Tickled Pink Elmo

I had a lot of fun with this cake! First of all, the gumpaste Elmo was a challenge, but I was determined to make him adorable and accurate-looking. I think I did a pretty good job; what do y'all think? I still maintain that making him furry was the hardest part of this cake, but I did find a pretty cool tutorial on Pinterest.

The cake is made with Fondarific, which is probably of the easiest fondants that I've ever worked with. (I also like FondArt but they dont' sell that in the Tampa area.)

I also used a lot of cutters from Duff and my rolling pins and modeling tools came from The Cake Tool Company (I won the supplies at the last FL ICES day of sharing). I'm really glad Michael's offers such a larger selection of cake supplies now, but I do wish there was a local cake supply store that sold more of the specialty equipment and hard-to-find items (like FondArt!)

Overall, I'm pretty proud of this one, it's one cute cake! Not as cute as the birthday girl, Marlee, though! She was just adorable! I definitely enjoyed getting the opportunity to make the birthday cake for such a sweet little girl.  Makes all the long nights and busy weekends worth it! :-)

Nobody likes you when you're 23

I have not one, but three friends whose birthday fell on the same day. So I had to double up on the cake decorating! They're both French vanilla cakes with Italian Meringue Buttercream...

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but that IMBC has the potential to give me a heartattack. I always think I've ruined it! (and to be fair, I did ruin one batch by not mixing the egg whites long enough and overcooking the sugar...) But in the end, if you just walk away from the mixer, then 9 times out of 10 (or at least 2 times out of three this week), when you come back in 15 minutes, your icing will be perfect.

Also! Add lots of flavoring! That's the secret! I learned that this go-round. At least a tablespoon, maybe two, and definitely more than you think you need. :)

Anyway, here are some close ups!

An attempt at Lambeth. (with buttercream, not royal icing)

I might have butchered the lyrics, but you get the point!

Ducks!

So in the town I used to live in for a couple months, there was a road called Duck Slough. I still don't know how to pronounce it. And that story has nothing to do with the duck cake I made, I just thought it was interesting.

Now, to the cakes!

My roommate loves rubber duckies! And why not? They're cute! And since I knew she loved duckies, they were the basis for the birthday cake I made for her. Birthday cake AND cupcakes. Because, well... why not?

The only problem is, I am a procrastinator. Surprise. I swear that's what gets me everytime I go to make a cake. This time it was because I couldn't find the candy molds I needed, and I didn't have time to order them online. So I called or visited 4 or 5 craft stores, and none of them had rubber ducky molds!

Then inspiration hit, and I remembered the cake decorating supply store in Tampa. So I called them up, and guess what? They had one mold left! So I had to book it there before they closed, and silly me, I had to drive there in rush hour traffic. (Terrible idea, by the way. Someone on 275 totally almost killed me.) Never again, I say, will I procrastinate! Oh, how I wish that were true...

I am really glad that I finally made it out to Cakes Plus. It. Was. Awesome. They had a ton of display cakes that were gorgeous, and sold all kinds of supplies that I'm sure I'll need/want some day. Gumpaste flower molds, fondant, cake pans, you name it! I was like a kid in a candy shop. (That's funny right? Because they sold candy... It's a little funny?) :)

And luckily traffic wasn't too bad on the way home, so I got back in time to make the little candies, and decorate the cupcakes to look like bubbles. The cake, of course, was decorated in the same theme. (I tried to "ombre" the cake, but the buttercream I used wasn't smooth enough. I can do it at work, no problem, but the buttercream there is a lot smoother and lighter. I bet IMBC would take to the ombre effect perfectly!)

And that's the story of how I once again procrastinated, but somehow pulled off another awesome cake.

Happy Birthday Danielle!

Pretty Pearls and Ravishing Ruffles

We're just going to take a moment to ignore the monochromatic color scheme, and instead choose to focus our attention on how perfect this cake is for my fashion-forward, always-in-style little sister. And shout out to Mom and Dad for the Christmas present of oval cake pans!

