Oh dear I'm behind!

It has been ages and so many baked treats ago that I've updated!

I've been so incredibly busy lately but I thought I'd finally get around to posting about some recent projects. The first was for Kathleen & Andrew's engagement party that I hosted. Trista and I tackled this project together and we decided we needed to perfect a cookies'n'cream recipe for it. After a flop of a recipe for both cake and frosting the saturday before hand we were at a loss. Trista then found a wonderful recipe without a moment to spare. The party was Friday - so I decided I would bake and decorate the cakes Thursday, Trista was able to come over and help after some exams Thursday night. That was the first mistake.

I really really should have baked the cakes Wednesday so they would all be cool and ready to go Thursday..oh well. I made SO MUCH CAKE...used a giant sheet pan that I hadn't used before and I didn't bake it long enough for the size of the pan and that cake was undercooked...so garbage it went. Try again - next cake in that pan looked beautiful...now how the heck to get it out of the pan without breaking/crumbling when its that big?! Well I sure didn't know because in my attempts to get it out - half went onto some wax paper on the table while the other half came crashing out and headed to the floor - garbage it was!

Next I used my round cake - well the outside was cooking quickly and the inside was taking forever! It took 1 1/2 hours! So needless to say it was hard as a hockey puck - GARBAGE!

Ok - at this point I had a mini meltdown and threw in the towel...I was running low on ingredients, and still had no idea how to successfully bake this cake! Kathleen was over helping me by watching the baby while I was baking, and she ran out and picked up some more ingredients for me while I got my pans cleaned and started on the next batch. I'd pretty much had it - and decided to go with a recipe I know inside and out and I know the cooking times for my pans/ovens..etc...the first 10" cake was a plain old vanilla cake. Then I figured 'hey lets throw some oreos in it!' So the next 10", 2 8", and giant sheet pan were all oreo. They baked beautifully (yay!) I threw them in the way too many cake caddies I own and put them outside (it was snowing and freezing) to cool quickly so I could get to icing them. The giant sheet was because Trista and I had bought these awesome biscuit cutters in different sizes and we wanted to make a bunch of miniature wedding cakes.

So by the time the baking was done was around 10:30pm night before party night...when Trista arrived I had only cut and filled 2 of the 8" cakes...I was pretty behind LOL. So we cut out all of our little circles for the mini cakes, cut and filled all of the cakes. one of the 10" (there were 3) I cut so horribly wrongly (I somehow managed to snap my cake slicer the day before so I was just cutting with a knife and needed some practice apparently!) it was unsalvageable...it looked awful - GARBAGE!

Icing them was the easy part - used my fancy new mixer and icing was done really fast, icing took less than a few minutes per cake.

Then to make some fondant - well I'm a complete idiot (can ya tell yet?!) and added way too much icing sugar to marshmellow ratio for the fondant so again Trista had to rescue me...we finally got it made rolled it out and covered all of the cakes - actually I was pretty impressed with myself considering I'd only covered one other cake with fondant before and it took many, many, many attempts to do.

Trista was making all of the details and decorations for the cake (along with many, many rescues from me and my cake disasters! LOL) She made all of the daisies and all of the stripes to put along the cake. we had this from Wilton as our inspiration (as the wedding colors are black and pink)

Well at 2AM and after many many cakes, you start to hurry things along a little...we had 4 cakes we needed to cover with black fondant stripes and in an attempt to avoid making more fondant we just spaced our stripes out a whole bunch! Also instead of making the border with pink fondant balls I just piped on a bunch of pink ball type icing with a pink buttercream - threw the cakes on top of eachother and WENT TO BED! So this is how they turned out (there were 2 of these)

Next we had to do the mini cakes - well we were pretty much zombies at this point, so that idea quickly was scrapped - Trista made one absolutely beautiful mini cake for them (they requested a special one for them to freeze so they can eat it on their engage-a-versay) and she made this:

So all in all - my garbage the next day was very very heavy with way too much scrapped cake - the cakes were delicious and enjoyed by all I was exhausted, Matt was exhausted (laying floor and finished just in the knick of time!) Trista was I'm sure exhausted but it went well. 

And just for good measure some more pictures from the party!

Punch with lots of vodka!

The drinks table - everyone had a wine glass and there were stemware tags I made for them to write their names on

We enjoyed some champagne with hibiscus flowers in them - so yummy and look so pretty (this is the bride to be)

Tissue paper poms - these were hanging all over in the wedding colors

Banner for the couple

Party Shot!

and of course - the happy couple!

Cake Deprivation

I've been depriving you all of my recent cake progress! I've just been so buy no time for updates. I'm officially finished all of my classes and as awesome as they were and as sad as I am to see them go, it might be nice to have a week or two of not worrying about getting everything ready last minute


oh wait - I have SOOOO many cakes to do this month! Fortunately Trista is doing almost all of them with me which makes it so much easier and so much more fun!

I've also FINALLY ordered a kitchen-aid mixer. From the help of some lovely WB'ers I found this awesome deal:

http://cayneshousewares.com/product.php?productid=6794&cat=0&page=1 


and with this coupon:


VISA2011R 


I got free shipping :D It should be here Friday and I'm so excited for it!! 


