'Throwback Cakes'

Somehow, all in one week, I ended up making three different cakes that looked like they should have come from the 70's and 80's. The Alf cake was for a friend of Ricky's 30th Birthday. His wife planned a surprise 80's themed party and, since Alf was his favorite show back then, asked if I could make an Alf cake. I cheated a little. I found a Wilton Alf pan on ebay for $3.99 and bought it - good thing too because I never could have pulled that off on my own. In one day I successfully managed to break one Alf cake and 5....yes you read that right.....FIVE 1/2 sheet cakes. My plan was to make a tie-dyed sheet cake to go with the Alf cake so I could be sure we had enough cake for everyone. I ended up calling the Walmart bakery to order the sheet cake. I have no idea how I did it, but I ended up with so many broken cakes in my house that weekend that I'm pretty sure I gained 15 pounds while trying to get it all out of here. I was pretty sure I'd retire after that, but with two more cakes to make that week alone I didn't have much time to rest.

The Atari cake was for a girl that I know from work but that Ricky has known forever. Yes, Traci - I'm talking about you. Right out in the open. It's all good though, I promise. :) What she asked for was something simple for her husband Brian. Just a sheet cake with black frosting and the Atari logo on it. I was happy to do it, and pretty excited about the simple design and the little effort it would take. Then I stumbled across a picture of the most amazing console cake while I was researching to see what a classic Atari game console even looked like - I'd never laid eyes on one in my life. So I asked Traci how she'd feel if I did some experimenting and this was what I came up with. This cake covered a lot of firsts for me: The first cake I'd covered in Marshmallow fondant. The first time I used Rice Krispie treats to add to the shape of the cake instead of just adding accents on the cake. The first time I worked with gum paste. The first time I tried the Wilton spray color. The first time I had to go back and paint the entire cake with icing color when the spray just didn't cut it. The first time I managed to drink more than two beers without gagging. Oh - and the first time I discovered I'm a little more creative if I'm drinking an ice cold Bud Light Lime while I work. I was really nervous dropping it off at work the day after I finished it. You always wonder things like, 'Will they like it as much as I do?' 'Will it taste good?' 'Did I deliver what they were wanting?' Turns out it was a big hit. Traci said that Brian loved it and was super excited about it. Whew! What a relief!

The record cake was for my friend, Sabrina's, son's 13th birthday. She had originally asked if I could do another game console cake. For her, I'd do anything so I said 'Heck yeah!' Then she emailed me and said she was giving him a record player for his birthday because he loves everything 'old school' and asked if maybe I could make a record to go with it. Again, whew! What a relief! I could have done another game console, but I was just a little scared to try again. What I came up with was a vanilla pound cake with chocolate milk buttercream and chocolate fondant. Ricky held the exacto knife while I turned the turntable to make the grooves for the record, and then I finished it up with the musical notes. Another big hit. Sabrina said that her son just loved it and was so excited to see it...and again, I was relieved to find out that it also tasted good. Maybe by this point I was getting the hang of this whole baking and decorating thing.

So that's a lot of cake history in just one post, so I think I'll leave it at that. I have a kitchen to clean up from 5 nights of baking cakes last week.

I Love The Smell of Buttercream in the Morning

The next two cakes I was lucky enough to make are two of my favorites. Not because I thought they were overly spectacular or amazing, but because of why I made them. One of my favorite quotes has been attributed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but snopes.com says it was the work of an 'unknown forwarder' at some point in email history. Regardless of who said it, it's still true: Throughout history only two defining forces have been willing to die for you. Jesus Christ, and the American GI - one died for your soul, the other for your freedom. Have truer words ever been spoken? I think a lot of times we get wrapped up in the politics of military activity. Everywhere you go someone seems to have an opinion about it vastly different from your own. Which is good - this is a free country, after all. What really bothers me, though, is the blatant disregard for the men and women who continually fight for our freedom to express the opinions we have. So when I was asked by my neighbors, Wes and Kate, to make a cake for a close friend who was deploying, I jumped on the opportunity. I did have a bad case of 'baker's block' when I was planning the cake, but after playing around a little - and spending some time in the toy aisle at Walmart - I came up with the desert theme cake complete with a Rice Krispie camouflage tent and some Army men. Again, I never thought it was spectacular, but I was proud, and honored to make it.

