Becca + Sam: The Wedding Cake

I am so excited to post about this wedding cake. I absolutely love it & had so much fun creating it. With this being my most elaborate cake thus far, I must say I am pretty proud of it!

I love the simplicity, yet textural details, of the white on white design. Becca was so great to work with & aside from knowing she wanted 3 round tiers in white fondant, she pretty much left the cake design open for me to do as I pleased. I really hope she ended up liking it as much as I did. Congrats to the newlyweds & best wishes to them in starting their life together!

Cookies

Okay....I seriously need a lower calorie hobby (aside from designing graphically), cause I have found another "baking" activity that I enjoy along-side cakes and cupcakes. I have been ooo-and-awing over "flooded" sugar cookies for a long time now and finally took the plunge to try doing them myself. (And for a first timer, they didn't turn out too hideously).

Talk about fun! I love the fact that you are creating an image on the cookie free-hand w/no guidance than the cookie's shape itself. It's like painting masterpieces with icing. :0)

My creative-artsy side loves this type of art....my love handles, on the other hand.....not so much

2011 Valentines

This year my mom and I teamed up again to make Valentine treats for our coworkers. (You know...another excuse to make cute things....). This year we went for simple and gourmet-esque. We bought the monster-sized marshmallows (also known as Campire--if you haven't seen these, they are huge. Probably double the size of the traditional Jumbo marshmallows). We put them on a sucker stick, dipped them in chocolate and sprinkled them with valentine hearts. And of course, we had to incorporate an excuse to use the Cake Cricut so we cut out those large pink hearts from gum paste, bushed them with pearl dust and attached them to the bottom of the 'mallows. They were then topped off with some cute ribbon & a "hope your day is sweet" topper.

"Super Why" Children's Birthday Cake

This is a cake I did for Robyn (who, by the way, has her own blog and business she's building, I Am A Girly Tomboy). Her son is turning one year old and she wanted a cake based on the cartoon Super Why, who her little boy adores. I had never heard of Super Why (being kid-less and all, you know?) and so after a little bit of research and some photos/samples that Robyn sent to me, I went to work on the creation of the cake using gumpaste, food coloring and my new Cake Cricut!

For those of you also unfamiliar with Super Why, here is an action figure of him.

And...here is the cake I made. While I'm not pro, it's not too shabby for a newbie.

Matt & Isabella: Wedding Cake

Okay, cut me some slack. The last two posts have been about some form of cake or another. But really, who doesn't love cake! And cake, in my opinion, can be made into a beautiful piece of art, so why not?

I was excited--okay, honestly. I was really super excited--when my mother-in-law asked me if I would mind making a wedding cake for my brother-in-law & his wife's reception here in Utah. (They were married last month in Brazil, and from the pics, it was gorgeous). Of course, having made my own wedding cake with her a few years ago, I immediately enlisted the help of my mom. (Thanks for the help mom!)

While there aren't necessarily "colors" for the open house there seemed to be a main color scheme of gray/silver, which I incorporated into the cake with the pewter-color ribbon and silver berries. I felt that these elements also really helped to make it feel like a "winter" wedding cake. You can't tell in the photo, but we also dusted some Pearl Dust onto the fondant to give it a subtle shimmer/glimmer--which reminds me a lot of the sun sparkling on snow.

We had a lot of fun making this cake and I think it turned out so well. (I hope the love birds like it!) It's clean & simple, yet has a sense of elegance.

And as a side note, I have a Cake Cricut making it's pretty little way to my house in the next week (as a graduation gift from my husband) and so there may be a few more cake-related "designs" popping up on this blog.

Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes & Topper Design

Those of you who know me are most likely aware that I will take any excuse I can get to bake. So imagine my excitement when we decided that in our department at work that each woman (there are no men in our dept) would be assigned to another woman, of whom they would bring/make dessert for on their birthday! What an excellent excuse to bake something fun and yummy! This year I am the "baker" for Michelle, who--when asked what she'd like me to bring--suggested that I make some cupcakes and incorporate a lemon filling, which is her favorite.

So--have you seen the show Cupcake Wars? While the host of the show annoys me. To death. I really love watching the bakers come up with cupcake concoctions based on the client/event chosen for the show. So I held my own "cupcake war" with the suggestions from Michelle in mind and went to work! I decided to make a strawberry lemonade cupcake based on a vanilla cake with some added lemon juice and zest in the batter. I then "cored" the center of the cupcake with my handy-dandy cupcake plunger (love it) and filled it with a lemon filling I found on Wilton's website. I frosted each cupcake with a fresh-strawberry buttercream, and viola! Delicious!

Now, no birthday cupcake is complete without little details (for me the presentation is just as important as the taste) so I designed & printed some cute cupcake toppers & made some cupcake liners, in a pink & yellow color scheme to match the cupcake flavor.

Cupcake Topiary

I know this is a "design" blog, but I've recently taken a liking to cupcake decorating and after finishing this most recent project I really wanted to post it on here. Besides...who said that you can't "design" with cupcakes & frosting? If you have ever seen the show "Cake Boss" on TLC, you definitely know what I'm talking about. Buddy designs some of the coolest cakes I've ever seen.

I saw this project in a magazine a while ago and have been dying to give it a whirl. I started by gluing a cute ribbon on the trim of the clay pot, stuffed a Styrofoam ball in it, then used a glue gun to attach some of that mossy-grass stuff. I then stuck toothpicks in the ball (2 per cupcake) and slid the cupcakes onto them, before decorating them. I chose to make buttercream hydrangea flowers and created a pink and a red frosting that were just slightly different in value which really gave the flowers depth & helped make them look realistic (It also gave them a hint of shimmer, bonus!)
So, here's the finished project. I used a yellow cake and flavored the buttercream with a yummy amaretto flavoring.