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.

Aaahhhhh

That was the sound of my sigh of relief...the cupcakes made it all (mostly) in 1 piece. I drove so very very carefully I was so tense. I had my younger brother help carry everything in and he tipped a container and 1 tipped slightly and the lily dug into the icing of the cupcake next to it but I don't think anyone other than me could really tell.

They seemed to be a hit! Only about 14 or 15 were eaten but it was in an office setting and I know sometimes in those settings not everyone is comfortable eating cake/cupcakes or food in general..so not everyone had one but for those that did they loved them! Some asked for my card - which I obviously don't have LOL I'm glad they seemed to enjoy them. There was a lot left over but the mom-to-be really enjoyed them so I lent her the caddy containers to bring them home with her (they are her cupcakes!) I'm so glad she enjoyed them!

I didn't even realize how anxious I was - which is totally silly but I was so concerned if they would be liked or not! Driving home I felt so relaxed - it was over...sigh


And now onto the birthday cake/cupcakes for a family birthday this weekend! I'm baking the cake tomorrow and on Friday Ellie and I are headed over to Aunty Trista's to ice, fondant and decorate with flowers for the big day!

Anyways I'm so tired I feel like I'm rambling in circles - off to bed with this cake-a-teer!

Lily Catastrophe!

I've been having so much anxiety over these baby shower cupcakes today. Its so different making them for fun and just showing up to occasions with them compared to being asked for specific ones - they just never go the same. I worked so hard on them yesterday, exhausted dragged my butt into bed..where I lay WIDE AWAKE until 4 AM because I'm so nervous - will people like the way they look? taste? will they think they're totally lame?!

So this morning I just wanted to finish icing them and stick the rest of the lily's on and get it out of the way...oh boy what a catastrophe! I only made the lily's last night so they haven't had much time to set - I made 6 extra just in case. Well I broke 12...so I made an executive decision that the coconut ones would have a white rose with airbrush'ed orange tips instead of a lily. Finished that, put them in the carriers (I have 2 that are just baking pans with a plastic cover and handle on top and 1 Wilton one that is huge! The wilton one worked great, the others, well started crushing my lily's and smooshing my icing! AHHHH

So I made a quick trip out to Wal-Mart (I found the Wilton one on Monday on sale for $10!! there) looking for another 2...went to the aisle where there were lots before - GONE! luckily I remember they were also at the end of a completely seperate aisle and found a few left there. I was so relieved. I came home transferred the cupcakes to their new carriers, fixed up the broken ones and can now breathe a semi-sigh of relief.

Now I'm just worried about the delivery, I'll put them in the trunk (flattest surface and drive really, really carefully and pray really, really hard..

wish me luck today!

And of course some pictures of the finished product (before the new carriers of course LOL)

All together!

 

Chocolate/Devils Food (BTW we decided against the banana filling)

Vanilla (note the awesome carrier that they all now currently reside in!)

And the coconut (sorry for the fuzzy picture I was shaking with anxiety over these things!)

CUPCAKES!!!!

Wow today was a LONG day. I get to deliver my very first order of cupcakes tomorrow so I spent the day baking. I made the 3 dozen full sized cupcakes as ordered, and used the remainder of the batter to make mini cupcakes

Here is the results:

Then I had to finish making all of the lily's to top them all with. I'm really nervous - mostly about the coconut one...I'm really not a fan of coconut so I'm a terrible judge - I tried one and I thought it was pretty good considering it was a flavor I don't usually go with. Matt is due to get home any minute now and I have a plate of my mini cupcakes for him to taste and judge. 

I'm not overly pleased with my Devil's food cupcakes - I'm thinking of perhaps filling them with banana cream before I ice them (the only ones not done tonight). Again I made samples filled and not filled for Matt to taste and let me know what he thinks.

With all of my remaining batter I experimented a little, one of them adding some banana extract (who knew such a lovely thing existed?!) and it was absolutely delish! Best cupcake I've ever tasted. I let Ellie have one (they're so tiny!) and she devoured it! For a kid who hardly eats anything ever, I've never seen her so excited and eat every last crumb like that before! I guess I haven't really let her have sugar before so that probably had something to do with it LOL - but it was such a tiny little cupcake I figured one little treat wouldn't hurt!

Anyways here's a preview of one of the cupcakes for tomorrow

(please ignore the cupcake drizzled stove top in the backround! 

It didn't turn out exactly as I'd imagined in my head - the lily is quite huge so it does look a little silly, but I think its just the right amount of silly and am quite pleased - the coconut version I put shredded sweetened coconut on top of the blue icing so you can tell the difference between the two.

I'll post some pictures of them all set up tomorrow. Cross  your fingers Matt thinks they're a hit!

Have a delicious day!

Brrr...baby its cold outside

It is FREEZING out today -27 right now (but it is still early morning the sun isn't fully out yet) a high of -19!! Yikes!!

