White Wedding Cake with Royal Blue Ribbon

This week I had the wonderful privilege of making my life long friend's wedding cake <3

She was having a 4th of July, beach wedding. She had picked a very simple color palette, of just navy and white, and explained the the overall theme/style as "simple" as well. So I didn't want a lot of embellishments, details, etc on the cake (which I found surprisingly hard to  edit myself for this one, I wanted to add shimmer/glitter, flowers...then more flowers, edible diamonds, etc)

I went with this very basic/rustic white butter cream cake, with two layers of a strawberry orange cake and one layer of chocolate (6in, 8in, 10in). I added a simple fondant ribbon along the bottom - in the same color as the ribbon on her wedding dress. And finished it with a little butter cream pearl border.  

Once it was all set up and ready to go I added the finishing touch - a custom made wedding topper to celebrate the new couple <3

We were very happy that it did not melt and made it to the beach in one piece (with the 3hr drive and 80deg temperatures). I feel so honored to have be part of such a special day! <3

Lotus Flower Cake

I recently made a cake that I am pretty obsessed with! It was for my niece's college graduation party. She is very interested in anything henna/mendi inspired so I took hints from that for my main inspiration. 

I decided that using my hexagon pans would help achieve that look the best. I am using the 6in hexagon pan and the 9in hexagon pan, to fit their servings needs. I wanted to use a sophisticated, yet bold, color pallet so I went with a dark turquoise frosting, with gold and white accents. 

For my topper, I chose to make a white lotus (I am slightly lotus obsessed, to the degree that I have a lotus tattoo on my inner wrist! Lol). I searched through a few different online "paper lotus" patterns and instructions until I had a good grasp of what was involved and then kind of "winged it". 

I used a small bowl and allowed the bottom layer of petals dry, creating the softly curved shape of the lotus petals. I also pinched the end of each petal to help give the petals the "cupped" look most lotus petals have. I used smaller bowls and cups to help the inside petals hold their shape while they dried. I also created a small center of the lotus by folding petals over it until a 'bud' form started to emerge. I should also mention that I used a petal veiner on each of the petals to help give it a more realistic effect.

After carefully placing the (partially dried) petals onto the "base" petals, and adding the bud into the center to make it look like the flower was blooming, I brushed the entire flower with pearl dust to help make the petals more realistic and pop a little more. 

For the cake decor/decorations, I opted to go with a henna inspired patterns. After I piped them in royal icing and let them dry sufficiently, I brushed them all with an antique gold powder. In retrospect, I should've colored my royal icing gold and then brushed it with the gold powder to achieve a deeper/richer color. The white royal icing needed a lot of dust to make an impact and even then, it was not as bold as I wanted. But they were still pretty gorgeously antique. 

I made yellow/butter cake with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream frosting. 

I colored the frosting a beautiful, dark turquoise color and frosted both cakes before adding on all the gold henna accents. I also made a bunch of gold dots to add color and add detail to the little henna decals. 

The top of the cake all boxed up. I added a gold pearl border to the bottom of both layers. This time I did color the fondant gold, and then brushed it with gold dust. It did help make the color so much deeper. I really loved it! 

Once I made it to her house I stacked the cake. It was much easier to stack it on site than it is to try to travel without messing it up. Haha :)

Everyone loved the cake and it was absolutely delicious! 

Like I said I am VERY obsessed with this cake! I think it is gorgeous, bold, elegant, and fun! And it has a beautiful white lotus topper, can't get any better than that! Hahaha! Hope you all enjoy it just as much as I do! 😃

High Heel Mini-Cupcakes

I am sure you have seen pictures of this new 'trend' for cupcakes online, they are high heel cupcakes! Yay! What does a girl love more than cupcakes? Shoes!!! 

I was so excited when I had a friend ask for some I could barely contain myself. Oh the possibilities!!! Haha! I was given a color scheme of White, Silver, and Turquoise to work with. Adorable! I couldn't wait to get started! 

I began by looking at pictures online to get inspiration for decoration (none of the tutorials were extremely helpful with construction ideas however, since I am using mini cupcakes and will have to use different materials to make my cupcake heel). I decided that a combination of bows, flowers, and swirls would be best to decorate the cupcakes. 

The swirls would be piped on with buttercream, so no prep needed there. But the other decorations would need to be made out of fondant beforehand. 

I made my own fondant with some mini-marshmallows, water, and powdered sugar. If you've never made your own marshmallow fondant before - simply microwave around a cup marshmallows with a little over a tsp or so of water. When the marshmallows start to swell, remove them from the microwave and add powdered sugar until it forms a dough. Continue to kneed it together until it forms a fondant texture. Use shortening and powdered sugar to help get the correct consistency. 

