorate your cake as normal. If this were to be served to normal guests, once you cut into it, each piece would have a nice rainbow of colors. Below are a few images from Melinda from her photo shoot with the lucky birthday boy. His parents apparently loved the cake, and the birthday boy had a great time destroying all my hard work!


 
Kind of hard to believe I make cakes just for the sole purpose of destruction, but it is so much fun to see!
So Happy Birthday! And if anyone in the Calgary area would like to let their child partake in this kind of fun activity for their birthday, please visit www.melindagombert.com

May 19, 2010

Let the new courses begin!

So, apparently after 15 years, Wilton has decided to "refresh" their course curriculum and make some changes to the classes. I must say I am looking forward to these changes as it makes the courses "flow" a lot better than before.

So because I teach these classes, I have to know what I'm teaching. And since I was not an instructor when they did their conferences, Wilton sent me all of the course packages, plus training videos to watch in order to become familiar with the courses.

Wow.

You gotta love a company that sends you free stuff! Now I took all of the previous courses, and I teach them, so I have probably 80% of the products needed already. But Wilton still sent me the brand new kits with all of the new fun tips and cutters. So I got to work and had some fun with the new material!

Now I am still working my way through the new flowers and ideas, so over the course of my next few weeks, I will update with the new things I am now teaching. I'm in love with a few of these new decorations already!

Anyways, to begin we have a new "first cake" for our beginners. Previously the cake was this:

A simple rainbow cake, teaching the "star" technique. Minus the horrid Writing. I swear I do know how to write on cakes now!

Anyways, the new "first cake" is now:


Pretty cute right?
I think it's a fresh new technique and better looking cake to teach beginners. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the students like this one!

Next, Wilton has finally clued in that not everyone enjoys decorating on cakes. There are many other yummy goodies out there that can be decorated, and finally we can teach cupcake decorations. Not only decorating, but Wilton has a new tip that allows you to FILL your cupcakes with a nice tasty center!
Mmmm... I already want a cupcake!

Anyways, one of the new cupcake decorations:

These are called "Shaggy Mums". I'm still not completely sold on these, but I think I might come around. This was a first attempt at them, so I do see where I need to work on them a bit.

Anyways, these are the first attempts I have made at some of the new materials. This weekend I will be demo'ing the new Ribbon Rose which is also a part of our beginners course at my Michael's store. I will post pics of that when I have finished.

Until then, I better get back to practicing!

May 8, 2010

Happy Wedding Day Amber and Alex!!



My oldest girlfriend got married this weekend.
And she asked me to make her wedding cake.
So I happily obliged!



The bride wanted something very simple, elegant and small. Nothing fancy, just something they could cut and tasted good.
So I decided to base the design on the flowers of her bouquet. Originally it was supposed to be a solid bouquet of Gerbera Daisies, so I felt this would be the best way to keep with the "theme".
In the end, the Gerberas were omitted for a different type of flower, but the colors at least, were a match.



The cake itself was a lot of fun to do. I knew basically what I wanted to create, and just had to wait on the time in order to do it as close to last minute as possible. I decided to try a new recipe for the cake itself, something I don't normally recommend doing last minute, but thankfully the cake turned out surprisingly well. It was a "Basic White Cake", but to be honest, both my husband and I thought it has a shortbread-y type of taste to it. The filling was a lemon "pie" filling, and iced in a lemon buttercream. It was covered in fondant, decorated with a simple black ribbon, and my Gerbera Daisies.


I was very pleased with my work.
The bride was also very pleased.


I love weddings:)

March 14, 2010

I love Baby Showers

One of my Dearest friends is set to have a baby girl in a few weeks. So this weekend is her baby shower! Her sister is throwing the party, but asked me to make her cake, which I happily obliged.
I had spent a few weeks trying to decide what to do as my friend is not keen on the typical pastel-y froo-froo shower cakes. So I wanted something Spring-like, but still could be a baby shower theme. Since my friend's nursery is complete I took elements of the room to make her cake up.

The nursery is done in yellow, with Pink and Purple accents of Butterflies and Dragonflies. So taking those colors and ideas, this was her cake:

And the other side:

Originally I wanted to make the cake in a fondant, so it would be "cleaner" looking and elegant, but my Friend is not keen on the taste of fondant. So I found a Marshmallow fondant recipe to try. I had talked to a bunch of people who enjoyed the taste of a MMF, so I figured it should do the trick.

Obviously I am not the baker I thought I was! The recipe itself was easy enough to make, but for some reason every time I went to roll it out, the fondant just crumbled into pieces, rather than pull nicely. Sigh. So there went my attempt at fondant and my original plans for the shower cake.

