White Chocolate Wonderful

My Husband asked me to make a cake for a friend at work, and because I had free reign, I made something I have been wanting to try.  A white chocolate cake with raspberry filling and white chocolate truffle frosting.  YUM!!!!  It was delectable. So much so that now I have been asked to make a chocolate version.  Can't wait!

Here is a  picture of it on my lovely new cake stand.

DOH!

Months ago I had promised a sweet little friend a birthday cake not realizing it was a week before my own wedding.  Oops!  To attempt to make up for it I gave her a gift certificate to make a cake together any time she wanted after the wedding.  She chose to use it for her Father and Brother's birthdays.  The cake was her idea completely!  She wanted a Simpson's donut cake because her dad LOVEs the Simpsons.  And because dad likes vanilla and brother likes chocolate we also made some delicious chocolate cupcakes!

And for some reason I have no pictures of the tasty cupcakes

PB&J

When I asked my husband what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday he gave his usual mansponce; "what ever you think honey" I told him to make up his mind and look thorough my cookbooks for something he would like.  The result?  Peanut butter and jelly cupcakes!

They turned out quite tasty!  Vanilla cupcakes with a raspberry jam filling crowned with a light and fluffy peanut butter cream icing

Oh how she loves Cheese!

My sister in law Nicole is a cheeseaholic so when her husband asked me to make a cake that looked like cheese for her birthday I laughed and of course, agreed.  I wanted it to look like those little babybel cheeses wrapped in red wax so here it is!

It was a very moist carrot cake with cream cheese icing.  I dyed the fondant to match the cheese wax and painted the label on.  I bought a brand new  9" contour pan which my husband later ruined by putting in the dishwasher :(  But don't worry, he's promised to buy me a new one tomorrow.  Let's hope he comes through!

Thanksgiving Baby

One of the children i watch had her first birthday on Thanksgiving this year so her mom asked me to make a smash cake that looked like a pink turkey... I heard shaped like a pink turkey...

I made the tail out of white chocolate. In retrospect it looks a lot like a peacock tail.  I baked the cake in a small glass bowl and after it had cooled shaped it with a knife. It would have looked much better covered in fondant but most adults don't like fondant so I doubt a baby would even know what to do with it.  The beak is just a little sliver of orange peel.  Since this was such a small cake I covered a bowl in paper and turned it upside down to display it.

This was the cake for everyone else at the party.  She had asked for a basic cake with jellybeans on it. I used the same pink frosting for the edges as I did on the turkey.

October was so busy!

My husband and I got married in October so that was already a very busy month.  Add to that my birthday, his mom's birthday and his sister Meghan's birthday and that equals a month thats over before it began!  Well when we got back from our honeymoon I whipped up a cake for Meghan's birthday. All she requested was that it be very girly and not say anything like her name or 'happy birthday".  Just a pretty girly cake.  I think I accomplished the aesthetics of it pretty well.

I cannot remember the flavor of the cake, but I used an almond butter cream icing and it tasted heavenly!

Cakes of my past

So in the past year since the birth of my at home cakery I have provided cakes to all whom I know.  Here are some of them;

This is the first cake I was ever commissioned to make.  It was very exciting for me.  The customer had requested yellow cake and a bright tropical, beachy baby shower cake in pink and green. Again I was given free reign so I created these palm trees out of pretzle rods and royal icing, the hammock is also made of royal icing and the baby is molded out of fondant. You can't really see from this angle but the sides are a bright pink.

This was my first fondant covered cake, and boy was it a challenge!  I took on a lot with this one.  I had decided to make my own fondant so that had to be done several days in advance.  The cake was a delicious sweet and tangy key lime with white chocolate butter cream. The "margrita" was dyed cornsyurp. I brushed the surface of the fondant with blue shimmer dust and dye to give it a deeper marbled effect.   I made it for my Aunt Kelly's 50th birthday, which was a surprise, so sneaking this 20lb cake around was no easy task.  Not to mention the cake had to  be transported from Jacksonville, FL. to Welataka, FL. which is about an hours drive, in the middle of summer. Thank goodness for air conditioning!

This next cake was for my Husband's best friend Lee.  He loves carrot cake and I was determined to make a homemade carrot cake.  Lots of love and time went into this cake and when it met with an unfortunate end, there was a very angry Sarah-Jay.  I no longer make cakes for my Husband's friends.

  I made this cake for my sweet niece's 11th birthday.  She had a candy themed party. Now, Lexi is very artistic her self and had given me several drawings of the cake she wanted all of which were beautiful and fairly impossible for my skill level.  But in the end we came up with something she liked that I could actually make.  She loved it so much!  It was every sugar starved child's dream!  The top tier was an enormous cupcake with a ring pop cherry. The bottom border is alternating chocolate whoppers and strawberry whoppers. Tootsie roll pops, Hershey's hugs, and sparkling candles covered the bottom tier.  A chocolate bar served as a plaque for the birthday girls name!

This was my second fondant covered cake, and one of my very favorites.  I was asked to make this for a friend of a friends birthday party.  I was told she like fairies and I went from there. Most of the cakes design came out of trying to repair everything that went wrong!  I was having so much trouble with the fondant cracking and tearing. I had kneeded and rolled and draped over and over and I was ready to rip my hair out! Finally I draped it without it tearing but there were still many cracks.  I was able to repair them with lots of smoothing and tiny bits of water to mold them back together.  Even after all that the surface still looked dry and cracked so I covered the major cracks with hand cut and painted flowers and medallions around the edges.  Then I finished the look with hand painted twisty vines winding their way all over the cake.  The sculpted fairy was my favorite and a lot of fun to make.  I painted her skirt to look like tigerlilly petals.  She ended up a little more busty than a fairy should be but who am I to judge the bodies of fairies?  Her wings got very heavy as they dried and ended up falling off and breaking so I quickly fashioned a pair out of vellum paper which looked much nicer but went against my "everything must be edible" vow.

This is me working diligently at 2 in the morning on the fairy