Buttercream Ruffles

I absolutely love this ruffle pattern. And it is surprising easy to make, you just do a bunch of zig zag motions up the side of the cake. The best part is how fast it is to decorate, and yet everyone who saw it was just in awe... I know if I didn't know how to decorate cakes, I'd think this was a super complicated design.

My two favorite design elements are on this cake: simplicity and elegance. And it doesn't hurt that chocolate is my favorite either! :)

Adam's Lego Cupcakes

Adam's LEGO cupcakes for his 9th birthday!

I sat down one night and made a ton of little legos out of fondant, which too a long time, not surprisingly, but they turned out really cute!

And I also made the mistake of making IMBC instead of American buttercream to go on top of the cupcakes. Because even though I like the Italian buttercream better, and most people I know like it better, 9 year olds do not.

However, the green/red/yellow/blue swirls were a nice touch, right?

And here is the finished product!

Happy birthday to me!

My birthday cake this year wasn't anything too grand or exciting, because my work schedule was a little crazy and I didn't have time to plan anything over the top, but I did make a cute little strawberry/lemon cake and some cake balls for my birthday party. And since it was my 21st birthday, afterall, I dressed the cake up with some limoncello and strawberry vodka. Also, I made cake pops. Because everybody loves cake pops.

And of course I did the rosette style on the cake, because a) it's really super fast and easy, and b) it looks really pretty! So everyone wins! And I tried to do an ombre thing, but it was a bit of a rushed job and (don't tell anyone) I used canned frosting. I KNOW! I'm ashamed to even admit it. I wanted to make an IMBC, but I just ran out of time. It took 3 cans of frosting to do that 8" cake, though. Crazy, right? It still tasted good, though. :)

Mini Margarita Cupcakes

When you have to ask your dad to go to the liquor store for you to buy some tequila, you know it's going to be an interesting day.

In my case, I asked him so that I could make mini margarita cupcakes for my friend Savannah's 21st birthday. And of course, for any 21st birthday, they need to be legit margarita cupcakes.

I'm not a big fan of the recipe that I used, which included frozen margarita mix and a splash of tequila; it was good but not quite the right texture for my liking. I'm a lot pickier than all my taste-testers, though, because nobody else complained. The frosting I made, however, was just amazing, if I can say so. I put about two shots worth of tequila and a little bit of lime food coloring in the frosting, and it just looked so good on top of the cupcakes with the green and white sugar "salt" I used to decorate.

I'll keep tweaking that cupcake recipe, though, and since we've still got a ton of tequila (I told dad I didn't need much!) and since my 21st birthday is coming up in five or six weeks, I've got plenty of reasons to keep baking!

tye dye cookies

I love playing with colors, especially when there's icing involved. So when my mom asked me if I'd make cookies for my brother's disco-themed end of the year party at school, I immediately thought: tie-dye.

So my first venturing into the world of tie-dyed sugar cookies was both a huge mess and a great success. I say it was a huge mess because I had six different colors of royal icing in zip lock bags with a little corner snipped off, and there was no way to get the icing from the bag to the cookie without also getting it all over the everything else. (Shout out to Katie for helping me finish the cookies at one in the morning!)

But basically what I did was take the icing, which was a drippy consistency, as I learned from Cookie Craft, and randomly drop it on the cookies, then swirl it around a bit with a toothpick. So it was pretty psychedelic. 

For future cookies, I'll probably go back to using a squeeze bottle, instead of zip lock bags (I was too lazy to find some) and get some electric gel paste colors from Americolor. Now THAT would be fabulous!

I've even played around some with blending buttercream icing together, like this cake I made at Betty Cakes many weeks back. I love how the purple/blue/green blended together. The orange/purple and the green/pink, not so much, but this is something I want to look into more, because if I had placed all the colors together correctly, I think I could've made them all blend together in one beautiful rainbow of a cake.

