Coxswain Box and a Drum - What?

This cake was for two teenagers having a combined birthday party.  One was a coxswain on the crew team and one was a drummer in the marching band.  The coxswain box was a little larger than life size, but worked out perfectly!  I had done a drum before a couple of years ago, and knew how to make it better.  Drumsticks were fondant.

The kids loved it, and I really like the simplicity of it!

A bit more risqué than I've done in the past!  With teenagers in the house I say no to a lot of batchelor/batchellorette cakes, you know, the ones with body parts and all.  For this one I was told that she could have a bikini on so I actually made it a cross between lingerie and a bikini.  They totally loved it and it was a hit!  For all the bakers out there, the chest was the full size ball pans and the body was and 12x18 sheet cake pan.  I used the copper(light skin tone) for the fondant color, and edible pearls for the pearls.  Edible markers were used for the tattoo.

Fourth of July Birthday Cake

Fourth of July birthday!  How awesome is that?  People spending tons on fireworks to help you celebrate your birthday in every city!  This was for a old friend whom I've known for over 20 years.  It was a simple waving flag with fireworks (not real) bursting out of the stars.  Fun one to do and he loved it!  Happy Birthday Ed and Happy Birthday to our country!

Slumber Party Birthday Cake!

This cake was for a birthday girl who was having a slumber party.  The bodies were Little Debbie Jelly Rolls, which was an homage to my cousin Steve since he works for Little Debbie!  The pillows, heads, hair and blanket were all made from fondant.  It was a great one to do because I was told the color of each girl's hair and eyes!   

Mystery Machine for Markia

The faces were made of  gumpaste.  I used edible black marker to draw the outline, then painted the faces in.

The hill was cake and the vehicle was also.  I probably wouldn't do it the same way again.  The Mystery Machine was way too heavy and it was quite hard to stack.

Ran out of time because I wanted to add scary trees and rocks and maybe a cemetary on the side.  That would have been awesome!

Anyway, the birthday girl loved it, so it all turned out nicely!

2010 Graduation

This was a tough one!  The graduate's high school mascot was a tiger, with the colors green and orange.  The college mascot was a snake with the same orange and green.  So we tried to combine it!  It is a gumpaste snake and gumpaste numbers, adhered to wires that I stuck in the cakeboard. 

It was a small cake, with 10" and 6" tiers.  When I set it up, it looked amazing!  The fabulous event planner had orange and green tables, tiger balloons, green clappers to give to all the guests, and many other details all green and orange!  She is fantastic to work with!  If you are in the Orlando area and need a good event planner, for any event, her name is Tara Boatman.  Contact me and I can give you her info!

This was just a fun and cute one to do.  The colors were red, white and blue.  The venue was a really cute mexican restaurant.  I can't wait to go back for a meal!

Ladybugs and a Bridal Shower

Ladybugs for a little girl who turned one year old!  The little bug was for the little girl to smash up!  The aunt who ordered the cakes said they didn't want a lot of fondant, so that the texture wouldn't confuse her.  So I did buttercream in red, then covered with the fondant faces and spots.  I'm sure the little birthday girl was covered in red! 

I was given two days to do this bridal shower cake.  I love square cakes, and pink and white.  The bride-to-be and the mother loved it.  They were 5" and 8" squares.  I won't say it's easy to cover squares in fondant, but I absolutely love the look! 

Both of these orders were a white cake with raspberry filling, covered in vanilla buttercream!  Yum!

Mad Hatter

Another fun one to make!  I got to use purple and gold luster dust all over this!  The effect was fantastic and the pictures don't do it justice. 

A daughter of a friend of mine loves the new Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp. So this was my take on his hat.  I had not seen the movie, so the hat looked quite dark and purple to me, however, I was told later that it was more of a deep burgundy. So I'll have to see the movie now!

Anyway, it was fun.  I covered it in white fondant, then brushed black paint on it.  Then spotted the luster dust all over.  The peacock feather, hat pins and little note were all made from gum paste.

Rower's Delight

This cake was for the yearly banquet of Edgewater Crew.   Both my kids row from this boathouse, and I have recently started rowing with the Master's program.  Rowing is a fabulous sport!  It works your legs and core and is a blast to do!  Anyway, about the cake...

This is the front of the boathouse, with little gum paste shrubs, bricks, picnic table and our sacred 'E'.  The grass was royal icing spread on the board with little clumps of grass from a grass tip.  The cake itself is the boathouse. There were two levels, one vanilla and one chocolate.

The sides of the cake (boathouse) were made and painted about a week before the cake was made.  They were also made from gum paste.  The red roof was fondant.  The little red doors in front and back, and all the bay doors were also gum paste and made to fit inside the walls.

This is the back of the boathouse.  I made the food trailer and a launch with a life preserver inside. They were both made of gp also, along with the dock.  It's hard to tell from the picture, but the water was a pretty blue shade of piping gel, laid over brown sugar to look like sand.  It was a muddy season this year, so we felt like we needed the mud along the side of the boathouse and next to the water.

On the back wall, the bricks have the crossed oars and bricks that spell out EHS (Edgewater High School).  I couldn't get the correct color of bricks with the paint (food color gel) that I had, so I did the best I could!  I learned a few things about painting gum paste!

This last picture I really like, just thought I'd add it!  Thanks for looking!

Bridal Shower Cookies

A very busy event planner that I know wanted these cookies.  She sent me a picture of them and I knew I could do it.  I thought about making my own cookie cutter to use, then realized that I could take one of my medium sized heart cutters and do it myself.  I cut the top and bottom with the top of the heart, then took another cutter, one with a sharp angle, and cut out tiny pieces from the bottom to form the 'legs'.  I was very excited that they came out so well!

