Dave's Birthday Cupcakes

It is my Sweetie's Birthday Today!! Happy Birthday Day Dave!!

Today Dave turns all of 40 years old..........Yesterday he wanted to take some cupcakes to work - so we baked up a couple dozen - iced them - and then I took small rounds of fondant and wrote a message of Birthday Wishes (notice I left his age off - that makes me wonder - at what AGE do we start leaving our age off the Birthday Cake? I mean when I do cakes for friends they always ask it to say "Happy 12th Birthday SoandSo"........is it 21?)



Well anyway - I saw that some Cakers have come up with the clever thought of cutting small flat fondant pieces and writing letters on them to create a message that can transfer to cupcakes. How smart was/is that? So here it is - and most likely here you will see it again!!

These Birthday Cakes were Dave's favorite flavor - Chocolate Chocolate Chip - some with a Vanilla Buttercream Icing and some with a Chocolate Buttercream Icing (Dave's fav is the Vanilla).

Happy Birthday All Day Long!

WWE Cake

Diary of a Wimpy Kid's Birthday Cake

The story of the Whimpy Kid cake will start with this...........the only way I have figured out to day as to how to make a cake Half 'n Half. I put a cutting board in the center as a divider and then start to scoop the batter in from either side (one at a time since I only have 2 hands).

When finished it looks like this and I take the cutting board out and scrap the sides of it before putting in the sink.

Have you found an easier way? I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to know it so that I can have 2 hands to put batter in while the divider stays in place.

Once baked and cooled - the Diary cake was crumb coated with a buttercream and set to the side.

Now this cake is the FIRST EVER - Second Cake from the same design I ever made. Yeppers - 11 years of decorating kids cakes for them and I have never had a repeat performance cake. So I was very excited to do this. It meant that I could take from the experience of what "could be tweaked better" after doing the first cake and see if it worked out.

There were a few things that I thought could have looked nicer from the first cake - like the edges of the book. I will show you as we go through it.



Now keep in mind - I was very pleased with the first cake.........this is the first one - the difference in the second is this time around I did the edges of the book a little too long over the top edge - and the cover of the book is not attached to the spine of the book - notice the crack where the side meets the cover? Notice how the edges of the book over the pages is kinda droopy and a tiny bit cracked looking? That I would have liked to be different.

So with Diary Cake II I changed that. The fondant for the cover and the binding side are all one sheet - nice and smooth transition from cover to side. The edges of the cake over the pages are also different - I placed the fondant on the cake - cut the edges off adn then rolled fondant into a long tube and attached it to the edge giving them a more smooth finish. Much cleaner I think.

Cake I you can see that the edges around the book are cracking - and that the pressure of that edge over the side caused it to look a bit more like paper and less like a hardback cover. However - love the way the piece of paper on the front looks.


The edges are cleaner on Book II - but the paper looks a smidge smaller and not as identical to the original book. Still......no one really notices that much.

After those tiny differences there really isn't much to be compared. Both cakes turned out cute and they are so close to the same in the final product that I was happy with either. Hopefully more friends will say, "Oh can you do that cake again for me......." - not that I am banking on that though because most want something completely unique.

The process of drawing the cover with Gret dropping his ice cream cone. The detail on the cover (the brown edging and stuff) are all done with a mixture of water and brown food color that was then painted onto the cake. The blue lines on the paper were the similar - mixture of water and blue food coloring painted on. All the other drawing is done with a buttercream icing colored to match.

The final Cake ............ The birthday girl loved it. Yea!! Another win. Her mom loved it too. Working with fondant that doesn't really have to look perfectly smooth is so much easier then trying to find perfection - but getting to do the same cake twice certainly makes it easier to improve a design. Practice Makes Perfect.......Practice Makes Perfect.......but you can only beg so many people to let you do their cake.

This cake was half Chocolate and half White Silver cake.......with a Vanilla Buttercream icing and a Vanilla Fondant.

Box of Cupcakes

Everybody loves a Sweet Surprise Present right? This one was for a friend who was having a birthday and I wasn't sure she was getting a cake. Being a single mom with two kids under 12 sometimes means not getting a cake on your actual day - I remember this because I don't remember making my own mom a cake until I was much older.


Since I was whipping up some batter for some other cakes - I thought a few cupcakes was in order for a mom who works hard everyday to make sure her girls are happy.


Nothing better then a little Chocolate Buttercream icing and a Cherry on top right?

Happy Birthday to the Single Moms (and Dads)!!

These were White cake and Chocolate Buttercream Icing.

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.