I know this is weird, but even though I hate cleaning out icing bags (it's just so messy and greasy and colorful), when my hands (and, admittedly everything else) were all covered in a bajillion different icing colors, it looked so colorful and beautiful in a weird, avant garde sort of way.

Also, painting with royal icing: Is that a thing? Does it sound as awesome to you as it does to me? I need to find some painting classes to sign up for.

My baby sister turned 18 and all she got was this awesome cake

Happy birthday, Katie!

This is the story of how I created a beautiful cake without my giant pantry full of cake decorating supplies, and successfully made it both delicious and delicious-looking.

The only problem (apparently) was that we had French vanilla cake mix in the house and being the efficient and non-wasteful person that I am (or lazy), I decided to use that mix. Even though Katie wanted chocolate cake. But I made her chocolate buttercream!

So this hand mixer is as old as my parents' marriage. But it still works! Mostly.

I tried to make zebra stripes in the cake itself, but I think I might need to work on my technique a little more. And also I used green-dyed cake batter, as opposed to white and chocolate cake batter...so it looked less zebra-y than it should've.

But, hey, it still looks good! Right?! And I even found flowery candles at Kroger, so my sister's love of all things flora shines through with this cake, as well as her love of chocolate.

And as a postscript to the title, she did get more than just this awesome cake. But I still thought it was a good blog post title anyway. So there.

The 90th Birthday Cake

Here we have a lovely two-tier square cake that I made for a 90th birthday party. It's a red velvet cake with cream cheese filling, Italian meringue buttercream, and fondant accents. Oh, the bow on top is gumpaste. Wilton gumpaste, not Bakels, because I learned my lesson with that one (Bakels never dries hard enough. It's quite tragic, considering how much cheaper it is.)

And I got a chance to try out my airbrush machine again! You can't tell in the picture, but the gold is very shiny and metallic.

The idea came from a larger, four tier cake I found on Google Images when I was looking for inspiration. The only thing I really had to go on was a suggestion for gold & black accents, and white frosting. So that's what I did! I wanted this cake to be really special because turning 90 is really special too! 

I'm so honored to be able to help celebrate such a momentous occasion, and for such an incredible, kind-hearted person. And shout out to my roommate, Joy, for setting me up to make the cake and assisting me along the way! :D

The Five Hour Cake

Today is my roommate's birthday. She is, if you couldn't tell, 20 years old. And since I'm a baker (and I had no other gift ideas) I decided to surprise her with a cake.

Which is a lot harder than you might think, because I didn't know her favorite flavor (my guess was red velvet or strawberry) or what colors or design to make it. So I just sorta winged it (wung it?) and came up with this idea on the spot.

It helped that Joy had plans last night so I was able to go out to the store, buy ingredients, have time to bake the cake, make a gumpaste bow and frosting, cool the cake, and ice and decorate it, all while she was out.

The bow is my first attempt ever, and Joy and Sophie thought it looked really good, but (you know what a perfectionist I am) the unevenness and powdered sugar splots really bothered me. Plus, I think using a gumpaste/fondant mix might help instead of straight up gumpaste, because when I put the little bows on the cake, some of them cracked. So I'm definitely going to practice this skill a little more.

And speaking of practicing, this is the website where I got the tutorial, so if you need some gumpaste bow practicing tips as well, here you go!

I still can't believe that I started baking at 7pm and by midnight, it was done. I know if I had more time, I could've fixed thought little tiny imperfections that bothered me, like the bow, and smoothed out the buttercream a little more. (I probably would've used a from-scratch recipe instead of a doctored box mix too.)

If you live in an apartment, or even a house, with a small number of inhabitants, say two or three, and you don't go through a gallon of milk as fast as a household of seven would, then it might because a good idea to check the expiration date of aforementioned milk, just in case it's two weeks past the date, and before you start dumping the milk into recipes. Just a thought.