In the end, I was pleased with how it turned out. At least everything is edible (fondant butterflies and dragonflies). All of the flowers are piped, grass piped along the edges and and sky was created by using a Color Mist. Neat idea. Kind of like airbrushing for the inept!

Anyways, I certainly hope my Friend likes her cake... And the party!


February 22, 2010

Epic Fail of a Birthday Cake

My Husbands birthday is this week, so on the weekend we had friends over for dinner and I asked him if he wanted a cake.
"Of course," He said..

So I made him a cake.. I decided since my husband is the ultimate lego geek I would create him a lego piece from cake. I was so proud of myself! It would be a rather easy cake to do with a very simple icing job and I wouldn't have to work too hard to do it..

Well I definitely didn't work too hard...

Most people have said the cake looks just fine. I however am a perfectionist at times and I was not thrilled with how this cake turned out at all. I look at it and see a big blue giant piece of crap.. but everyone else says they see a great lego piece.

So you can be the judge


I know it looks sort of like a lego piece, but I am not happy with it in the least. The little top pieces of the lego almost drove me to insanity as I tried to ice them. I think if I ever did this again, I would cover it in fondant.

So there... this is what I call my Epic Fail so far.. you can decide what you think of it

February 18, 2010

Blog Awards

Well apparently I won a blog award last week from another site. However after 7 days of me having their link up on my blog, and showing the link to their awards page, they decided to hassle me for a week straight saying my link wasn't the right size text.. Are you kidding me?? You get a link to your site from here and you have the audacity to bitch about the text of the link???
Who does that???

Is this some blog thing that I don't know anything about?? Are other sites this fucking anal that they would deliberately keep your link from their site simply because you put their link in a text they didn't like???

Screw that!!

So award or not, I've chosen to tell them to forget it. I don't need someone else telling me what I can or can't do on MY site!!

February 9, 2010

Happy Birthday Brother

It is my Brother's 34th Birthday... So I made him a cake.
He just recently took up golf again, so I thought this cake would be fitting for him. I got the idea from a friend of mine who made a golf ball cake for her father's birthday last year. So I stole her pans and tried it for myself:)

The golf ball itself is a ball shaped pan. I decided to rest the sphere on top of a regular round cake to give it some support, and I thought it would make a good fairway. I recently found the "grass tip" which made the grass work super easy to do! I can see this tip coming in handy on future cakes!

The cake was very well received. Even after my Aunt almost took me out with her shoulder as I brought it to the dining table! I think she was jealous of my work (snicker)

Anyways... The cake.. that is what you came to see right?

January 25, 2010

Candy Hearts - Valentines Cake

Since I finished my courses at the end of last year, I have had little reason to actually make a cake. My husband moved offices, so it is harder for him to transport a cake to work, and lets be honest, I have few friends:)
So I finally got itchy enough to make a cake just for the hell of it. I realized last week that *I* now have a place of employment, and I am sure they would love a cake every now and then...

So, make a cake I did.

I saw this on the Wilton website for Valentine's Day and I thought it would be a nice one to try out. The cake itself is a lemon cake, with raspberry filling. Then a light buttercream coating on it, followed by a fondant layer. Then the next three hours of my night were consumed with cutting out hearts, and placing them on the cake like I was working with a huge jigsaw puzzle. Only these pieces I had to make fit on my own.
Overall it was an easy-ish cake to do. It was more work than I thought it would be, but I had fun doing it. The good thing was, it was only a 6 inch cake and not the 10 inch one I was going to do!


I brought the cake into work this evening, and in the two hours I was teaching my class, the cake was completely devoured. So at least I know my co workers liked it!

January 3, 2010

A New Year .. a New chapter

Holy crap, when did it become 2010?? Wasn't it just 2002 not too long ago?

Anyways, The start to 2010 is off to a bang. I began my first two classes as a Wilton Instructor! My first month will see me teaching a course I and a course IV. My Course I class began today and I must say, I was pretty nervous! Im a drama major. I know how to speak in public and how to teach. But even I felt like I was a little school girl on her first day!

My class is a full 12 students, All eager to learn and I'm the one to show them guidance. The first class is basically just watching me, so it is 2 hours of me talking. I'm sure by the end no one wanted to hear me anymore! However I did have a good chat with some of the ladies and a lot of my class are planning to take almost all of the other courses. I even had a few ask me if I would be teaching Course II next month so they could take it with me. Alas, I am not teaching Course II:(

Anyways, the class went well, and I know get to prepare for my course IV tomorrow. At least in there I get to play with the gumpaste along with my students!