Minion Cake!!

This is one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE cakes to have done. Not because it was hard and I felt like I accomplished anything, but more because I love love love Minions!! I love that they have goofey names like "Dave" and "Steve" and yet look so not like those names. Plus I like the movie they come from a ton too.

This cake is really a copy of something I found on line though. I can't take original creativity for myself. My friend, Bryan, asked kinda short distance from the date of need (which many of my friends do) and so I didn't want to waste much time trying to think of anything. I cheated and CASE'd this.

It was for his oldest, Lucy. Their family comes up with some of the funnest things to make. I am never disappointed by their ideas.

My own kiddo's said the hair sticking out of the top of the Minion's head was their favorite part. Mine too kinda - well I liked doing the over-all's and the one eye too - and the cake in front - okay I just really had a fun time making the whole dang thing.

Inside the Minion is Red Velvet Cake and non-dairy Cream Cheese Icing. I mean - Tofu Cream Cheese Icing really. What you are scrumpling up your eyes right now? Well don't!! It was delish - HONESTLY!! I even took a spoonful to my husband and our neighbor while they were working on our schools trivia questions - both had made a face when I told them what I was making. They both looked concerned as they began to eat the icing........then raised their eyebrows and admitted that it was really good! See the youngest in their family has a dairy allergy so Lucy was making sure that her little sis could eat the cake. Sweet right? Plus - Tofu Cream Cheese Icing barely tastes any different at all!!

Rock & Roll Werewolf

The cake that ROCKED Dawson's 6th birthday party. My kids are direct - "Mom none of that fondant and I don't care what you put on it as long as I like it."..........which leads a mom to wonder - how do I know what you want as a decoration if you don't tell me. So all I had to go on was that he wanted a Rock N Roll Werewolf Party.
The main game we were going to play was Pin the Guitar on the Rocking Werewolf.........so I just copied the picture of the werewolf I made up to be on the cake. Tah Dah.

As you can see the kids were WAY impressed (hehehehe)....at least Dawson was into it.
But once you put a blindfold on the kids the fun began and everyone was excited to give it a try. Some were obviously not as good at finding the wall as others.
The Rockin' Gluten Free Vegan Chocolate cupcakes to make sure our food allergy friend had something yummy to eat.
and the Birthday Boy and his Cake...........where is the excitement man?

Littlest Pet Shop

I LOVED this cake!! A Girl Scout friend asked me to make this. Her daughter - who is a year older then my own - still loves Littlest Pet Shop - so she asked me if I could make her a cake with the horse on it. Fun!! And she didn't want any fondant. Easy!!

The result was of course this........I did add a few fondant flowers that I had from a previous cake to accent the sugary cuteness that is Littlest Pet Shop. Otherwise.......this is all Butta'cream baby!!

The real fun was delivering the cake to Kathy at the GS office. As I walked in with her cake her daughter (who is homeschooled) and hubby were standing there at her desk (Kathy works in the main entrance area of the office). Kathy about JUMPED OUT OF HER SKIN when she saw me. She was checking another customer out - but No One would have been the wiser to me with a cake box if she hadn't started hyperventilating and looking at me in a way that looked like she was trying very hard not to look at me. It was worth making the cake honestly. I simply walked in - asked if another friend was there and then walked into the back area and popped the cake into an office for her to collect later. It was a total hoot!!

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!

Sponge Bob Revisited

Remember the tractor cake? If so then you probably remember the picture you see here. Tractor wheels was the point to this picture.........but at the end of the tractor wheels there was left over RKT (rice krispy treats). My kids eat a lot of sweet treats if I leave them laying about. To try to keep that from happening I toss a lot of the scrap stuff into the trash. But I will be honest - that is SOOOOO hard to do sometimes because we are always taught not to be wasteful. On this particular day I also had a Sponge Bob cake to do - so I decided to use some of the extra RKT to fashion the arms and legs. Let them dry for a day with the tractor wheels and voila.....

This is technically my 3rd Sponge Bob cake. The very first was years and years ago for my almost 10 years old sons 3rd birthday. This cake is the 2nd Sponge Bob made with a fondant cover. I am just about ready to do Sponge Bob without looking at a picture anymore. ;o)

Still - no matter how many times you do the same thing - there is always something new and different you can bring into the mix. For this cake it was obviously the arms and legs made from RKT. I heard that the Birthday Boy LOVED the cake. We are on swim team with them and he came up to me the other day (this is months after the birthday) and said, "I am planning my birthday cake". Always fun to hear!!

This cake was Chocolate (if I am remembering right - geez o I should not wait so long to post things!) - Vanilla Buttercream icing and a Vanilla Fondant. Most of all it was loved and enjoyed!