And my final word of advice for anyone looking for cake decorating tips and tricks: don't burn your thumb on the lighter when lighting birthday candles. Actually, you probably shouldn't use a lighter at all when you're blood sugar is low and you're exhausted at 12am. But aside from the charred mark on my nail (what the heck?!), I survived that incident too.

Happy Birthday, Joy!

Yes, I DO Make My Own Birthday Cakes

Flashback time!

People are always surprised when I say that I make my own birthday cakes. My mother gets annoyed, though, because she thinks that, the way I tell it, it sounds like she just quit making my cakes and left me stranded in the kitchen.

When that is sooo not how it happened.

See, I wanted to make my own birthday cakes. I still do. I wanted to pour through Family Fun magazine, and make a Teddy Grahm pool cake, or stick my pink Power Rangers Barbie doll in a tiered cake and cover it in sprinkles and call it a "dress." I think my mom had a pretty hard time getting me out of the kitchen when she was baking. And as the years went on, I pretty much kicked her out.

So when I proudly say that I make my own birthday cakes (and yes, I write "Happy Birthday Kelsie" on them, because why would I write "Happy Birthday Me" anyway?!), it is not because my mom has subpar baking skills or hated making her children's birthday cakes, because neither of those are true. It's because I love to bake. I always have, and I always will!

Two more days until I'm 19!

Kelsie's Cakes from "Back in the Day"

As promised in my last posting, I'm going to keep up with this blog while I'm still in college, baking or no baking.  So far, no baking. Which is really a shame, because I've had such a craving for those chocolate chip cookies I love.  Katie told me she'll send some in a care package for me, but either they're going to get stale and/or smushed in the box, or my family will decide they should eat them all without me.  Personally, I'm betting on the second option.

I did, however, scan about 20 pictures onto my computer and upload them to Flickr.  I don't have the dates for any of them, but I'm sure I could figure it out if I had a calendar and a lot of time to kill. Even though I don't remember the dates very well, I can promise you I remember the cakes.

It's funny to think that I've had cake on my brain since I was really, really little.  As in, three-years-old.  Granted, back then my ingredients were things like mud and flower petals, but it's the thought that counts, right?

There's no mud in this cake, though, just lots of sugar and cute little Teddy Grahams.  I found the instructions for this one on a magazine cover and mom and I put it together for my birthday.  When I say "my birthday," of course I mean Maggie's birthday as well, because when we were younger, we always had combined parties.  At the time, I resented it, but looking back, it really wasn't that big of a deal.  Sorry for giving you such a hard time about it, Mom.

As you can tell, this was before I ever picked up my first Wilton instruction booklet or visited Cakecentral.com.  If I had to guess at a time frame, I'd say elementary school, maybe 1999.  But the cake still provided a lot of fun: going shopping for the ingredients, baking and icing the cake, putting the little Teddy Grahams in their Life Saver floatie devices, making a slide out of bubblegum, the giant lollipop who's purpose I can no longer remember... Oh, and eating all of the leftover candy later.  That was fun, too.

We still have that tablecloth, by the way.

This next and final cake I'm showcasing for today is the Barbie cake.  I'm pretty sure every little girl wanted a Barbie doll wearing a dress made of cake and icing, but how many little girls can say that they helped make that cake themselves?

Sure, it's not as pretty or "dress-like" as the Barbie cake my aunt Elsie made for her daughter, April, but it has chocolate AND rainbow sprinkles, so I'm happy.  I don't know if we had three different sized cake pans, or if Mom just cut the tiers to the appropriate size, but it was probably the latter.

That Barbie in the middle of the cake is my pink Power Rangers Barbie.  She was my favorite.  She had this cute little party dress (which she's wearing) and her kick-butt Power Ranger's suit.  I lost one of her gloves, though, which was a sad, sad day in my household.

So there you have it: two of my childhood memories, preserved in photographs of birthday cakes.  But don't worry, there will be lots of cakes and memories in the future!