The next deployment cake hit a little closer to home for me. This past Thanksgiving was a great day, but bittersweet due to the fact that we all knew that the next morning my nephew, Buddy, was flying back to El Paso to get ready to deploy to Iraq. How was this even possible? He was just a baby yesterday, and now he's a grown man putting himself in harm's way for the safety and freedom of people he doesn't know. Because this time this soldier was so close to me, I was lost for ideas. When I had asked him for his help with ideas for Wes and Kate's cake he made the comment that a unit patch on a cake would be a cool idea - so that's what I did for him. It was a pretty big cake and a relatively small patch so that's where the US Army logo came in. Every dot of icing I put on that cake broke my heart a little more, know what it represented. And to see my nephew choked up and with tears in his eyes when he saw it nearly brought me to my knees. Gladly, he'll be home for leave in just two more weeks and then home 'for good' eight weeks after that. I'm hoping for 'for good' anyway - he's already planning his next tour in 2012.
So for now, for anyone reading this, please take a moment and pray for the safety of our troops - whether or not you agree with their being where they are - they still need prayers for safety and prayers of gratitude. Another favorite quote of mine is: If you can't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them. And I think I'll just leave it at that.

My First 'Real' Cake

My friend, Tonya, is one of the most amazing women I've ever met. She's an incredible friend, awesome hairdresser, great mom and all around wonderful person. So when she asked me to make her daughter's Sweet 16 cake last October, and told me what she was looking for, I just didn't have the heart to tell her, 'No, I've never done a cake like that and I can't do it....I'm scared.' So I got together with my friend, Crystal, who is a self-taught fondant Goddess, and we made a trial run cake. Then the week before the party I made another one...the second looked better than the first so I thought 'Hey, maybe I can do this after all??' The picture here is the end result. Sure it's not as great as some of the 'mad hatter' cakes that you can find online, but I thought, for a first try, it wasn't too bad. Obviously I passed on the fondant and hand-piped the zebra stripes. It took a while, but I thought that they turned out pretty good - kind of funky, and less uniform than what I came up with when I tried the fondant. It was exhausting, and I think I spent about 30 hours on the final cake - working late into the night after work two nights in a row and all day that Saturday. But seeing the look on Tonya's face, and hearing how happy her daughter was with it, made it so worth it. This is when I discovered that there are very few cake catastrophies that a trip to Michael's or Hobby Lobby won't fix. And it's also when I discovered that free-handing colored white chocolate for letters and numbers looked much better than trying to use stencils and colorflow icing (for me anyway.) I think each cake has the potential to result in new mistakes - which, in turn, will result in new lessons learned. I would eventually give fondant another chance...months later....but you'll have to keep reading to see how that turned out.

In Over My Head?

My sister, Debra, got married in September to one of the most amazing men I've ever met - Jason. Being new to decorating cakes and with visions of grandeur I said, 'Oh sure - I'll make your wedding cake - it'll be easy.' Famous last words, right? I had a beautiful picture in mind of a 3 tiered square cake with chocolate frosting and a simple, elegant strip of teal fondant around the bottom of each tier. How hard could it be? In a word: EXTREMELY. This picture is what I ended up with - it was a three layer cake with chocolate frosting. The bottom tier had been nixed because my oven isn't big enough to accomodate a 16" pan. The middle tier stayed at home on my table with a chef's knife driven right into it's heart. It was awful. Lessons learned there? 1. Flipping and stacking multiple layers is an exact science. 2. It's not as easy to mend broken layers with frosting as you might think. 3. When you have a crack the size of the Grand Canyon in your top two layers you cannot cover the cake with fondant hoping that it will hold.

In tears I scrambled to find something to make this poor pathetic cake look better than it did. I covered it with teal drop flowers in random spots and took it to the party. Disappointed that it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to I refused to take pictures of the finished product. I regret that move to this day. Why? Good question. The answer is because no one at that party knew what the cake had looked like in my head. They only saw what I ended up with. Every person that walked in the door raved about how beautiful and elegant it was. What I thought was a fiasco and a colossal failure turned out to be a big hit, and now the only thing I have to show for it is a fabulous new brother. I guess, in the end, it was a pretty good exchange. But if you take anything at all away from this post let it be this: Celebrate every failure as if it is a work of art. What might be disappointing to you could be the most beautiful creation anyone else has ever seen. If you don't appreciate it, and photograph it, months later you'll be kicking yourself wishing you hadn't been so stubborn and full of yourself.

Oh, and another lesson you might want to take away from this is to know your limitations and try not to get in over your head. Remember, it's all about the baby steps.