Princess Castle Cake

Here is a cutie and a Quickie. I really wish that I took more time to take pictures of things as I put them together. Because the one thing that I am really giggly happy about this cake is the edging on each tier. Kinda like a railing to keep the princesses from falling over the edge........

Yet at the same time totally similar to a Crown.........yet completely edible. The person who asked me to do this cake sent a picture - and I was doing a sort of a copy job of that cake. As I looked closer at the cake I realized that the railing and the windows were plastic add ons. Disappointing, yet at the same time understandable - but copyable too. So I tried. I am pretty sure I got it. There was also a purple crown at the top (that I forgot to take an aerial pic of!) and a flag that went into the center and had the Birthday Girls name on it. Those things were given to the family to put on right before the party......so no pics for me, but safer for Michelle so she didn't have a crying princess.

Speaking of Princess - Michelle had a totally clever idea! In the original cake all the windows held princesses. Michelle sent a note saying, "What if we add my Princess into one of the windows?"..........Totally Clever!!! and.........Why Didn't I Think of That!!?? See her in the window above the door?? So cute!

I love it when the people asking me to do a cake have specific and clever ideas of things. Makes it more fun!

this cake was Chocolate in one tier and White in another tier. Vanilla Buttercream icing (we were trying not to cover the cake in fondant) and then Gumpaste for the railing crowns and Vanilla Fondant for the other additions.

Batman........Make Your Own Template

There are SO MANY totally cool tools out there to use on the market in order to make MILLIONS of neat designs on cakes!! Believe me.........I search them for fun in my spare time and think.........wow that would be cool to have. Save it to Favorites on my computer (which drives Dave mad because I have a never ending list if you click "favorites" on my page on the computer - but I can find everything in a heartbeat so it works for me).

A few months ago I bought a Cricut for fondant. Also very cool. Used it 1x. Probably I will use it again - eventually - hopefully! because the dang thing was $100 (I used Christmas money that I had sitting around for those of you who know I am too cheap to splurge on things - and a 50% off sale - bonus right?). So anyway - the box ......... and tons of blogs ......... said that I could use it to make every design possible - which may be true - however, you have to buy a million cartridges to do this - which my friend, Julie, apparently has - but who preplans this stuff? Oh yeah, me. I do preplan, but I don't gather all the materials needed in time all the time.

Plus - honestly - making my own template free of charge is often Quicker - Easier - and more Accurate as to what I am looking to make. CASE IN POINT - This Batman Cake -

All I wanted to do was a simple Batman Logo. So like any techie I searched it. Then I copied the picture and pasted it into a Publisher document. Easy enough right?
Then I baked a cake (okay you caught me - the cake was baked already - and cooled - and iced - and I had already placed a beautiful topper of fondant over it). Ready to be CREATED into something...........

I printed my Batman Logo out. If I were doing buttercream then I would have kept the logo close to the cake as I freehand drew it onto the cake in buttercream icing. Hard to do, but doable.

However, for this cake I was going the mildly easier route and using fondant. So I used this template in STEPS.

Step 1 - cut the template out around the larger black oval - toss white paper into recycling and then place on black fondant and cut around the oval.

Step 2 - remove the same template off the fondant and then cut the template around the yellow oval - toss black trim paper into recycling and then place on yellow fondant and cut around the oval.

Step 3 - remove the same template (are you getting the hang of this?) off the fondant and then cut the bat template out of - toss the yellow trim paper into recycling and then place on black fondant and cut around the bat.

Step 4 - Assemble all those pieces on top of one another in the center of the top of the cake.

Voila!! Easy - AND - Free.

Then I added the birthday message and did something cute, easy & similar to the sides of the cake..........

I rolled more black fondant out and cut it into different shapes - squares, rectangles, points, and placed them along the sides to look a bit like a city landscape. Used some yellow royal icing (dries faster then buttercream) and dotted the city to look as those it were "awake" with lights.

Tah Dah!! See...............the tools you use decorating a cake do not have to include $100 (with Christmas money and a 50% off sale) cutting devices. It can just be your IMAGINATION and INGENUITY and you are golden........

This cake was Chocolate Chocolate Chip with Vanilla Buttercream and Vanilla Fondant - plus a little Royal Icing for deco. Well received and big applause from the friends who ate it!

Garry & Patrick........

Whoops - I thought these went out months ago!! These were the cutest ever cupcakes (in my opinion). The day that I did these I had 2 extra children......and they did so so so so so well with The Line that it made things easier for me to get them done.

