50th Anniversary Pontoon Cake

Yes - this was made forever ago. I really had not paid much attention to how many cakes I let "float" by without posting. Then I was sorting and organizing them (because they are beginning to fill up our computer) and I am finding that there are a TON of cute cakes I never shared!@!

This one was for a neighbor. Her parents were celebrating their 50th Wedding Anniversary and she wanted to tell a fun story about them. They live in Florida a good part of the year and go out on their Pontoon boat a lot.

On one particular outing they ran over a crocodile. Well I am not sure you "run" over in a boat - do you? Or since it isn't a car to you "boat" over? You don't "car" into things - the boat is "running" as it has a motor so I guess it is still "run" over. Geez. Who knows. Now do you see why I sometimes do not get things on this blog - because my mind zig zags around and then I find myself doing something totally different.

Needless to say - Marci asked for a Pontoon boat, with her parents inside, running into a crocodile. I add a dock and some yellow rope to fill the cake space up a bit. She said the whole thing was a total hoot and everyone is still talking about it (see if you wait months and months to post something you can then add in things like "folks are still talking about it at family gatherings").

2 Brides and a Cake

This was a VERY FUN cake to make!! Interestingly the week that this cake was requested by my friend I had been gearing up to create a Bride & Groom in fondant, but I was being a bit lazy about it because I figured it would be difficult and I had enough kinda big tasks sitting in front of me at the time anyway. So I was doing what many folks do best.........Avoiding!

I searched 2 Brides on a cake and 2 Fondant Brides, etc.......and I found nothing on the internet that matched. So while I am SURE there are wedding toppers of same sex unions - I couldn't find any made in fondant. That led me to just start creating it myself. I thought leaning in toward one another and holding hands would be a nice touch - and making them sit would make my first attempt easier then trying to make them stand.

However, once I began to put the brides together (which I did several days before I made the cake).......I realized that it wasn't nearly as hard as I was thinking. I wish I had taken pics of the pieces going together, but as I said it was a busy week. So "End Results" were all that were photographed.

The cake itself was totally simple - traditional wedding cake - White Cake - White Buttercream icing.......easey peasey.

The dresses were surprisingly simple. Fondant draping with a synching at the waist. Then I added some seed beads and little pearls and a tiny bit of icing work. I was a bit afraid to make it more then simple for fear of overdoing it. First time out I think not too frilly.

My understanding through my friend who suprised the Brides with the cake was that the cake was a True Hit of the dinner. And that was the goal.......to make something totally Fun and Cool that was the Icing of the Day.....pun intended. Plus - now if someone searches 2 Brides on a cake or 2 Fondant Brides - they might find something to look at!

Jasmine's Baptism

One of my Girl Scouts was being baptized and I was honored to be able to make the cake. They threw me a fun little zinger and asked for a Strawberry Buttercream Icing. Not having ever made that it was a bit fun to do some research on that and create it. A little bit difficult to decorate with an icing that has chunks of fresh strawberries in it - but it made for a nice pink color.

I hear it was pretty yummy too!

Drumming Up New Ideas......

This was a fun cake that I did for a neighbors son as he graduated from High School.

This is all buttercream - no fondant. While fondant might have made it easier to create the details - I kinda enjoyed that I wasn't rolling and cutting.......especially rolling fondant for such a BIG cake! This was 3 layers of 12" cake!!

The drum sticks ARE made from fondant though.

In the end I think that it all turned out really really nice! Many folks thought the drum sticks were real.......yea!!

Farmer Cake - I am becoming Queen of the Tractors

Oh My Gosh - totally forgot about this cake!! It was so easy and cute to do. Well not totally easy, these tractors are a bit of a challenge, but since I am becoming a Tractor Queen I am not so daunted by them when asked anymore.

This cake was for a Dad/GrandDad of one of my friends. Her mom phoned and asked if I could make a model of a CASE tractor that her dad used to plow the fields with when they were all farming. So we looked up antique tractors and the ladies gave me an idea of what they remember their Dad/GrandDad having and I went from there. Everything was done in gumpaste.

The tractor looked kinda lonely just sitting on a green cake - so I put a few rows of veggies growing and some ears of corn and tomatoes sitting around. It turned out really nice I thought. The ladies seemed excited about it too when I dropped it off.

This cake was Red Velvet with a Vanilla buttercream icing. Very fun to make!

It's a Pirate's Life For Me

So this cake was FOREVER ago.......as are almost all the cakes I do when finally posted. The summer was really crazy this year. Not so much more then any other, but this summer was the last "free" summer my baby had and I think I was a mixture of "we have to make it fun" and "what the snufflupagus am I going to do with my life once they are all in school?"

Since I was thinking about myself and trying to entertain the troops - I just let this blog slide on by. Now here I am - almost 8 weeks into school - finally getting out of my pity party funk and trying to do a little catch up.

Like a Pirate ship - Let's set sail.......

Come on now - you HAD to expect something dorky like that - it is ME here!!

This cake was for my good friends son, Kai. He was all piratey about things this year. I did a little search on line and found that there are TONS of pirate cakes and variations of pirates themselves. Kai was pretty open ended so we did a nice cake that he could use for a party at his house with his parents and adult friends..........then his mom complimented the cake with cupcakes that looked like pirates for his actual birthday party.

The cake is all done in buttercream for the outside planking. I just iced it and then took a straight edge and traced in the lines to represent wood planks.