I made up my white toppers, then covered them with some white pearl dust. I also made up some extra toppers with white fondant that were then sprayed with silver Wilton Food Color Spray. I then made up some turquoise fondant to make bows and flowers.

I added some edible adhesive to the centers of each flower and added white sprinkles or silver dragees to the adhesive. I was really excited with the end result! They look adorable! I cannot wait to put them on the cupcakes! 

Since the colors are white, silver, and turquoise, and they wanted red velvet flavor for the cupcakes I just made them turquoise velvet cupcakes instead. 

With white and blue cream cheese frosting

While I was waiting for my blue velvet cupcakes to cool, I made a test high heel :) I used a oblong butter cracker for the soul of the shoe, added a small amount of frosting to the back and attached a pretzel heel. It worked pretty well for regular chocolate frosting.

After I was sure about the best way to put them together, I started piping blue and white frosting onto each one and then added on the cooridinating toppers. They looked ADORABLE!!!!!! I had to put them in a box to transport them but it worked pretty well (this is box one of two).

When I finally got there only a few of them had broken heals, which were easily repaired. 

I set them up on my cupcake stand and they looked amazing!!! 

They were definitely a fun (but time consuming) project! So happy I got to do them though because they were worth every bit of it!!! :)

Drop Flower Chocolate Cake

My mother in laws birthday was yesterday, so I decided to whip her up a quick cake. She is on a gluten-free diet and (thanks to Betty Crocker) I was able to make her one!

I know she loves chocolate, so I made a devils food cake, with PB/chocolate filling and chocolate frosting. I used a 6in pan, and did three layers to achieve the height that I wanted. 

Those kind of cakes, though absolutely delicious, are not always the prettiest. So, to make it a little more special I started to added some royal icing drop flowers (that had been sprayed with a pearl glitter spray)....

...lots of them! Allowing them to cascade over the sides.

 I also added some green leaves...

....a chocolate pearl border...

...and a happy birthday message on the cardboard.

It was absolutely delicious! I was super impressed with the Betty Crocker gluten-free cake mix! It's awesome! Yay for finally allowing many people to make yummy cakes at home again! Love them for that!!! 

I was really happy with the end result (and so was my MIL)! It looked gorgeous and tasted even better. And didn't take me any time at all! Gotta love the easy, show stopping cakes! :) 

White and Gold Gum Paste Roses

My class project this week required that I make all my decorations ahead of time because we wouldn't really have enough time in class to make them. 

I decided to make a cake that had gum paste roses on top. And never having made them before, I was excited for the challenge. 

I saw a tutorial online for making a gum paste rose with only a circle cutter, so I was prett confident that I could handle it. 

I started by cutting out my gum paste circles. I smoothed the edges with a ball tool and left them in a flower former to help them begin to dry. 

I found that working with them quickly, and not making too many up in advance, was best. Letting them dry too long would make them crack a little when I tried to mold them. 

I bought some simple rose cores from Wilton to make this process a little faster/easer. It REALLY helped! I highly suggest the splurge! 

I started with the small petals, applying them around the core until it looked like a small rose bud center.

I made sure to put the leaves in groups of  3 & 5 as I went around to help it look more like a rose. 

After I had a row of 3 and 5 small petals, I moved on to the medium sized petal. Placing 3, then 5 petals around the rose bud I had already created. Making sure to turn the petals out and shaping them as I went.

Then the largest leaves got put on (also in groups of 3 & 5). And I ended up with something that looked pretty close to a real rose. 

And I kept going until I had 6 roses finished. 

Then I dusted all over the petals with pearl dust and outlined the petals with a gold luster dust to give them dimension and make them look 'antiqued'. 

Excited to see how they look ontop of the cake tomorrow!!! :) 

Saturday Practice

I was bored this Saturday so I whipped up a batch of buttercream and practiced a few techniques.
I decided to make my frosting orange today because it seemed fun. And is not a color I use very often so this seemed like a good chance.
I started by working on my basket weave technique. This is hard to master. Plotting out the proper spacing is the most important part to help ensure that you have a nice tight basket weave. I used a small round tip (tip #4 I think) for the white and a small star tip (#16) for the orange to achieve this look. No basket weave tip for me. Lol! I like the hard way. It looks amazing in my opinion and tends to take more time and effort but it really does look great.
I also used the star tip to create the rope border around my basket weave design.