What is The Line? Haven't I talked about that before? Oh. Well The Line is very well known in my house. Generally The Line was invented to help children from getting into trouble. Although if you asked the children they might say that The Line was invented to keep them away from the fun.

See early on - when making cakes wasn't happening as often - the kids had kinda free reign in the kitchen. I mean anything I was baking was for my family. So I wasn't really worried about germs. Well...........I was worried about germs if the bakery good was going out of the house or being used for a party. But in the first few years of living here in Central Illinois we weren't having many parties - so baking was mostly for us. If the kids stuck a finger in the batter I wasn't too worried. I mean batter fingers and licking spatulas is the best part of baking for a kid anyway right? Who wants to take that away?

Then when I began to make cakes for others as favors the kids still had the same mindset of where the comfort zone was for touching things. In my mind the understanding was pretty clear cut - If The Cake Is For Someone Else...........WE DON'T TOUCH. They didn't seem to get that. In fact I remember one day where I had just mixed a batter.......Ben came in and literally STUCK his face into the bowl and sniffed in REALLY REALLY DEEP and complimented me by saying, "That smells great". All I could think was GROSS!! Dave was there with us and explained to Ben how gross that was and how he just spread germs all over the batter. Ben pointed out how he didn't touch the batter or sneeze on it (yes, this has happened in the past). So we explained how little things can still drop from a persons closely placed face in bowl. Ben apologized and left. I turned around and Kid You Not! Dave has his face in the bowl breathing in really deeply and says, "That does smell great."

Seriously? Batter thrown out. The Line invented. In our kitchen we have an island. Our kitchen is kind of an L shape. The island starts at the long stretch of the L. Inside the L there is the island (duh), sink, fridge (not the British rock band) and stove - and all cabinets. When I am baking or decorating a cake The Line goes up. This means basically that they can enter the kitchen and exit the kitchen onto the porch.......but they can not walk through the portion of the kitchen that has anything useful or interesting to them. Which can be hard.

At first.........during The Line training.......I would have to repeat "There is a line here" and physically swoop my arm from the wall - across the floor and end of the island - to the wall. Over and over we did this. About 5 cakes in the kids began to come into the kitchen and would see ingredients on the island and ask, "Is The Line up?" Thus The Line became its own "thing"

When I was making these fun cupcakes the Grey boys were here. These weren't the first kiddo's to visit when I was baking.......but they were the best at responding to The Line. Good job Pennie! When Andersen told the oldest Grey that there was A Line.....he looked for it - pretended to see it - push against it - made fun of it - but he NEVER crossed it! And that is all that counted........because honestly and invisible line is kinda funny - necessary - but funny.

Patrick was my favorite cupcake of them all. At first - when I cut his body out with a star - all it looked like was A STAR. Then as I added more items and moved his arms and legs about he began to really look like Patrick!

With The Line up - the kids paying due respect of The Line and Dave bringing home lunch - these were pretty quick to be made!

The cupcakes were Chocolate Chocolate chip and White cake - all with a Vanilla Buttercream icing and Vanilla Fondant.

Rapunzel & Architecture

It is the sweetest thing ever (pun intended on the use of sweet because....well this is about cakes) - Dave watches Alton Brown videos about cake stuff. I am not sure if he is doing this because I out loud say, "Why does that happen?" when some cake related thing occurs ........ or if it is because I try to explain something about a cake related thing and Dave doesn't get what I am saying and wants to hear an experts take........or if it is because really he has always like Alton Brown - which I shouldn't overlook - he has watched Alton on Food Network for years - but now he is looking up cake stuff and watching on the computer so I am totally taking it to be a sweet support to my cake dealings.

How is this related to the mess of stacked cake above? Well he was watching an Alton Brown episode about whipping eggs or something and there was a question/answer thing happening and he made the statement that many cake designers have an architecture background. Usually I can zone out what Dave is watching........because unlike the kids when they watch videos (like Annoying Orange) on the computer.....I don't make him put on earphones. This statement by Mr. Brown caught my attention - because in High School I studied drafting and architecture.......and then in my first year in college I continued my studies. Many of you know that following that first year I switched schools and eventually attended many colleges before earning my bachelors and masters in social work and counseling related fields - not architecture. Still.......I do have an architecture/design background of sorts. So this statement was kinda cool.

See Mr. Jackson........apparently I am using my years of architecture after all - just in cake building. Kudos to you for making me so good at it all.

Now the first picture is of a budding tower. And I didn't just stack those cakes up and hope for the best. That would have been ridiculously not smart.