Ellie and I have a few errands we have to run today so please send us all your warm thoughts! At least Ellie will get some good use out of her snowsuit! We're going to meet up with our Aunty Kathy for lunch, and hit the grocery store for our next baking project - cupcakes!

I'm just missing the ingredients for the coconut cake/almond buttercream icing cupcake - that and I really need to find a nice stand to display them on that will cost less than $100!!

Wal-Mart is having a sale right now, their 3 in 1 cupcake/slab cake caddy is usually $30, on for $10!! So I went yesterday to my local wal-mart and they were sold out :( I may have to try a different one today because that is just too good to pass up!

I was supposed to go to a playdate today, but Ellie's friend is sick :( poor girl. So I disected my cake...I took all of the flowers off (they're hard - made of royal icing and gumpaste/fondant) and stuck them back into their storage container so I don't have to waste them...LOL is that terrible?! So now my cake is just a big blue blob with some green vines in my fridge...it is delicious though...

Thats all for now! Have a delicious day!

Flower Cake!

No time for a long post - but here is my final cake for class 2 - from many angles as all sides of the cake are different :P

I've come a long way from this eh? LOL

Practice!

Practice makes perfect right?

Well I've been working on my rose - they leave something to be desired so when my daughter went down for her second nap today I whipped up a batch of royal icing, turned on an episode of dog whisperer and practiced my rose

I made many, many roses...they're still not great but they're coming along! Practice makes perfect right? right?!

I didn't make any more lily's today like I said I would, but here are the ones from yesterday

I baked a cake aswell and was excited to use my new tilting turntable - only to find it doesnt really turn unless I use two hands, so kind of defeats the purpose - there is a bunch of the packaging stuck under it though so I think I'll return it tomorrow/exchange it for a new one

Final Cake - Course 2!

Tomorrow is my final lesson for course #2 so I'm baking my cake. The weather sucks (20cm of snow since yesterday :( ) so I decided to make it a colorful cake to brighten things up. I was going to do a rainbow cake but since Matt is in Vegas this weekend and its just Ellie and I - I decided to go with a girl power theme and made it pink and purple.


Now I have to think of a design for it - I need to put a bunch of flowers on it but I don't want it to look too crowded and forced..I was thinking of doing violets on the sides with long windy vines and some bigger flowers on top...oh who knows!

I think we're learning the basket weave tomorrow but I really don't like the look of those cakes so I'll learn it but I doubt I"ll use it on this cake.

The lily's for the baby shower are coming along - I've finished 17 and ran out of icing so I should probably get back on track with those today - at least I have until wednesday! Baking the cupcakes and icing them will be a breeze its just these damn lilys!

Anyways I'd better run and get something done while Ellie is still sleeping

Have a delicious day!

Cakes Cakes Cakes!

It seems news of the cakes has caught wildfire! I'm going to be very busy this week - and likely covered in icing sugar ;)

I have my final cake for this course - a floral cake
I have 3 dozen baby boy themed cupcakes for a baby shower
and 2 birthday cakes!

I decided for the baby shower cupcakes to do 3 different flavors, top them all with a blue icing and a white lily on top - I know the lily's will take a while to not only create but dry so I got to work on them right away this morning...I did 8 in 45 minutes LOL they will look so cute once they're finished.

For flavors, chocolate, vanilla and  coconut have been requested, so that they know which is which I think I will sprinkly shredded coconut on top of the icing.

I've been dying to do a chocolate banana cake, I think I may do that for my final cake - it just sounds so yummy!  As for my birthday cakes, flavor hasn't been decided but I was thinking something along the lines of a cookies and cream for one of them

I have to make a trip out today to collect some more lily stamens, ingredients for all of these cakes and some decorative stands - maybe a new baking tin or two..

Have a delicious day!

From the beginning

When I first started this cake journey I had no clue what I was doing

In fact - the first time I attempted to make my own icing, I bought regular granulated sugar instead of icing sugar - you should have seen the result of mixing and mixing..I was very confused as to why it wasn't icing!

So here is the end result of my very first cake! (I want you to be able to see the progress - there is hope for me yet!)

But it wasn't all bad - it was infact a rainbow cake!

  Along came my second cake - a xmas cake (also a rainbow cake!)

 And these days I'm working on perfecting my recipes and my decorative flowers to add to my future cakes/cupcakes

My roses need a lot of work

Cate's Cakes

I've been hmmming and hawwing about creating cakes for friends and families events for a while now

After posting pictures of my creations on FB and having a nationwide drool session over them I received many requests to make some custom creations for friends and family.

At first I thought they were joking - until I started getting PM's with actual orders :D

So with that, Cate's Custom Cakes was born and here we are!

I'll be blogging about each of the special cakes I make for some very special people so check frequently to see my new additions!

Looking forward to taking this journey with you!

Cate's Cakes