All of the "extra" pieces are done in fondant - though when I did this a second time I did the extras in gumpaste so that they would dry faster.

And while these are NOT edible - I was kinda tickled by my creativeness and my execution on these sails. Totally cute right? I used some stamping paper (because it is thicker) and then some wood skewers for Kabobs. I inked the skewers a brown to match the ship - then inked the edges of the paper to give the sails a more fabric look and fraying weathered texture. So cute!

The water is a mixture. I rolled out blue fondant, but then piped on blue buttercream in a swirl type fashion to make it look like the ship were hitting breakers in the waves.

This cake was all Chocolate Chocolate Chip with a Vanilla buttercream that was tinted brown (so it is not chocolate icing). The fondant was all Vanilla flavored.

It turned out so cute that when I showed a pic to a mom on our summer swim team she asked me to do one for her pirate. I will post that soon just for comparison sake!

Key Lime Cupcakes & a Week of Cupcakes!

July 24th huh? That was my last post here and yet it was not the last cake that I did..........so I could think of this as slacking - only with all the kids home for the summer I am hardly getting to sit down let alone SLACK! To save you all from a rant about my having to chase children around to clean or shuttle future adults to library weekly for books and movies - we will just forget that stream of thought and do a Week Of Cupcakes!!

This cupcake is a Key Lime Cupcake. Now as usual nothing is original in my mind. This cupcake I am 100% certain has been done a million times over - I think this because I did a search to see if there were recipes and how folks did them. Why I did the search though is because a friend, Pennie, made a Key Lime pie. Never having made one myself I asked what goes into it. She explained it - surprised me that while there were separate steps NONE of them sounded all that hard, just time consuming a smidge (tiny smidge). The pie was wonderful!! It was totally gone by the end of the evening. A few days later she mentioned her husband suggested I try making a Key Lime Cupcake. And thus the search for what makes a Key Lime Cupcake to folks all over was mine.

There are TONS and TONS and TONS of different recipes. Key Lime cake as the base of the cupcake - Key Lime filling - Key Lime icing - and combinations of many different. To me it seemed like many of them were missing the Graham Cracker bottom - only then I noticed that many of them had Graham Crackers sprinkled INTO the cupcake paper and then the cake batter placed over that so it baked into a pseudo crust. Not what I was envisioning.

Finally I figured out what would be totally Yum and kinda close to Pennie's Pie - because that was my personal goal - a Graham Cracker cake. Figured that out in less time then it took to search all the Key Lime stuff. Substitute pureed Graham Crackers (cinnamon grahams are the best in my opinion - but I would put cinnamon in everything - except my husbands rubs for smokin' - he does that, but cinnamon doesn't belong there I think) for part of the flour in a basic Butter cake recipe. Gave that a WhipUp and taste tested it and OHMYGOODNESS that was YUMMY all by itself!! I immediately envisioned a Ton of different cupcakes I could do with that and sent the recipe to my Sis-In-Law who was looking to do a good S'mores cupcake.
So then there was the figuring out of the main part of the cake - Key Lime. I did more research on this then I would have thought because of the egg involved. The cupcake wasn't going to go into the oven a second time - the filling would be inserted into the cupcake after baking - that created a problem with the eggs. Although much research about the egg being combined with the sugar and the sugar/egg ratio then eliminating the possibility of salmonella poisoning being gone........it still made me nervous.

Key Lime makes me think of Lemon (duh) and one of my favorite Lemon treats is a Lemon Curd that my friend, Sarah, made me years and years and years ago. So my thought was why not make a Key Lime Curd which would kill off the salmonella problem - mix that with the Sweetened Condensed Milk that goes into the pie filling and pipe that into the center of a cupcake? Genius right? Again - surely someone has done this, but I didn't find it on line this time so I wasn't 100% it would work.

First task - Squeezing all these dang Key Limes. I did it with my glass lemon juicer - see it there in the back of the pic? Took me a whole piano lesson + some time to do it - Key Limes are way too tiny!!! Don't do that!!! See a few days later guess what I saw that someone had done.......used a Garlic Press because half a Key Lime fits perfect into a press - DUH!! Brilliant!! So do that - don't do what I did.
Then there was the melting of some butter. Do you love watching butter melt? At first I do. Not sure why. Then I become incredibly impatient and start moving the butter around to get on with it already.

Added the egg yolks - the Key Lime juice and a bit zest - the sugar - and waited - well didn't really WAIT.......

Rather I stirred and stirred and stirred and stirred until the wanted thickening happened and the consistency that was desired was reached. I have finally figured out that you do not want it to be thickened completely on the stove........that took a few doings years back to realize. See how Instant Pudding ruins our ability to learn things the right way? It will thicken a bit more as it cools off.

So a smart girl who runs a hobby blog about cakes and things she creates would have taken a picture of the process of adding the cooled Key Lime curd in with the SCMilk right? Or maybe a picture of the delicious Graham Cracker cupcake? Yeah probably - but who knows a smart girl like that around here?

What you see is what you get I am afraid. Hulled the center of the yummy cupcake - filled it with Key Lime filling - topped that with a White Chocolate Icing - sprinkled a tiny bit of the crushed grahams and then started taking them around the area for testing.

Only one person suggested a change.......which I was totally ready for - only after saying that he had something to say it turned out to be, "This is probably the best cupcake I have every had".

So I am going with this one is a winner. The next day I started getting calls asking me if I would make them for a neighbors Red Hat meeting - Winner.