This is the beginning of the roof top of the tower. The original cake I found on line had a roof just like this. But this looked pretty.........well..........boring and like a hat that I made in kindergarten with construction paper.
In fact if you turn it upside down you will see that it basically is the hat I made in Kindergarten. I took a piece of poster board - created a cone - lined that with plastic wrap so the fondant didn't adhere to the cone - then I put a base on the cone so that the weight of the fondant didn't pop it (I'm a mother - I worry about everything).

Then to make the cone head roof look a little nicer I put shingles on. This is my first shingle making and while I did really well, they are by far not at all uniform........of course if I think about it do you think the elves who were making the shingles in the forest for the magical tower that Rapunzel would live in made them all uniform? No probably not. Besides they were using wood - which is probably way easier then fondant. Elves have such an easy life. All they mostly make are cookies and shingles.

Now .......this is really the only architecturally structural picture I took. I knew that if I left the stacked cakes without a base support I would be crying the next day. So I put 3 very long dowel rods into the cake. Unfortunately one of the dowel rods went in at a slight angle. Personally I began freaking out as soon as I realized that to take it out and replace it might mean to cause holes that would cause cracks.

My husbands advice was that I was worrying about nothing that needed to be worried about. It would all be fine. Move forward and let it go.

My focus was to drive him berserk. "Can you come here and look at this?"......"What do you think does it look like it shifted?"......"Do you think it will hold?"......."How about now has it shifted now?"......each question came with his having to bend over and peer at the cake (or pretend to in order to appease me) as I turned the cake swirling around thing (you store may call it something else if you go to purchase one of these).

Once it seemed Dave had enough of this I left him alone.........for a bit at least.......and moved onto the next thing.

The landscape. I iced the landscape to include a river. Can you see the river?

As I was putting the landscape to the side to dry before putting fondant on it my 5 year old came in and said, "Maudy that is way too bumpy to be smooth." I said, "It is going to be a valley with a river in it. Can you see the river?"........he looked at me like I had lost my mind. Nodded his head and smiled at me like he was afraid to tell me he didn't think it did. And walked away.

I can see the river........can you see the river?

Then I iced the outside of the tower. A nice gray mortar kind of a color. And Dave and I did another round of "Can you come here and look at this?"......"What do you think does it look like it shifted?"......"Do you think it will hold?"......."How about now has it shifted now?"......

Then I began placing the rocks on the tower. Added a few windows that Rapunzel would have swung open if she were planning to throw her locks out to Finn to climb.......and did another round of Does this look leany to you Dave? Dave was getting quite tired of this game, but he was playing it really well by continuously stating, "No it is going to be fine." "It looks great.".......but he didn't want to play anymore and left - then luckily my friend, Sheri, showed up to drop her son off for a sleepover. Unfortunately for me though.....when I asked her "Does this look leany to you?" she said, "Yes."

So I spent the rest of my night LOOKING at the tower.....over and over and over and over. I was so paranoid about the cake leaning into breakage that the side I thought was leaning I put a towel under the cake swirling thing to make sure it started leaning straight - because things can lean back to straight right? In my head at least........hey no one ever said I was a GREAT Architecture student (but I was - right Mr. Jackson?).

While waiting for my tower to fall over I went back to the valley. Put a nice layer of fondant over the top......pretty right? Then started to fill in the river........My five year old started to see it.

Add in a few boulders around the river - some grass - a few pine trees........a lizard - rather I believe he is a chameleon.
Then a few flowers scattered all about............. After that I called it a night. Tried not to think about the tower that I had propped to lean straight in the china hutch and played with the kids.

The next day we took the entire collection of cake pieces - and two cookies - to the party.

These are views of the car ride to the Birthday Girls house. I thought that the view from this angle was kinda cool. What I did was place the tower on the cake and then pushed the remaining portion of the dowel rods into the base cake. There was also a cake board at the bottom of the tower that had hole punches matching the top of the tower - so there was a foundation at the top and bottom that kept the dowel rods from shifting much.

Although in my head the whole thing was about to fall at any moment. Poor Dave driving the van........

Once we got to the party I put the roof on the tower - placed the figures they had given me to use on the cake........and all was right with the world.

The cookies were Shortbread........I was trying to think of a way to get the Birthday Girls name and message onto the cake and also incorporate the crown that Finn had stolen and was a pivotal point for the characters. Plus everyone loves a cookie right?

So in the end Dave was right (please don't tell him I typed that). The tower was fine. I worried for nothing. But hey, I'm a mother - I worry.

This cake was Chocolate with Vanilla Buttercream and White with Vanilla Buttercream.......Vanilla Fondant and Shortbread cookies with Royal Icing. The pictures of the final cake could have been better, but honestly - I was so crazy nervous putting it together I am just happy I remembered to TAKE a picture!