In the coming weeks I'll be making 1 mini wedding cake (for practice on Saturday), then 1 main cake with 4 or 5 mini wedding cakes for Kathleen & Andrew's engagement party next Friday, and 3 birthday cakes!!


April will be a bridal shower cake and an Easter cake.


May - Ellie's birthday


August- Wedding cake


Sept - Wedding cake




So thats a lot I need to get some practice in for! I've been so incredibly nervous about laying fondant on cakes - I've tried a few times and I knew how HARD it was. I can proudly say I can now do it no problem - its actually SO EASY! dare I say it, even easier than the crumb coat that goes on under it!


My last cake for my last class was a wee bit sad - but I prepared everything the night before at 2AM and had no final plan, nor many flowers pre-made...Add that to my fondant decided to fail miserably day of and I just decided to wing it. It happened to be my younger brother's 19th birthday so this is what he got

Valentines Day

Matt and I don't usually celebrate V-Day and now life with a baby makes it entirely impossible. For most of the day we'd even forgotten it existed. We are in dire need of a good grocery shop so there wasn't much to choose from for dinner, but with Ellie still on the mend and how busy any restaurant would be we didn't have much choice. So I made us some pancakes and eggs and made some gum paste calla lilly's and put those on top.

Wish I took a picture :P Sorry I've got nothing to show you but it was cute. Matt of course actually ate the Calla Lilly's LOL - I did use a gum paste/fondant mix and flavored the marshmellow fondant so it was actually much sweeter than you'd think...but still I'd never actually eat those LOL

I hope everyone had a good snuggle with their sweetie!

Gum Paste Fun

I've been missing this week - nothing exciting baked just a couple batches of banana cupcakes - decorated very boringly...

I did have a class today. We learned how to make roses, carnations and Calla lily's out of gum paste.

I'm actually quite pleased with my very first attempts at each!

Here are my roses - actually turned out beautiful! I wish I hadn't dusted them with the pearl dust, I think it cheapened the look of them as I didn't do it very nicely - ah well!

Some Calla Lily's (had a bit of a time with the Callyx on this damn flower - I'm not so sure I like it..) Also Trista said something along the lines of the middle of these flowers always look like caterpillars and now I can't get it out of my head LOL

And lastly my carnation - very pleased with it - especially since its just the first, I'm sure all of them will get better with practice

Ellie has been sick so needless to say I'm exhausted and just not in the blogging mood today! I'm sorry to dissapoint - hopefully I'll get back to it this week, I have a lot of cakes coming up I need to prepare for!

WMI

Well I'm in the very last course of my cake decorating now...and I'll be so sad to see it end. I love having my day out with other cake-a-teers!

Sooo....I applied to be an instructor :P I need that day out and why not spend it doing something I love?! Who knows if they'll actually hire me but I figured I'm not going to loose anything by applying!

No cakes today, actually I don't have any orders for cakes for a couple of weeks - I wonder what I'll do with myself? Maybe I'll have to make one for a playdate or something just to get my fix

Fondant Cake

So I went with a yellow fondant last night! I also flavored it. It was a hot sticky mess but actually turned out great and much more pliable than the stuff from the store.

Because I still have no kitchen table (long story!) I had a space of kitchen counter about 20 inches wide to roll the fondant out on - on top of wax paper which just kept moving all over the place...needless to say I could not roll it out enough to drape over the cake - so ended up putting it on in pieces, it looked awful the seams were terrible. Oh well long night - went to bed.


Today we went over to Trista's to make some cupcakes and finish this cake. After some running around to various craft stores we decided to get cracking on the cake. Still with no particular design in mind - Trista wanted to learn some flowers so I showed her the button flower and away she went! She was particularily good at getting the flowers out without damaging the petals (something I need to work on a lot). Basically she created all of the elements of the cake and I put them on. In the end it turned out amazing.

Trista also youtubed some instructions to make a gum paste/fondant bow and tried it out and it turned out fabulous. We then painted over it with a water/vodka mix to keep it shiny - almost metallic looking. I'm quite impressed with this cake - best one so far..so here it is!!!


The fondant covered disaster before decorating:

and the final product

YUM - Bananas!

You know - I love the smell of my house since I started up this hobby. It always smells so delicious. Today I'm taking that recipe that I toyed with to make the banana mini cupcakes and making a big cake! Getting ready for a birthday celebration!

Ellie and I are headed over to Aunty Trista's tomorrow to work on decorating the cake and making some cupcakes so I figured I should get this one baked, iced and covered in fondant tonight so its ready to work on - I'm so looking forward to it!

So its a banana cake with banana cream filling - and of course, has the signature rainbow touch. Royal blue (for welcoming the newest member of the family) and bright pink (for the birthday girl!)

I haven't put much thought into the design of it - I want to use a bunch of flowers but I'm just not sold on anything in particular...I might go with a bunch of button flowers and random dots - keep it clean and simple...more importantly I need to decide on the color for the fondant for the base of the cake - I'm almost tempted to stick with a white? Hmm...maybe I'll do the fondant tomorrow when Trista can weigh in on it.