A Few More Cake Adventures

These are the next three cakes I made - several months after the cupcake castle. For Ricky's birthday last year I wanted to make him a yummy cake version of his favorite candy: The Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. The result was a variation of a recipe that Shasta found for me - with peanut butter/cream cheese frosting and a chocolate ganache glaze on top. It's not beautiful - but it was GOOD. It was a great way to top of the night after he managed to win a jackpot playing free birthday bingo. :)

The cake with the roses on top was my 'final exam' for my cake class - we were told to pick our favorite cake from the Wilton Course 1 book - and after a lot of whining and complaining because I couldn't get the roses to come out right, I managed to make enough of them to pass the first course. One of these days I'll make it back for courses 2 and 3....maybe.

The pink and brown cake was something I did on a day when I was home from work with Evyn. While she napped I came across a recipe for rolled buttercream fondant and thought I'd give it a try. It tasted great and was fun to make - but unless you're working in a walk-in refrigerator and have the body temperature of....oh, I don't know....a vampire maybe - it will melt the second you touch it. I had a huge sticky mess in my kitchen, but Elaina and Emery were pretty excited to see it when they got home from school that day.

So that's another three cakes down - which really translates into about 5 pounds around my mid-section. I won't lie, now I'm a little sick of cake and don't eat nearly as much of it as I used to - and my hips have thanked me every day.

Baby Steps

So this was my first baking experiment....the cupcake castle for Evyn's first birthday. There were a few minor problems and a couple of random moments of sheer panic when I thought to myself, 'Why in the world would I want to ruin my last baby's first birthday by trying to make the cake myself?' But - all in all - I think I did ok for never having piped a drop of icing in my life. At this point I wasn't even sure what buttercream icing even was, and (obviously,) had no idea that you couldn't put it directly onto normal wrapping paper to add decorations to the cake board without the grease from the butter oozing into it. So the castle turrets (is that the word?) had a halo. Big deal. It definitely didn't ruin the party. Who knew it would be the first baby step down the road to this hobby, which I LOVE, that it took me 3 decades to find?

So Here We Go.....

Almost a year ago now I, wanting to keep my baby's first birthday party cheep and also terribly un-inspired by most 1st birthday themes, decided 'Hey - I can make her cake - that'll be easy.' So I googled some recipes, bought a piping bag and some icing colors, and tried very hard to remember how my sister, Toma, had decorated the Mickey Mouse cake she had made for her husband's birthday 15 years ago.
With the mixer my husband had bought me for our first Christmas together in hand I set out to mix up some great vanilla cupcakes and butter cream frosting. Everything was going great until the mixer started whining a little....and then a lot....and then in a giant puff of smoke, it died. Just died. I couldn't do anything else with it. Luckily, I was done with everything but coloring the icing so several minutes, and one very tired stirring arm later, I was done - with the prep at least. That's when it hit me: I had no idea what I was doing. With a little less than an hour to spare before party time I managed to turn 23 cupcakes into a decent princess castle.....and so began my journey to, what I hope will be, cake artist stardom.
Several months after the cupcake castle, I took a decorating class with two of my besties, Kimmy and Shasta. I don't think any of us really wanted to be there because we were passionate about decorating cakes - we were just loving the 2 hours of guaranteed girl time every week. We had a great time, but I can't say we really learned a lot. The next class didn't work out because of a scheduling issue (it's very hard to find two hours a week to play Betty Crocker with 4 very busy kids to keep up with.) I'm a big fan of improvising though, and what I can't go to class to learn, I turn to my good friend youtube to learn.
So here we are, 11 months later and I've finally decided what I want to be when I grow up. I'm no Bronwen Weber, and won't ever be, but if this adventure doesn't take me to stardom, we'll all find out together where it will lead. I've made a lot of cakes for a lot of people over the past 8 months or so. Some were good. Some couldn't even play on the same field as bad. But it's been fun. The one thing I regret is not taking a picture of every single cake I've ever made. For some reason I was under the delusion that if it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, there was no use taking a picture of it. No more of that. We can't all learn from my mistakes if I don't have pictures of my mistakes, so from here on out there will be pics of all of them (the good, the bad, AND the ugly.) Now if I could just figure out how to post the pictures we'd be golden.
So as much as I'd love to spend the next 6 hours here typing up all of my baking adventures, I really have to go.... I have promises to keep, and cakes to make before I sleep.