The decorating process was not hard, just had to have the three different colors of icing.  You can't really tell from the photos, but the line details were ivory, not white.  I really enjoy making cookies, there are so many things you can do with them!  Thanks for looking!

Trumpet Cake

This was a tricky one!  The client wanted a trumpet cake.  I decided to make a trumpet in a case.  The trumpet would be gumpaste and the case would be the cake.  I loved making the trumpet!!  I made all the little tubes, the bell and the keys separately, then used little dots of gumpaste to piece them together.  I used edible gold spray paint on it, like I did previously with a saxophone cake (which I just realized I never posted-oops!).

After spraying the gold on it, I painted on the metallic silver details.  Too much fun!  The 'case' was just a couple of marble cakes stacked.  I scooped out some of the cake so that the trumpet would fit, then covered the cake in fondant.

Again, learning from my mistakes, I would have done this cake different.  The structure wasn't that great.  I did not like the dowels showing.  I've seen some cheats online on how to build this cake without dowels, so I would follow those next time.  Over all, the effect was fantastic and the birthday girl thought it was amazing!

Mother's Day

This was supposed to be a jewelry box cake.  I think it looks more like a hatbox.  Talk amongst yourselves...

The client wanted all types of flowers and pearls.  The theme was 'Momma, you are my pearl'.  I made a mixture of gumpaste, fondant, and buttercream flowers.

I learn something on every cake.  If I were to do this one again, I would have made the lid separate instead of the illusion of being open.  I could have put a lot more flowers inside.  I hadn't made buttercream roses in quite some time, so I actually made 20-30 of them before getting back into it!  It's a rare occasion when I make traditional flowers!

I hope all the mother's had a wonderful, blessed day!

Zombie Birthday

My son is crazy. He reads, writes, watches and talks everything zombie related. I've watched several zombie movies with him, including Night of the Living Dead (my favorite thus far), 28 Days Later, and one strange one from the 80's that was so bad neither of us can remember the name. He just turned 15, so needless to say, I made him a zombie cake.

There was a face coming up from the dirt with a tombstone above, and a hand breaking through the ground. The hand was made of fondant and the dirt was crushed up chocolate sandwich cookies (we all know them as a certain name, but I don't want to get into any trouble or advertise for free on their behalf!) Anyway, there were several boys over at the house and they all loved it. It ended up being way too big, and I realized that teenage girls eat a lot more than their counterparts! After three days, I threw the remaining cake away!

Crazy Love

Valentine birthday for a Nascar fan!  The birthday boy's wife told me hearts and black and white squares, so this is what we came up with!  They were actually 7" hearts and about 3 1/2" high, so they were quite large.  It was a hit!  

The board was a black foamcore and I cut out 2" white squares from fondant.  

Space Shuttle Cake

Space shuttle cake for a little astronaut!  He also got a bunch of cookies that were planets and shuttles to give to all of his classmates.  They were a hit!

An Apple A Day...

This was for a PTA group in Winter Springs. They absolutely loved it! The chalkboard, pencils, chalk and leaves were made from fondant. Shined the whole apple up with luster dust. The apple was formed from a ball pan, which I use for absolutely everything! Thanks for looking!

Want a little wine with that cheese?

Fun one to do! The wine bottle was cake, and the grapes and cheese were fondant. The birthday girl was a Capricorn, so around the label was the Capricorn symbol. Her birthdate was the vintage year. There is also a carnation, for the January birth flower. I would love to do more of these! I would make the cakeboard look like a wood table top, which would add that rustic look!

New Year's Eve Wedding

This was a beautiful wedding! It was by a pool, outside, with mohagony columns and tealites around the pool. The bride and groom were the most amazing clients to work for! They each had grown children, so this wedding was a fun celebration of their love.

The cake was three different flavors and turned out well. The top, which the couple kept, was chocolate kahlua with mocha buttercream. The second tier was italian cream cake with cream cheese filling. The bottom was a yellow cake with chocolate ganache filling.

I wish Wanda and Matt the very best for their future! Thanks for letting me be a part of your special day!

Scary Flower Cake

This was an amaretto cake and my first time decorating a cake with real flowers. The florist told me to build up the buttercream, then place the stems in it, so that the caterers wouldn't have to worry about where to cut and which part to eat.

Well, I did that and as you see above, it turned out beautiful! However, after driving the cake to the client, and after the chef told me where to place the cake, most of the flowers had fallen off along with the buttercream.

Instead of freaking out, which I was silently doing, I took a knife and got as much buttercream as possible to build up again, then stuck the flowers in all over again. I did not get another picture of it, but the catering staff all thought it was beautiful! Whew!

Lesson learned - the next time real flowers are used, I will put them on at the location! :)

Over the Hill Cake

This was yet another cake for a friend from high school! I have been fortunate enough to do graduation cupcakes, baby shower, baby dedication and now this one for her mother.

It is actually a square cake with a football pan size cake cut and put on top. The signs were gumpaste, and I used white royal icing and edible markers to write on them. It is a very simple layout, but it really ended up being a large cake!

Thanks Stacey!

Copy of an Invitation!

This was an interesting one to do. The invitation was beautiful and I thought I would try to recreate it. I decided that to do it 3-dimensional would be quite time consuming and costly for the client, so I did a simpler version of 3-D.

All the details were made from fondant. I rolled it, then flattened with my finger where needed. There were a lot of dragees used on this! Also, royal icing was used for the beaded look on the crib, sides and bottoms.

Copy of a Napkin!

The napkin looked just like this, just with the writing along the bottom. This was the first time I had covered a board in fondant, it was actually pretty simple. I tacked it down with piping gel and it did the trick!

The CELEBRATE along the side was done by using alphabet cookie cutters as a template, then painted with black icing color.

The '8' was chocolate and the '0' was yellow cake.

It was a hit!