Phineas

Okay here is another cake I have been sitting on for awhile. I posted the finished cake on my facebook blog link, but never did get it up here. This cake was fun. Michelle - the person who asked me to do it - found the base idea of the cake in a seach, but she wanted it tweaked a bit to include 2 themes - Phineas & Ferb at the beach & Dr. Doofensmirtz and Perry on another layer. But most of all we both wanted to see the "Logo" for the show on the cake........so I started by staring at it and thinking "how will I ever copy that to look authentic". After I did that for a few minutes I made fondant and began the process.

Being kinda caught up in what I was doing I forgot to take pictures (sound familiar). Honestly though my camera has more sugar on it then the cereal my kids are eating these days - so it might be better that I don't take pics during the process - for the life of my camera!

To create the logo I used an Egg Shaped cookie cutter and a tiny Oval shaped cookie cutter. Then matched the fondant up. I also printed the logo out 2 times. One was for referencing as I put things together and the other was to size that I wanted to make the logo for tracing the words Phineas & Ferb.
So basically - I cut 2 layers of the background orange. I placed the sucker pop sticks that I use for Cake Pops in the center of the 2 layers and adhered them to one another with Caro syrup. Then I placed the yellow layer and the small red dot in the middle on top and let it sit for a bit. (I am only NOW noticing that I forgot to pipe "and" in the red dot).

While that was drying a bit I rolled some gumpaste out really thin and let it set up (dry) a bit. This doesn't take long - maybe 5 or 10 minutes. Long enough to read a short book to a 5 year old who will hardly make it to the end of the book. Then I began cutting the letters out. Layed them over the top of the fondant and cut them out with a very sharp knife - or exacto knife. Once these were done I layed those on top of the logo to complete it. Phineas's hair didn't want to stay up and since it sits on the edge I decided that while it was drying for the next few days it would have a support - so I tucked some papertowel underneath it.

Then a few days later I began to assemble the cake. The top layer was Phineas and Ferb at the beach surfing. This is very close to a copy of the original cake Michelle brought to me.

The bottom layer though is different. In the version she and I decided I would create we did a lab for Dr. D and Agent Perry to be in. I asked my 9 year old what things a kid would expect to see in Dr. D's lab..........he said he had no clue. What??? He watched Phineas and Ferb for 2 hour stretches - kids. In fact he informed me that he really wasn't that "into" P&F anymore. Which I guess meant he was sleep watching all those episodes the day before. Kids.

Michelle and I agreed there would need to be a computer screen that said the birthday boys name.........

After that I figured there would need to be a Ray Gun and a few computers. It was fun looking at images of Dr. D's lab and then trying to bring them onto the cake with fondant.

One image I saw over and over was the lab - or some kind of a dome shape that looked like maybe it was a view from outside the lab? I wasn't sure, but I thought it looked fun to copy so I did. Later Ben came in when the cake was done and looked at it. His eyes lit up and he said it was totally cool. He walked around the cake and pointed out various things I had put in the lab and named them off - so I did copy the lab in a way that kids would recognize things - yea!!

And since this cake - Ben has found a renewed love for Phineas and Ferb. He has been watching it a lot lately. Sweet because I kinda like the catchy songs they sing.

This cake was chocolate on the bottom with a Oreo cookie buttercream center - and white on the top with a vanilla buttercream. All topped with a vanilla fondant. Yum!

McKenna's Dolphin Cake

Cakes are just fun - One of Andersen's friends was having a birthday recently and we decided that part of our gift to her would be to make her a cake. She is also a Facebook Friend and one of my favorite Girl Scouts.......well former Girl Scouts (hint hint that I want her to rejoin if she reads this). So Miss McKenna's sees any cakes that I post - and she asked for me to create her a cake. This is where we started.....

A nice White Cake with a Chocolate Buttercream Icing........yummie!!! The baking was from scratch. I think I have mentioned that I am still on the search for a delicious White Cake recipe. Well, still kinda on the search. This was good, but baked out a bit dry.....and I underbaked it. Plus - honestly I should have known when they didn't instruct me to separate the whites from the yolks. No respectable white cake has yolks in it.

What surprised me was her theme. She is a sporty girl and I honestly thought she would request Soccer, Softball, Basketball........something.......but she has an Ocean Love side and she actually picked......Dolphins and the beach. Having only 1 day to create this I went with simple.