The next technique I was wanting to learn was how to pipe a buttercream bow. I use tip #104 and a rose nail to make these. I didn't get a lot of pics because these were hard! And didn't always turn out very well. I made the two loops of the bow by placing the wide side of the tip on the nail and moving it around until one side is made, turning it and making the other side. Then making the ruffled ends coming down from the center of the bow. I love these bows! I just need to master them and they will be able to be used in so many ways!

After I was done with that, I decided to whip out a few 5-petal flowers. I used tip #104 for the flower petals and tip #16 for the center. I really like these actually...they remind me of creamsicles or something. I think they're cute. Just need to find a use for them.

Not a bad way to spend a Saturday...😊

My First 2 Tier Cake!!!

I was both nervous and excited to make a tiered cake! It is very intimidating! But it really is not as hard as one would think, at least for my tiny 2 tier cake.
Due to the complexity of the work this week (and outside factors/stresses that had nothing to do with the cake) I did not take as many pictures as I would've wanted. I stacked my cakes and began decorating before taking many pics. Sorry!!! I feel horrible, but like I said it was just not my week.

I began by baking two 9inch round cakes, and two 5inch rounds (that I actually cut out of a 13x9 cake pan). I filled them with ganache, crumb coated, and frosted them.
I stacked them by placing 4 cut-off dowels under the area I was stacking my 5in round. After sprinkling a little dehydrated coconut between the layers, and placing the 5inch cake on a foil covered cardboard (I could only find a 6inch board, so I had to make sure my frosting covered up the edges so they didn't show), I placed the smaller cake on top. To help secure the cake I sharpened two dowels and hammered (yes, with an actual hammer!) them all the way through both layers of cake/cardboard. This really helps make sure the cake does not shift in transport.
After they got stacked, we have free reign to do whatever designs we wanted for our class final. One of my favorite design techniques is the Corneille Lace so I had fun and played around with it.
I decided to use a large, dark purple ruffle as a border to help cover the cardboard. And even though it looks kind of blue in the picture it was a awesome royal blue color.

I had a lot of left over flowers from my projects a week or so ago. So I decided to turn this into a Cascading Flower cake! I have been obsessed with them lately and thought this was a good opportunity to learn how to make that work well (with great instruction from my teacher!!!)
I started by figuring out exactly where I wanted the flowers placed. Using a 'S' shape to help them look more natural as the fall down the side, I was able to find flowers that worked and fit onto the cake well. I also placed a big glob of green frosting on the top of the cake and stacked some of my buttercream roses.

After getting the bulk of the flowers on, my teacher helped me make it more natural looking by continuing the flowers onto the border and adding leaves in a few select places.

I think it looks great! The colors are not really what I would use for a wedding cake but this was more inspired by my daughter than a wedding. Maybe it's a classy birthday cake or something. I don't know but this week I was more focused on the techniques used than the styling of the cake. Using my last class as a opportunity to get as much knowledge out of my teacher as possible :)

Lattice and Lace

This week was our biggest, hardest cake to date but the time and effort payed off because it is also my favorite cake I have ever made!

I started out making two boxed cake mixes (yea, cheating. But since my class is more about decorating I let myself cut this little corner) and that produced 2-9in cakes and a dozen mini-cupcakes. I didn't need the cupcakes, so I frosted them with a light green buttercream and topped them off with a few extra flowers I had made (

I filled my cakes with my favorite ganache (2:1, choc:cream) and stacked them.

Using some thinned down buttercream frosting I created a crumb coat and allowed it to dry.

After it had set up (just at room temperature) I put on my frosting and smoothed it out with my large offset spatula.
 

Thanks to a handy little garland marking tool, I was able to seperate my cake into 8 even areas. I applied a lattice pattern on the sides of the cake, using the marks from the garland tool as a guide for starting and stopping my lines.

I applied the Corneille Lace pattern to the scallops on the top of the cake. (I had never used this technique before but after working on it for a while, it's one of my favorite patterns for a cake. Simple but elegant, and can be made in an size to give it a very different feel)

To help give the illusions of scallops, I made a very small star border around my lattice work (cleaning up all those messy edges I didn't bother cleaning up).

Wanting the top to look a little more elegant, I used a simple, small pearl border around the Corneille Lace.

Final touches to my cake included a larger, yellow shell border around the bottom of the cake (helping to cover up my very messy frosting job) and a few simple (pre-made) wild roses and drop flowers. I chose to make them in purple, because it really popped with the yellow and white frosting.

This is by far my favorite cake I've made. It's simple, elegant, and fun. It would work wonderfully as inspiration for a larger wedding cake, or even a nice birthday party, or a summer picnic.