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!

Pink Lemonade Cake Balls

These are the times when presentation really is as important as your intro to marketing professor kept telling you, while you were nodding off, wondering why on earth you thought you could handle 8am classes because "then I'll have the whole day wide open to do whatever I want!" (like nap.)

Back to the presentation! For these pink lemonade cake balls, presentation was everything. I really didn't think they'd be that popular or terribly delicious, because I just used a basic lemon cake, a large dollop of vanilla icing (don't hate me, but I used the canned stuff! I know! I'm a terrible baker! But I only use it for cake balls, I swear.) and that fake white chocolate stuff commonly known as confectionery coating. People really like that stuff.

Especially when you find a fabulous new product at work called Flo-Coat, which allows you to use plain ol' Americolor gel colors in your chocolate. So I was able to make a fabulous hot pink color and a lemon yellow to dip the cake balls into. I was going to try adding in Lor Ann lemonade flavoring to the chocolate too, and give it a surprise twist, but I forgot to buy it.

Even so, these cake balls were such a huge hit at our mini family reunion, despite all of the popsicles, ice cream cones, gingersnaps, the cake-in-the-shape-of-a-car, the chocolate fountain... yeah, ok, my family likes sweets. I can't complain!

So I'm definitely adding this little gem to my arsenal of awesome desserts to make for people. It was a crowd pleaser, it was super, super cute looking (and note to self, and all of y'all: forks making better squiggly line makers than spoons do, if you're going to for that squiggly line look on top of your cake balls. These are technical term, guys.), and ridiculously easy to make! Gah! I love cake balls!!

The Super Awesome Porsche Cake

A few days before Father's Day, I decided to go really, super crazy, and make a totally-out-of-my-skill-set-and-comfort-zone cake for my dad? Why, you might be thinking? I had a few reasons.

First, the best time to make a crazy, potentially-disastrous cake is for someone you love. That way, if the project completely tanks, they'll still love you. It's only cake, after all.

Second, I wanted to tackle a project of this scale on my own for a while now...just to see if I could. Also: good practice.

And third: my dad has been incredibly helpful this year, and I wanted to thank him the best way I knew how, with a cake. He helped me pick out my new car, and did all of the scary haggling with the even scarier car salesmen, he helped put me through college, he loaded up all my stuff after graduation, and he's graciously (slight sarcasm here) letting me live at home until I can find a place to live.

You might be wondering why I didn't make a super fabulous cake for my mom, since, after all, she's done just as much as my dad in those areas, if not more, if you include all the times she took me out to lunch, or listened to me complain over the phone, or just put up with me in general.

But I also thought that since a) my mom isn't a huge dessert person (unless it's lemon or key lime flavored; I did get her cupcakes!) and b) I think she's more grateful that I didn't destroy her kitchen or get cake crumbs everywhere.

OK, OK, OK, time for the big reveal:

BAM!

And yes, if you've been following my twitter or facebook, this isn't such a surprise. But I really tried hard to keep it a surprise from Dad. At first, I was going to do all the baking and everything when he was at work, that way he wouldn't even know I was making a cake, but since I'm terribly disorganized, and have the worst time management, it was pretty obvious that I was making a cake. But I wouldn't let him see me decorating it, because the final design was still going to be a surprise! I didn't even tell my other family members, but eventually my mom guessed that it was the Porche. (Adam thought it was a taxi. Uhhh, what?)

Since we had a ton of family over for Father's Day, I gifted this lovely chocolate pound cake to all of the fathers in attendance: Uncle Kerm, Uncle John, Big Adam, and Dad. Thank you for being such amazing role models and fabulous parents!

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.

Zombie Gingerbread Men Take Over the World

Yeah, I went a little crazy with this one. But to be fair, it wasn't just me. My brother helped, and my dad bought what I'm pretty sure was the entire stock of candy at Kroger. So. Much. Chocolate!

The funny thing is that I finally bought that awesome gingerbread house book to make professional, architecturally sound houses this season, and I ended up using those Wilton cutters like I always do. (I've definitely gotten my money's worth from them!) It probably has something to do with the fact that you've got to enlarge the "blueprints" that come in the book, and I don't have a blueprint enlarger just laying around my house, and I was much too lazy to go to a store that does that kind of thing. Also it was New Year's Eve and I didn't feel like leaving the house especially if everything was closed anyway.