Ocean Water looking fondant.......which I must say I am getting better at placing over the top of the cake. I am also beginning to understand my fondant recipe better. If I follow the recipe exactly I believe I am using too much powdered sugar and the fondant gets too dry. Tweaking is an art and sometimes can take me forever to wrap my head around.

Tah Dah - just a tiny bunch of fondant there on the edge of one side. Better right? I am getting there - slowly but surely.

Added a little sea life.......I didn't have the time to create schools of fish like I wanted to add in - a day in the life of a mom with 3 kids doesn't always allow extra creative opportunity. But I did get a few "Star" fish - get it?? and some seaweed and such.

The most important part of the cake of course were Dolphins - and they made there way in. However, Andersen and I thought that it was equally important to make a McKenna for her cake......
So that is just what I did. McKenna topped her cake laying on the beach.

There was also a beach umbrella - although it was made and set to dry for them. We delivered it the night before the party in hopes that the umbrella would be set enough for them to put it over fondant McKenna right before the party. That hope wasn't realized. The umbrella crumbled a bit when they pulled it off the form - so the girls ate it. Still a Win Win I suppose if you can eat your mistakes!

Birds of a Feather - Part III - Celebrating Adoption

After making the nest and the birds - waiting a few days so everything would be nice and fresh......it was time to bake the layers of the cake. I didn't take too many pictures of that. The bottom layer was my favorite - Carrot Cake - the middle was a from scratch Strawberry Cake (I get to learn new things from others choices) - and the top layer was a Coconut Cake (another newbie to me). All done in two cakes to give a little extra height. And yes.........I warned them they would have enough cake to feed all of the community.

Iced........the Carrot got Cream Cheese (of course) - the Strawberry received a Buttercream coating (which I whipped and it made the icing all crunchy.....won't be doing that for decorating under fondant again - makes the fondant bumpy) - the Coconut received a Cream Cheese with some Vanilla & Almond flavoring in them........yummy.

Then came the fondant. Practice Makes Perfect.......Practice Makes Perfect..........Practice Makes Perfect.......Rolling fondant out is super easy (in a building your bodies upper strength kinda way).......but not having the right tools makes the event super challenging because even if you get it all right on the counter - you still have to pick it up and put it on the cake.

The other day I hit this blog site about cakes - a supposed novice like myself doing cakes for fun and documenting them. Her cakes looked FABULOUS and were titled "My first fondant cake" - PERFECT - "My second fondant cake" - MORE PERFECT - "My third fondant cake" - FREAKING AMAZING......in my head - "well if she can do that me too!!"

While it certainly looks like I have that all under control.......this is where photography can create an illusion and where I began to wonder if the person on the Internet claiming to be so fabulous the first go round was telling the truth - because looks can be deceiving......

Flip my cake around and this is what you see..............AHHHH!!!! Sure it rolled out great - in theory all you have to do is roll it onto the rolling pin and you will be golden.........Sure......"My first fondant cake" (not really mine....just channeling the cake site hit).

This is where having children is helpful for me. After crying out loud - like seriously finally breaking down and crying (for about 15 seconds) and having my children stand in shock watching.........I picked myself up - looked them in the eye and said, "There is always a way to make things better." and then something along the lines of, "Never be a quitter."

Then I started to get creative. The other day I also watched a video on YouTube about making fondant bows. While I had never tried to do this before I figured.......it can't get worse right? Did the bow fix the problem? No not really -but it was a good start and I did still have all that beautifully colored fondant left to find a way to decorate the cake with.

Color on a blank pallate can change everything..........and distract the eye. So the night prior to the final fondant I had spent some time making different types of flower and things to place on the cake. Remember the only real design element that was asked for was color - nothing about how to get it into the design - just that it existed in the final product. These colors all matched the Bird Family.

As I began putting the flowers and leaves onto the cake and around the areas of the un-sightly fondant - I began to notice that I no longer really noticed the gaping fondant mistakes that were part of the cake.

I also began to realize why so many fondant cakes have either a real ribbon around the base of the cake - or they have a fondant strip in a color that is made to LOOK like a ribbon at the base of each tier. Things are becoming clearer to me. Those perfect cakes may be more of an illusion - and it may be why so many of the photos are not taken as "up close" as my photos are. Smart bakers.

