Courtney's Cake

Who needs to study for finals when there are birthday cakes to be made?

OK, so maybe that's not the best logic in the world, but with only a few days until graduation, I didn't exactly have my priorities in order. And it wasn't just a cake for anybody. And I only had one final left anyway.

Ah, rationalizing.

So this delicious (if I do say so myself) red velvet cake is carved into a Tampa Bay Lightnings jersey, which combines two of Courtney's loves. (And, by the way, she is the biggest Lightning fan I've ever met, which is awesome, because hockey is awesome. I just wish Atlanta still had a team...sad day.) And if you weren't able to figure it out, the cake was for her 21st, hence the big 21 on the jersey and all.

In hindsight, the sleeves aren't exactly even, but I'm hoping I'm the only one who noticed (until I pointed it out to all of you),  and the Lightning logo probably could've been bigger, too, but that's what I get for doing something last minute.

One day I'll learn to stop procrastinating. Just not today.

Ooooh! And I got to use my airbrush machine too! The fondant I colored was a bit too light, so I mixed up my own airbrush color and just did a bunch of layers of color until it darkened up to the lovely blue that you see in the picture. Definitely enjoyed the practice. I also learned that you gotta be super careful when you put your fondant accents on top of your airbrushed fondant, because if you drip any water or gum glue or whatever you're using on the fondant, it makes the color run. And that's bad.

So there's my advice for the day! And happy birthday again to Courtney! :-)

Superbowl Cookies (2007)

So these are the first ever Superbowl cookies that I ever made, way back in 2007.

In '08 I made little footballs

In '09 I made footballs and helmets

As you can tell, I've come a long way since the Bears played the Colts.  I now use Royal Icing instead of buttercream (and the proper consistency of RI) to decorate the cookies, and I found appropriate cookie cutters.

If the horse looks a little funny to you, it's because I had to find a picture off the computer and trace that-- I didn't have a horse cookie cutter! (I do now, though, thankfully!)

This year, unfortunately, I won't be able to make Superbowl cookies, since I'll be away at school, instead of attending the annual church party like I have the past 3 years.

But I hope you enjoyed this little flashback into the past, and enjoy watching the game tomorrow night! (Or, not. I don't even think I'll be watching it, but who knows?)

Happy Birthday, Kaylee and Sue Ann!

I was commissioned this weekend to make two birthday cakes.

The first is a sheet cake, half yellow & half chocolate, for Kaylee's 10th birthday (if you can't tell, she loves to play soccer).  Kaylee's mom has been a long time reader of my blog so I was pretty stoked that she asked me to make this cake. :D  I had fun making it, even if I never made a 2-flavor cake before, and I thought it turned out pretty awesome.  The soccer ball is a FBCT that I probably should've kept in the freezer longer, but it turned out fine in the end.

I also realize that this isn't the best picture, but I thought I would have time to shave my legs AND take photos before it was time for the cake to be picked up.  Well, time management was never my strong point.

And this second cake is a red velvet cake for my mom's friend Sue Ann.  I decorated it right after I finished Kaylee's cake, so Sunday was quite the cake decorating day for me.  I know this cake is a little more simple than the last few cakes I made (where are the flames?!), but I still like it.

One question that I think we should all think very deeply about is whether or not to use buttercream during the middle of June in the southern United States.  I know that's a thought that will keep me up at night. :-) As in, buttercream with real butter in it.  I know you can't tell, but my 50/50 buttercream (butter/crisco) definitely melted, so I made up another batch of icing with only Crisco and combined the two recipes, so I ended up with a 1/3 butter & 1/3 Crisco formula which still looked a little droopy.  I ended up with a lot of icing, too, so it's a good thing I made two cakes.  I really like the buttery icing, but I have a feeling I won't be using it much over the next few months.

(On second thought, I did use the Costco unsalted sweet cream butter, and I don't let its texture as much as the Kroger or Publix brand, so I may have to try again with one of those brands.)

I'm not sure how much baking I'll be doing this week, but Independence Day is this weekend, and I believe that calls for a cake (and yes, definitely sparklers ), and my friend Brian mentioned that he needed a cake, so we'll see if I'm making that any time soon.

Golf Cake: Gone to the Dogs

I am crazy.

My father says that I have the "entrepreneurial spirit" but I think I just have a touch of insanity.

Allow me to explain.

My Spanish teacher (mi maestra de la clase de espanol) asked me if I wanted to make a cake for her husband's birthday (and she got a taste of my cakes, if you don't recall, at the Spanish Honor Society induction), and I said yes.

That was about a week ago, and I put it out of my mind because some extraneous things came up that I focused my time on.  Well, Wednesday night, I realized that I had a cake that needed to be baked.

Wednesday was a long day, if you didn't know.  Wednesdays are often referred to as "hump day" because its in the middle of the week, and I generally like Wednesdays.  It's all down hill from there.  But Wednesdays are also busy because my sister and I go to church, and we eat pizza, pray, and play volleyball with our fellow Catholic teens. :) It's a lot of fun.  But I'm getting off subject, we're talking about cake here not pizza...

OK. So. Wednesday.  I get home from church around 8:30 and I start to (finally) make this cake.  I got out all of the ingredients-- the big seven pound bag of powdered sugar, the four pounds of butter, the commeical sized bottle of vanilla extract... yes, we went to Costco last week.  And I proceeded to bake a cake, mix up a batch of buttercream, and make my own gumpaste (with some gum-tex and really sticky glucose).