But anyway: Zombies! Even if I was using a standard cookie cutter house (eh, eh, see what I did there??) I wanted to make something fun and creative. So just a few gingerbread men with crazy eyes and a lot of blood-red royal icing later, I had a zombie battle straight out of The Walking Dead. ...Maybe not that intense, but there were a lot of zombies climbing over that Hershey's bar fence!

Porsche Cake

Just the logo for today's cake. Maybe I'll make a replica of Dad's car next year? We'll see!

20 years ago, for his very first Father's Day, as a gift to himself, my dad bought a Porsche. I'm not really sure why, or what that has to do with being a new dad, but he really wanted one, so he got it, and it's still sitting in our garage right this very second.

Bam! Do you see how smooth that buttercream is?

But let's get back to the exciting stuff: the cake. For Father's Day '11, I went with a chocolate cake. Surprised? Yeah, me too. I thought for sure that Dad would want a plain yellow cake, or maybe lemon, but he went for something totally different and asked for chocolate. Go figure.

So chocolate he got: chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream, chocolate chips, chocolate syrup, chocolate fondant.

The baking and the buttercream-ing of the cake was the easy part. It was when the fodant came in that I started having trouble. First of all, I used Fondarific, which is a terrific, tasty, and rather expensive fondant that we use (and sell) at work. The chocolate flavor tastes a little like tootsie rolls, so that's awesome. The problem, though, is that I'm used to using a dough sheeter to roll out the fondant, and today I had to do it by hand, with a wooden rolling pin, and a lot of elbow grease.

Smooth fondant! (mostly)

Anyway, after some sweat and tears (no literal tears, but I did feel like crying at one point when I still couldn't get the fondant thin enough and I was worried I'd have to start all over again), I got the cake covered. Is it as smooth and professional as you see on the TV shows? No. But was my Dad happy? You bet. It's all about pleasing the customer, right?

The logo was a lot of fun to make (though not necessarily easy). I printed the logo from Google Images, used it to trace onto the fondant, and did the same for the center part and the red and black stripes. I don't have an X-acto knife but I realized today that it's going to be my next decorating investment. The lovely gold sheen was achieved with lemon extract and "old gold" luster dust (usually I use vodka, but we didn't have any of that and it's Sunday, plus I doubt my parents were going to buy me vodka anyway, even if it was only to paint a cake). I free-handed the horse and the writing, which turned out quite spiffy, if I do say so myself. (I can never draw horses, but it turns out I can paint a tiny silhouette of one!)

Oh, and Adam helped me put the ribbon around the cake. If you look at the back side of it, you can see his little thumb prints. Which is why it's on the back.

It's not exactly the neatest cake in the world, but I'm hoping that everyone else doesn't notice all my flaws, so I'll try not to point them all out. I'll keep my perfectionist comments to myself!

Happy Father's Day!

Father's Days from the Past

Father's Day is coming up, so I've reached back into my photo album to pull out these cake pictures from bygone years. This lovely star-shaped cake was probably from 2007 or so, and believe it or not, I actually whipped this one out pretty quickly. I don't really remember why, but I do remember thinking "Oh, a Father's Day cake? I need to make one of those... right now?!" Is it the most elaborate Father's Day cake ever? No. But was it sweet and well-received and delicious? Yes. And it was chocolate, so that's all my dad needs in a Father's Day cake. :)

I honestly have no idea what the date is on this cake, I just know I made it a really long time ago when my dad first started playing golf. I found this cake in a magazine (as I often did in my early decorating days, before I discovered Cake Central or even Wilton), and my grandma helped me put it together. There's coconut for the rough, brown sugar for the sand traps, blue piping gel for the water hazard, weird chewy mint leaves with pretzels for the tree, and tic tacs for the golf balls. How clever is that? And to think, I wasn't even serious about cake decorating back then. Oh, I've come a long way.