Still all the added color and the bows did take care of the truly tear inducing look of my fondant covering. At this point in the decorating I was feeling like announcing - with happiness - "My first fondant cake - I am AWESOME!"

and there was one side of the cake that DID look close to perfect - it was the BACK SIDE - where I was able to leave just a few flowers so that all the eyes were pulled forward into the camouflaged area.

Personally I quite like the back.

The nest and the cake.......notice the nest is darker now? Yes, as I said earlier - once the cake was covered I noticed that the white fondant and the light tannish color of the original birds nest really kinda washed out compared to the colorful flowers and the colorful bird family. So a quick fix was in order for the families nest. Darker worked much better.

The Final Cake. I was so happy to have this done and looking really really cute. Yea Me!!

Even more so - Yea the Family that has built a Nest so loving that they could add 5 children to is in less then 1 year. Our family is very proud to have them as our friends and we were so happy to be part of their special day.

Birds of a Feather - Part II

Step II for Birds of a Feather was to make the Birds. Now just like every other kids I LOVED modeling things in school with playdoh and that clay stuff that would dry and then you would take the item home to give to your parent as a very "special gift". So this seemed like a no brainer - loved it as a kid - must love it as an adult - right?

Problem.......I forgot that as a kid when I molded things for my parents their acceptance usually started kinda like this........"oh how lovely Patti - it's ahhh.....well it is ahhhh...."

Not surprisingly that is somewhat how my first attempts at making birds with fondant went. Kinda wonky. However, to start out with I was being very careful about how much fondant to color. Didn't want to waste it because I was going to need it for lots of additional stuff - yet didn't want to make too little and have teenie tiny little birds. So I did what you see above - I pre-badly-modeled some birds just to get a feel for how much fondant to color.


Once I had the colors set I was happy. Course the three days later I realized that I needed to make yet MORE fondant for the rest of the cake that was in the same exact colors as the birds. Duh it would have been smarter to color all the fondant at the same time............Live and learn right?

After a few attempts I started to get the hang of making the birds. I saw some online that I thought were really cute and I fashioned mine off those........certainly the original ones I was working from were done by a fondant sculpting master, but given this was my second time really making shapes - I am pretty darn happy with the outcome.

Here is most of the Flock after I finished them and washed the fondant off with a bath of vodka and some tiny sparkly flecks.

And thus Part II of the cake was finished. So now just to wait a few days for the birds to set so that I didn't mess them up.

Birds of a Feather - Part I

A few weeks ago I was offered the chance to make a SUPER COOL cake!! Some friends of our grew their family from 1 daughter who was 3 years old - to - 5 daughters who are all under the age of 4 (two 4 year olds - one 2 year old - two 1 year olds) all in less then a year.....but it has been about 2 years that they have all been together. The occassion they were celebrating? The finalization of the adoption for two of their daughters. Two are bio theirs and the final daughter is the sibling to the two becoming legally theirs. So it really was a wonderfully special occassion!!

The mom of this brood asked me if I ever do cakes for others.......do I ever do cakes for others?? Only when they ask!! And so it was that our family got to gift their family a tremendously important cake.

What to do - how to do it - what could be special enough to convey the day? The family asked for VERY BRIGHT girlie colors. After that I was told "do whatever you want" - but there was a hint that a tiered cake would be fun.

So my first picture is the stacking.....how big and how much........


The bowl on the top was for me to figure out how big to make my "special element". Since I was given full creative license I thought it would be fun to make a birds nest and have the ENTIRE family represented in a nest together at the top of the cake. So I needed to make a nest.

Making the nest I began by lining a bowl (as seen on top of the stack) with plastic.

Next I took some white melting chocolates and well.......melted them.........this time in the microwaved.


After they were melted I stirred them up until they were smooth. Then I took another step not shown and added a small bit of brown dye in the chocolate to make it more resemble the color of a birds nest.

Put all the chocolate into an icing bag with a medium sized tip and began to put the chocolate into the bowl - going back and forth making a random pattern - to of course look similar to a nest.

Once this was done I let it sit and harden. Tah Dah...........I don't have a final picture of the nest until later in the cake. The nest on the cake though is a darker brown - in the end I felt like this mild brown color was not holding its own against the bold colors of the birds and we ate this one.

Still - it was fun working to figure this out. And even more fun to see how excited the kids were about the final product.

Kid's in the Act

In the previous post I talked about how excited Andersen was to play with the fondant for her birthday cupcakes. Ben and Dawson wanted in on the act too. Originally Ben was going to help make some bugs for the cupcakes, but siblings will be siblings - or perhaps Andersen was channeling my "I was asked to make this" speach and saw her cupcakes as a reflection of her own artwork. Whatever it was.......Ben was left without a cake to decorate.

