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.

Bachelorette Cake

This was a fun cake. A friend of mine - and my FAVORITE Girl Scout at the main office - asked me if I would do a "fun" cake for her friends bachelorette party. We joked around about the different theme's they might have.........I sent her some pictures of things that they could do I found on line.......she didn't even trust me enough to look at them without sending a note back that said something along the lines of "are these appropriate enough to look at here at work?"

They were. Mostly. There weren't any totally rude body part type cakes like I did happen to find. I mean let's be honest - who wants to eat a cut into body part? Ewww.

So what we decided was that "yes" I would get to do a fun cake for her party - but she would consider what she might want it to look like. And she did..........she did another search and came up wit this design. Very cute - Very fun. Time consuming to make all the little detail pieces, but easy enough to actually do (does that make sense?).

In fact, the more challenging part was that the Bride To Be was asked what flavor she would like the cake. I believe that Amanda sent her my blog - which lists flavors I have tackled on the side - and the answer that returned was ...........White with White Chocolate Chip cake (okay done that) and a White Chocolate icing.......ahhhhhhh.......my response was, "Ah does that exist?"

Of course it exists - but I have never done it. What we are finding is that EVERY flavor in the world has already been done. The challenge is generally NOT creating a new flavor, but more tweaking the flavor to be what you and those you are serving it to will enjoy. So after a quick search I found several several several recipes for White Chocolate Icing. Certainly not hard - it only included 1 double boiler adventure.........but also not as easy as a Vanilla Buttercream. Totally yummy though. I have already found 2 more cakes that it matches up nicely with.

So once finished this is what the cake looked like - and my understanding was the party group really enjoyed the flavor of the whole thing. It was the hit of the party (so Amanda said) - although cakes are fun, what I find is if you think something like the above cake up - most likely YOU are the hit of the party because you have spunk and a creative and fun energy about ya.

As you know - this cake was a White Chocolate Chip cake with a White Chocolate Icing. Vanilla fondant was used for the cake and Gumpaste was used for the Personal Items.

How to turn your Hand Red

For heaven's sake!! I was searching through my lists of posts on this blog to clean anything up that was sitting around and found these pics ready to be posted! Holy cow this is from like January or February - well I think the cupcakes were Valentines so totally February.

What is this thing? Well this is a picture of the FABULOUS gift my Mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. I really really wanted this. It is an airbrush. Now I am not new to airbrushing. In High School I airbrushed in my drafting and architecture classes. Well really it was in architecture. Remember - I mentioned before that I took drafting/arch all through High School. Mr. Jackson, our teacher, was kind enough to kinda make up - fashion - create - new classes for 6 of us (was it 6? Kelly, Mike, Fred, Brad, Me....Steve may have been in it too, but he wasn't in our specific group of every year together in the class - so I guess it was 5). By the fourth year we had kinda run through most of the classes I think - there was Drafting - Arch I and Arch II. Hmmm...it was 25 years ago.....maybe there were 2 Draftings and 2 Arch, but since each class was a semester there were really 8 semesters and - well like you really care anyway.......so there was a group of us who took a lot of drafting type classes and Mr. Jackson liked us all enough to keep us going with new areas of the field to teach us - plus he took us to yearly competitions (cool). Toward the end we were creating the exterior plans and then using different mediums to create the presentation - like markers, pencils, water colors and AIRBRUSHING.

Based on the grades I remember receiving I was pretty darn good at all the mediums except.....yes.....Airbrushing. I can remember Steve was excellent at airbrushing - in fact I am fairly sure he opened a tshirt shop where he airbrushed art work onto tshirts like they do at Six Flags. Okay maybe not.....but it is a possibility that it happened. I will ask Mary Jo - she always secretly crushed on him.