Now you're just going to have to check back in a few days to see my next chocolately masterpiece. I haven't exactly made it yet. You can't exactly blame me for waiting until the last minute, see, because my dad's a procrastinator too. And since he did give me half of my DNA, it's really his fault that I have such trouble with time management. So I can totally blame it on him...right? ;)

Katie's Birthday

For my sister Katie's 17th birthday, my mom threw her a surprise party. It was a fun party and I enjoyed helping out (meaning: I enjoyed taking Katie shopping to distract her while the party was set up) and making the birthday cupcakes as well.

Originally, I wanted to make a Dr. Who themed cake, but that will just have to wait until next year. The reason I didn't make it for the surprise party was because I had just gotten home for Spring Break the day before, and I only had one night to make it.

So obviously, I decided on cupcakes! They bake faster, cool faster, and I really think they can be decorated faster, although I did make all these little fondant decorations that took some time.

And it was definitely a little more challenging to make buttercream without my stand mixer. I haven't had to do that in forever!

But it was definitely worth it. Katie and her friends enjoyed the coffee-flavored cupcakes and the fondant flowers and butterflies matching perfectly with the party's garden/patio/coffee shop theme.

(Mis)Adventures in Cookies

Remember that awesome mixing bowl set I bought Adam for his birthday?

It becomes a lot less awesome if you're out of parchment paper, flour, and all of the staples that you normally have at your disposal while making cookies.

Adam and I made the Toy Story 3 cookies at the beach condo where my family's spending vacation. I spent Sunday night with them, then my dad drove me back to school the next morning. I forgot how much I love going to the beach with my crazy, chaotic, lovable family.

But I digress! The cookies turned out to be a semi-disaster. Since we didn't have flour, and the cookie dough stuck to everything (including my Sil-Pin. Sigh), I thought, "maybe we'll just bake some round cookies, and then right after we take the cookies out of the oven, then I'll use the cutters on them."

I seriously appreciate Adam putting up with me. He would eat the raw cookie dough, though, because it said not to on the package. Well, more for me.

After I cut out the cookies, and everyone ate all the scraps (and I mean ALL), I gave Adam the little tubes of icing so he could decorate.

Please ignore my awful beach hair in the background... Look! A cute kid holding a tube of icing!

And that's why I love this particular gift, because he had fun squirting icing all over the cookies (except for Slinky, but none of those cookies turned out) and then eating them.

I'm sure if I was in my own home kitchen surrounded by familiar pots and pans, the cookies would've been perfect. But as it was, the memories will still be perfect. ;o)

Captain Rex on Deck!

The cake I made for my little brother's 7 birthday was definitely a labor of love. I think the amount of time that I put into it more than makes up for the cake I didn't make for him last year.

He wanted a Captain Rex cake, and I've known for years it was only a matter of time before he asked for a Star Wars themed cake. This kid knows more about Star Wars in his 7 years of life than I do in my 19 years, 1 month, and 2 days of living. Thankfully, though, he didn't say anything about the realistic-ness of the gumpaste Lego figure on top. James, however, was not so kind. But hey, I think it looks a lot like this photo, soooo whatevs.

One big problem with the cake was the humidity. The fondant was so sticky and so hard to work with, and the gumpaste never dried properly (as you'll be able to see in the following photos). Plus, I ran out of powdered sugar half way through decorating, I didn't have a turn table or toothpicks (but I definitely bought some of those), and then there was that awful crater in the center of the top tier. You can't see it because I filled it up with another cupcake!

 I did the lettering out of a gumpaste/fondant mix. It took an hour to cut them all out, using a pattern I printed off the computer (I downloaded a free Star Wars font, and cut the letters out individually). A word to the wise, don't roll out the letters too thin or they will tear.

Do you see the trouble this cake gave me?! I didn't even notice that the "Birthday" was drooping down the side of the cake. You can't tell in this picture, but the H also cracked and tore a lot. It was a sad moment . :( I thought about re-doing it, but the cake was due in 20 minutes, and I figured no one was going to notice, except self-deprecating lil ol' me. (And now all of y'all because I pointed it out to you.)