This wasn't a problem that took long to solve. We had fondant, we had willing hands and I had a friend who is always doing sweet things for me and LOVE LOVE LOVES cakes wrapped in fondant. Add that all together and you have a cake for Julie in the making.


Since this little cake was certain to be eaten quickly and it was single layers stacked - I skipped the need for a cake board in between or any dowel rods. We simply iced the cakes - wrapped them with fondant - and then stacked them.

Ben created some Bumble Bees and Flowers. This was his first time - I can tell he made a Bumble Bee - and honestly.......there are many cake decorators that I have noticed can't replicate a figure to save their lives and STILL sell the cake. To me that means that Ben is on his way to being an A #1 decorator.


The cake was simple and not incredibly perfect. Still it ended up being cute. Julie loved it - it was a surprise. Ben and I both got some fondant practice in. Win Win all around.

The cake was Julie's favorite - Chocolate - with a butter cream icing to attach the fondant - and a Vanilla Fondant.

Sometimes You Wing It

My wonderful niece's graduation cake. Not hard really until you factor all the elements that went into it.

#1 - not my kitchen
#2 - I was on vacation for an entire week before doing this cake
#3 - I had virtually none of my cake stuff with me and had to make things up
#4 - the few fondant pieces I made ahead of time kinda broke


Still I think the cake turned out pretty cute. Now....does it look like it is leaning a bit? Yeah, that is because the couple of things that were supposed to be bought for me were kinda forgotten - other people have crazy lives too - so we made due with what I could create.


See how the edges of the cake look like they are sinking into the lower layer? That is because the divider to keep it stable is a Butter Box. Yep it is the thin cardboard that surrounds 4 sticks of butter. Then I folded it in half and wrapped it with plastic wrap. Tah Dah......a cake layer divider was born. Although not a terribly stable one. Since I had no dowel rods we used those skinny wooden skewers. Again - not terrible stable, but they worked for the little time the cake needed to stay together.


Everyone loved the cake - The graduate was happy - and really that is all that counted. Although maybe it is my vanity that makes me think the cake is what made her happy that day. Perhaps it truly was the fact that she was GRADUATED from High School and moving on toward the next big challenge in her life........College!!

The cake was 1 layer White Vanilla - 1 layer Chocolate Chocolate Chip - 1 layer Banana. Vanilla Butter cream and Vanilla fondant for the extras and the name.

Off to College

Cake art. Yeah yeah we see them do it on those TV cake shows like there is NOTHING to it. HA!! You know full well that before it airs they have cut out all the parts where the staff are cursing like sailors becaus it is so crazy trying to get that exact right angle for the edge. If they say otherwise they are FIBBING!!

How do I know this?? Well I know this because I am beginning to start working with more detailed cake carving.


This cake was for our niece, Meghan, who was finishing up high school and getting ready to head off to college. I thought - stacked books - too cute. Googled the thought and designed something off of other wonderful cake decorators who have gone before me. No need to reinvent the wheel.


Crumb coated......what is the little round cake? The topper........wait til you see.


Fondant was not my friend this day. Still brand new to doing fondant I will admit that I had to roll this out 3 times before I got the right shape. Think I need one of those rolling mats that details the sizes? Yeah, me too.

In the end it looked okay. This is my first book ever.......so I was fairly impressed with myself. I admit that I did whisper a few curse words to myself, but later I patted myself on the back too.


Another "of course" moment. Not long ago I realized how they painted on stuff - diluted food color and a paint brush. Duh..........and Of Course!! All in the same stream of thought. So I diluted a bit of brown food dye and got ready to paint the books.


However, I did not paint this book red. This is the base book that was covered in red fondant. Then I took the food coloring paint and created the look of some pages.


Layed some lines on the sides of the books with thin strips of fondant - kinda gives it a more "bookey" feel don't you think?

>Stacked the books on top of one another. Do you see what the smaller round cake was now? The base for a Graduation Cap. The top part is a piece of black fondant......the tassle is red fondant. I did those pieces a few days before.
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The final touches were a bit of icing to detail the cakes. And TAH DAH!!

Cake flavors were Chocolate Chocolate Chip and White Vanilla cakes. Icing was Vanilla Butter cream and a Vanilla Fondant.