So I still keep in touch with Mr. Jackson. FB is a wonderful thing right? However, even before FB I had been in contact - visited - things like that. He had been following my cakes a bit - sending me some ideas and things. Both He and Dave had brought up the Airbrush and the thought that using it might open up some decorating techniques for me. Sounded fun - just needed to get one and at the time I wasn't doing enough "cakes for friends" to buy more then the supplies needed to bake a cake........so I put it on my Christmas list and my wonderful Mom-in-law made the purchase. YEA!
Anyway - back to my brand new totally coveted and wanted Airbrush. I opened it - it looked the same as the one I used in HS. And then the paralyzing fear of it came back. The AIRBRUSH. My classroom nemesis. I hated the Airbrush. How could I have forgotten how much I DID NOT like the Airbrush??

I mean look at the direction picture that details each part!! Ugh. The first day Mr. Jackson gave us the airbrush and had us dismantal it and then put it back together after identifying the parts and figuring out what each one does. Ugh. Now I have to do it again......the flash back fear of a test became overwhelming. However, I was determined to figure this thing out......to see how using it could open up new cake decorating techniques. Only that week I had seen them airbrush the tops of cupcakes quickly and easily........and I was donating about 100 cupcakes to various classrooms at our school for Valentines - so airbrushing all of them vs actually mixing enough red dye into buttercream made sense financially as well as in time.

So I didn't close the airbrush casing........I kept going.........Finish Strong is what we tell the kids.
But then I found the directions.......Ugh.......they were so long!! And there were all these various pieces to deal with........ugh.......

But then I looked closer at the pieces........with the flash back of test anxiety came a flash back of recognition as to how to put together all the pieces of the airbrush. So pushing the directions aside I picked up the airbrush pieces and assembled it. Hey this wasn't so hard - 25 years and I could still build an airbrush - Whooo Hoooo Me!!

But I should read the directions.......But I didn't want to........They were long.......They were boring..........They weren't as fun as just sticking some of the food safe dye into the airbrush and Going For It!! Who needed those stinkin' directions anyway!! I took Architecture in High School and I already KNEW how to use the airbrush.........I am Airbrush Woman watch me CREATE!!

I poured the correct amount of dye into the pot. Closed it all up. Set it for spraying things. Put a cupcake on a plate and..........
Well and then I totally missed the cupcake on my first try.

The second try was a little bit better.........but almost as lame as the first try. I counseled myself into comfort by saying this was a "lack of reading the directions".......no, this missing thing was more just a rustiness due to the 25 year time span of NOT having to use the airbrush in class.

After about half the cupcakes I started to get better. There were certainly blotching spots on some because my hand didn't have the grapse of slowly pulling back the trigger to release the dye, but with each cupcake I became a smidge better. Ben came by and wanted to try - so I let him. His were worse then mine so I patted myself on the back and said in my head, "See don't feel poorly about the way yours look. They are WAY better then his look!".......of course he is a 9 year old boy who has never in his life touched an airbrush.....and they only looked an itty bitty bit worse then mine........and he had the sense to say, "Hey if we add a few of those tiny chocolate chips you have on each cupcake they will look even better"......and he was right.

In the end he was probably the better airbrush artist.

Once they were all sprayed it was time to clean the airbrush. AGAIN I pulled those instructions out and looked at them. Geez O who needs directions.......I cleaned the airbrush out a million times. So I started the process of cleaning this one out. How hard can it be? Well honestly - not hard at all......unless you don't really remember HOW to clean our the airbrush and you are kinda just winging it based on the fact that you are too dang lazy to read the directions.

And with that.........

I turned my hand red.

And the counter. And the cloth that I had to use to clean the counter up. And 2 other cloths too.

Now you may be wondering........Did She Ever Use The Airbrush Again? Bet you think I didn't. Well you are wrong. I have used it, but not much to be honest. I am utterly scared of the thing. I saw on line that my absolute favorite cake decorator - who I have pilgrimaged across the country (okay only from IL to TN) to meet in person at her shop - was setting up an airbrushing class with a cake decorator who is in those competitions and teachers.......but I can't just drive to TN for a class.......and I couldn't find one around here. I should mess around with it more though because I have seen some seriously cute things done with an airbrush on a cake.

Now are you wondering did I read the directions? What do you think?

Of Course Not!!