And here we have another photo of the headless Rex Lego dude. The little black thing next to the cake is his blaster, which, if properly dried and hardened, would've been in Rex's hand, pointed down like a #7. You won't see the blaster in any other photo because Adam ate it.

 But we got a nice sparkly #7 candle at the ghetto Walmart, and the star candles, because they didn't have any birthday candles.


It was my mom's idea to prop Rex up against the cake. She's brilliant. However, she did think the pattern was margarita glasses, and not Rex's helmet, so.... yeah.

This is the other present I got Adam (the cake being the first). It's a Toy Story mixing bowl set with a spatula and cookie cutters. He can't wait to make cookies with me! :)

Despite the many, many problems this cake gave me over the last 24 hours, it was totally worth it to present it to Adam and to be able to see him (and my entire crazy, lovable family) on his birthday!

19 Years and Counting

Happy birthday to me!

Yup, it's official, guys. I'm 19. (even though I've totally been telling people I'm 19 for weeks, it's just true now!)

And to celebrate, I made myself a cake. Well, a cake and cupcakes.

But I have this weird quirk that I had to overcome first: I hate starting a cake. Once I get going, I'm fine, but the beginning is rough. Which is probably why I end up decorating cakes at four in the morning the day before they're due. I am a true procrastinator, and it's an awful trait, but at least I have a good answer when job interviewers ask, "What's one of your weaknesses?" (Because "Tayor Lautner" probably isn't a very professional answer.)

Right. So it's 5:00pm Sunday and I still haven't started yet. Instead I'm half-heartedly looking through photos on Flickr trying to figure out how I'm going to tie my black/white/pink/girly/swirly/flower themed cupcakes into the cake topper, instead of making buttercream and covering my cake in delicious Duff fondant.

But fast-forward a few hours, and I have a fondant-covered cake (that smells amazing), and a handful of fondant daisies. And finally around midnight, I've finished the cake.... well, except for the 19 on top. That was done last-minute as party guests started arriving. And instead of the gumpaste 19 I wanted to do, it's made of fondant & cardboard & toothpicks & electrical tape. And it didn't fall apart until after we served the cake!

So this post is getting extremely long. I guess with age comes a verboseness I wasn't expecting. So how 'bout another picture?

It's not a perfect cake. I'm spoiled because at Bliss there's a fondant sheeter and ribbon cutters that I can use. I had to improvise here. :) I also couldn't get the pink buttercream quite the right color, so I did end up at Bliss this afternoon & bought some Fuschia Americolor gel. But really, other than that, the decorating and construction went smoothly. I was going to put a 3D daisy on top (next to the 19) but it didn't look as good as I thought it would, so Sarah ate it. :)

And the two flavors-- cookies and cream (the pink cupcakes & the top cake), and the mint chocolate (white cupcakes; the b/c was mint too!) tasted amazing! I'm so proud of this cake!

Now that the party's over, I'm going to enjoy the rest of my birthday by watching A Very Potter Sequel and recovering from my sugar-induced coma (which is a metaphor and not an actual diabetes-related medical issue, so no worries there!)

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!

Oh, Crumbs

My first ever Harry Potter cake. (This is the second. And these are the cupcakes.) I've taken it out of the secret vault of Kelsie's Cakes of the Past to share with you all today. But after this, it's going back into the vault. Because this cake was... crumby.

I think it's also my first carved cake too. With canned icing, dyed "Golden Snitch yellow" with...liquid food coloring. I know, I know. But I've said it before (and you're probably really tired of me saying this): I've come a long way.

This box mix chocolate cake did not have the luxury of a crumb coat of decorator's buttercream, and there was no gold luster (lustre?) dust on wings. Heck, I didn't even know such a thing existed when I was 14! But if I were to make this cake today, it would probably be a three-dimensional orb with gumpaste golden wings.

Oh, that's my sister Maggie by the way. I keep talking about her because her birthday was Sunday. But this is the last Maggie-centric post for a while, because MY birthday is next week. Then you get to hear me talk about myself for a few days. Won't that be fun?! :P

Roses for Maggie

Flashback time!