And then our oven dies.  So two 9" cake layers, which normally take about 20 minutes to bake at 350 degrees, took almost an hour (if I'm exaggerating, it's really only a little bit), because the oven kept shutting off.  Sometimes the -F2- or -F3- alarm would sound, and sometimes it would just quietly shut off and I wouldn't even notice.  Argh.

Needless to say, I was quite annoyed at our oven (which you may have noticed if you ever check out my Tweets), but it gets worse.  Because when the cake finally came out of the oven, I got burned.  That's right: the oven gave me a second-degree burn.  It's not the first time, and I doubt it will be the last.  What's different is that this time, it was on my finger, when normal it's my forearm that gets scorched.  I currently have at least four noticable burn scars on my right arm from baking.

Thursday was not much better, as far as being busy goes.  I had a fieldtrip that day (to see Don Quijote and eat some tacos), and I was supposed to have a golf game, but it rained.  So I made a cake instead, or rather, I decorated it.

The little doggie, a Jack Russell Terrier, is all made from gumpaste. Which, by the way, I think is a lot of fun to play with, if not a little sticky.  (And now I really want this gumpaste tool set so I can have even more fun!)  The cake really didn't take that long to decorate, but I'm slow and lazy, so it took all afternoon and evening.  (And I had to take a break to eat Chinese food, too, of course!)  I did go to bed earlier last night than I did on Wednesday.

Finally, today, I delievered the cake.  And you would think, well that's that.  But no, I still had a busy day today:  a test in anatomy, a quiz in Spanish, a make-up test in English... and tonight I went to see my best friend in the play A Midsummer's Night Dream, which was amazing.

But this week is Spring Break (YAY!) so the plan is to sleep as much as possible so I can start all over again with my hectic life in 9 days. ;-)  I told you I'm crazy.

Football & Cookies

For the third year in a row, I made sugar cookies in honor of the Superbowl.  This year, it was the Steelers vs. the Cardinals.  I'm not a big football fan, but I usually just pick a team so I have something to cheer at. :-)  (And, for the record, I did pick the Steelers.)

These cookies was sort of a rush job, considering I baked them Saturday night and decorated them Sunday morning.  I don't recommend doing that, especially since you're supposed to wait 24 for the cookies' icing to dry completely.  But then, I am a procrasinator.

In order to make the helmets face opposite directions, I flipped half of the helmet cookies over before I baked them.  And, yes, those are chocolate sugar cookies; they aren't burnt.  When I was flipping the helmets over, I flipped the Steelers logo around, too, so it's actually backwards.  Oops.  This is the opposite of what I did with the Bulldogs cake; I inverted the image when I was not supposed to!

These are probably my favorite cookies to date.  (Don't I always say that, though, like about the Webkinz cookies and the Christmas cookies?)  But I mean it this time, and I owe it all to Bakerella for pointing me in the direction of the book Cookie Craft.  Wow.  That book has so many amazing tips and directions and recipes; the process was so much smoother when I made the cookies this time around, from the flooding, to the piping of details.  I do need to buy some more #2 tips and squeeze bottles though.

The cookies were well recieved at the party, and they arrived fairly unscathed (a little smeared, but I stacked wax paper between the layers so the damage wouldn't be too severe).  Of course, they were still delicious, and there were no leftovers for me to take to school today to share with my friends. :-(  I look forward to making more cookies in the future, though, especially after all the awesome help I received from Cookie Craft!

Football Cookies

Here are my football cookies. Pretty basic: Royal Icing on Sugar Cookies, cut out with a football cookie cutter. The cookies are from a mix; I've never made homemade tasty sugar cookies before.
Last year I was a little more elaborate, and I made trophies, and team mascots, and helmets for the super bowl, but I kind of ran out of time this year...

GOOOOOAL!

This cake was quite a kick at this 9-year-old's birthday party. I really scored with this one.

Okay, okay, enough with the witty puns. But in all seriousness, I thought this cake was awesome!

And as a friend (Hillary!) said, the grass looks really good, and it didn't take me near as long as it looks, because I have one of those nifty tricks of the trade to make decorating a lot easier. I used a star tip for the grass, but instead of one opening, it has 3 star-shaped openings so that the cake can be decorated in one-third of the time! Cool, huh?

And I love the contrast of the chocolate lettering with the green frosting... almost like mud and grass, right? And speaking of chocolate, the icing was really tasty. I used butter flavored Crisco, since I knew the icing didn't have to be white. Although not as good as real butter (which does not hold up in this Georgia climate), it was still a very tasty buttercream. And the cake itself was chocolate, an added bonus.

The net is made up of royal icing that dried over night. I actually made three nets. Dad actually broke one, but I promise (!!!!!!!!!!) I don't hold it against him, because I broke the other one. And that's why I made three.

The soccer ball is actually a little clock that stopped working. The birthday boy got it from one of his soccer seasons, I think (he's played seven), and he graciously let me use it for his cake.

The only thing I don't like is that the J looks funny... but that's just how I write them. Oh well. And the writing is a bit off-center, but again, the person who really matters didn't care. If the birthday boy likes it, so do I!

There was definitely no foul with this cake!