Happy Birthday Pumpkin!!!

it was my youngest daughter's First Birthday this past weekend.
I cannot believe my baby is now One. Seriously, where has the time gone? We of course had a big party for her with all of our family and friends, and I of course, made a ton of treats to share, including the birthday cake.

Since my baby was born in October, and she is in between Thanksgiving and Halloween, I naturally wanted to do a Pumpkin "theme" for her cake. I had a friend make a pumpkin cake for her son's birthday last year, and I loved the idea of it. Then I saw these cute mini Pumpkin pans at Superstore, which called my name.. honestly. I sat in the aisle with both kids in the cart, while I agonized for buying these mini pans for about 15 minutes! once I figured out what I wanted to make, then it was a matter of choosing my cakes themselves.

My same girlfriend had posted a Pumpkin Pound Cake that she used for her cake. I figured, "When in Rome".. so I used her same recipe. I'm not a huge fan of pound cakes, but I guess in the Decorating world, they are the best medium to use. Overall, my cake turned out pretty good. I used two Bundt Cakes, one flipped on top of the other to make the pumpkin shape. Then iced and decorated as usual. The smaller cakes were a bit more trying. They were definitely cute, but unfortunately all of the detail that was on the cakes themselves, got lost once the icing went on.  I think those kind of pans are better suited for plain cakes, with just a confectioners sugar sprinkled on it.
Anyways, The end results was just what I was hoping for. Of course the icing job on my small pumpkins could have been cleaner, but it was already a late night and I couldn't take anymore!!

I love making Birthday Cakes... especially my own kids' cakes:)

Attempt at Gumpaste Shoes

I've seen cakes made with shoes as decoration a few times now. I've always wanted to try to make them, and finally I decided to google my way through everything and find out how to do it.
Well, it isn't that hard to do!


I'll be honest, I actually made these shoes up a few months ago with every intention of making a cake around them, but after I had finished the shoes, I was not overly happy with my final results due to the color choice and my choice to "paint" them with pearl dust. So they sat on the back of my buffet in my kitchen for a long time..

Until I finally had to throw them out because I couldn't look at them any longer..

Sigh.

Anyways, the shoes..

Overall the size and shape of the shoes were very spot on. I was pleased with the initial product for a first attempt.. but my lackluster paint job on them afterwards just soured me on the look of them. You can't really see in the pics, but you could definitely see the brush strokes everywhere. It was ugly.

I do eventually want to make these into a cake, but at least I know what I can do differently next time

More Halloween Cupcakes

I had to do a demo at the store this weekend, and I had a display of Cupcakes to show off, to not only get people interested in my cupcakes class that weekend, but to draw interest into the regular wilton courses.
Im not fond of demos as they never draw the attention one would hope to have in the store. I get a lot of "oh, that looks pretty" or "nice work", but  I rarely get genuine interest in the Wilton courses. Thankfully its only 2 hours out of my day, and I do get paid for it, and of course the staff loves it, because they get the leftovers:)

Anyway, I had a demo of both cupcakes and cake pops, both of which were "meh" to me, but did their job and drew a slight bit of interest:)

Ohhh very scary..

Very simple cake pops..

Thank god my demo days are over for a few months!!

Birthday Cake Surprise

My brother asked me to make a cake for his neighbor for his birthday. Since it was a slow week for me, and I hadn't done a cake in a little while, I said sure.
He thought it would be great to make a beer shaped cake, and since I had not done any shaped cakes before, it would be good practice.

With a very short time frame for making this, I did not have enough time to play around with sizing and shaping. I only had a 9x13 pan to use, so I knew the dimensions would be off. But since this was for only 4 people and two kids, I knew it would be fine. The beer label is a Frozen Buttercream Transfer of the Wild Rose brewery's Wraspberry Ale beer, which was the birthday boy's favorite beer.

Overall I was pleased with the results. Next time I would try to make it more the right dimensions so it looked more like a beer bottle and not flattened out at the bottom.