Today is my youngest sister's 15th birthday. Last weekend was her birthday party, when I made that Sword in the Stone cake.

Three years ago, I made this little number. Nothing too fancy; it's got three pretty hot pink roses (I. Hate. Roses. But these look so nice! How did I do that? And why can't I do that now??) and a classy basketweave border (an old favorite of mine). I remember when I made it, my dad wanted me to go around to all the bakeries in town and see who wanted to hire me. But considering that I was 15 at the time, I was too timid.

Seriously, though, this is a cute little cake. And you can see underneath it is the ever-present green tray that I use for pretty much everything. We still have it, and I'm pretty sure it's one of those things that we'll have forever. Not that I'm complaining. It's cute AND a good way to transport cupcakes!

Happy Birthday, Maggie! I love you!

The Once and Future Cake

I stumbled out of bed at 11:30, bleary-eyed and pajama-clad. Only three hours to go before the party, and the cake was still in pieces in the freezer, and the chocolate buttercream was still unmade.

Gone were my dreams of creating a whimsical YouTube show, complete with costumes and props and instructions on how to carve a cake. The camera wasn't charged, the tripod was still in storage, and I hadn't taken a shower yet.

I think you know what they say about "best laid plans," but is there a saying about thrown-together-then-scrapped-at-the-last-minute plans? My friends and I are still talking about making an instructional and fun webshow about cake decorating, but that will just have to be put off until another day.

On the other hand, the cake itself is really awesome. I'm getting a lot better at carving cakes, thanks to instructions from Shelley at Bliss. I've really gained a lot of confidence in my cake decorating abilities since I started working there.

I'm still far from perfect, though. For example, the sword. It was gumpaste, and I made it the night before, so it didn't have time to dry. I did have the foresight to stick a dowel rod through it, but I didn't put the dowel rod all the way through, so the next day, the top of the sword was sorta cracking. Uh-oh. I patched it up with some cardboard and somehow, miraculously (it was Excalibur after all!) it stayed upright on the cake during the entire party. Oh, and that shiny stuff? Silver Glaze.

Maggie really loved the cake though, even if I did forget the anvil that the Magical Sword was "supposedly" attached to. The chocolate pound cake was "the best chocolate cake I have ever eaten," according to my aunt. So even though I look at my cakes with a more critical eye than someone else, I'm really proud of this cake and I'm glad everyone else liked it!

Science Rules!

It may appear from my lack of blogging over the past few weeks that I have not been baking, but that's not true at all. Just two days after the Wizarding Independence Day party, I broke out my cupcake pans in order to celebrate Katie's confirmation. My friends and I made two cake mixes worth of cake balls (and realized that white chocolate candy melts/confectionary coating/bark chocolate is an awful substitute for the milk chocolate stuff. Never again...) and for my brother's kindergarten teacher's birthday, I made some awesome and delicious confetti cupcakes and confirmed my theory on the secret of amazing buttercream. I also ate lunch with Adam at school and personally experienced how adorable kindergarteners really are. But I'm getting off topic; we're talking about baking.

Aside from the informal cake balls and cupcakes, my ventures into the kitchen have been limited since the exciting and exhausting Hogwarts cake. In the meantime though, I have fallen in love..

 ...With science. I know. I know. Go ahead and say it: I am the world's biggest nerd. But I got a huge stack of books from the library (all baking or decorating related) and two of my favorites are Understanding Baking and BakeWise.
 

The way the respective authors explain the how's and why's of baking is simply amazing. I could go on and on about the eye-opening and mind-blowing things that I've learned, but I'm afraid I might bore you, despite my huge doses of enthusiasm. However, if you are as nerdy as I am, I highly recommend that you read these books. I never knew how much I wanted to know the information they contained until I started reading them (yes, I am reading them both at the same time) and I can't wait to tweak some of my favorite recipes and-- dare I say it?-- create some of my own.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I should finish reading first, no matter how much I want to jump head first into a bag of flour (cake flour, of course) and become the Bill Nye of the kitchen.

Oh, and my secret to awesome buttercream? Beat it. A lot, and for a long time. The texture is amazing. And use real (unsalted, room temperature) butter. But you already knew that.