Aaron's Birthday STRIKES again!

A cute little birthday cake for one of mid-kid's co-workers. He's been with the company 12 years and absolutely LOVES to bowl. He's a bit freaked out about turning the Big 4-0, so the managers thought it would be nice to get him a cake that might brighten his mood about it all. I hope he loves it! Giant orange and yellow "4" and "0" candles will sit on top.

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows ...

... anyone else old enough to remember Leslie Gore? Now I can't get that song out of my head. Anyway ... this was for a 13-year-old who loves blue skies and puffy clouds and rainbows and flowers. Not a bad batch of things for a 13-year-old to love, these days. Banana spice cake with buttercream icing and fondant. Mr. Sol is all gumpaste.

Prima Ballerina

For a cute little six-year-old who wanted a Ballerina Cake for her birthday. This ballerina is taking her bow in her buttercream frosted tutu. White almond sour cream/chocolate chocolate chip marble cake. Yum.

26 years ago today ...

... we were married. This is just a small carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and fondant fall leaves to commemorate the occasion. Can you imagine -- our girls and son-in-law actually WANT to come over and help us celebrate the anniversary! Or maybe it's just that I'm fixing dinner and providing dessert and champagne. Hmmmmmm...

Elisa loves Elmo

Little kids' cakes are so much fun to make. I don't think cakes this fun and festive even existed back when I turned two. Must be why I always seem to go a little overboard with them. Elisa gets a shortbread number two cookie on top, and a necklace of fondant pearls around the base of the top tier. White almond sour cream cake, covered and decorated with fondant.

Jackson loves bugs

This little guy-turning-three loves bugs and creepy-crawlers of all kinds, and his favorite colors are blue and green. His mom brought me the plastic bugs, and this is the design I came up with. That #3 on top is a shortbread cookie that's all for the birthday boy. This cake was half chocolate, half white almond sour cream, iced in buttercream and decorated with fondant and plastic bugs galore. I hope he loves it.

More Cookies

This time for our friend whose birthday is today. Shoes and purses and birthday cakes, oh my!

Well ... I was named after one, after all ...

I love this business. I never know what I'm going to be asked to create next with these delicious tools of cake, icing and sugar. In this case, I had no idea what the phrase meant. A bit of Googling later had me suspecting this is referencing a British comedy film, "Nuns on the Run," starring Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane. I may be totally wrong. But that's what I took as my creative inspiration -- hope I was right. This cake was a whole lotta fun to make.

College Basketball

Oh my. I've spent all day on this. It's a gift for youngest daughter's friend, who's on their college BBall team. This is supposed to be representative of Hofheinz Pavilion where they play. I probably should have made the actual building LOOK like the actual building ... but I thought I was being clever enough with the elevated stands, the stadium look, and the "people" represented by M&M's. Yes, I applied every single one of those M&M's with a tiny bit of royal icing this afternoon. While watching endless episodes of "Design on a Dime."

Those giant red letters on the front of the cake spell out "GO COOGS!" (Their mascot is a Cougar.)

If you look closely at the top of the picture, you'll see the top basketball on a pile of several fondant basketballs that are stacked up on the backside of the cake.

The team birthday party is tonight. Let's hope the guys appreciate the idea of "Cake! Frosting! M&M's! Eat!" more than a perfect rendering of Hofheinz Pavilion.

Happy Birthday, Al.

Mother in Law

What do you get for the woman who either already has, or can buy, anything? It's an annual struggle for us. Typically we end up with fairly pitiful offerings, but this year, I lucked out. Found a fabulous black umbrella edged with red silk roses (her name is Rose) in the "Signals" catalog. The darn thing looks fabulous whether it's fully opened or cinched closed. Then I sent her some cookies along the theme of ... "since we can't be with you at your house on your birthday with coffee and cake ... thought we'd send the party to you." Decorated with roses, cream and gilt.

No, no guilt. Just gilt.

Teacher Retirement

This cake was made for my Comadre ... our daughter's mother-in-law. She is retiring after 28 years of teaching the above subjects. The kids are throwing her a surprise retirement party today. The Spanish 101 book is chocolate, the French 2 book is lemon poppyseed with key lime curd filling, and the ESL book is White Almond Sour Cream. All iced in buttercream, covered with fondant book covers, and accented with chocolate-ganache-dipped strawberries.

The cake isn't really leaning -- it's my camera angle. I'd already loaded it into the sturdy cardboard transport box and didn't want the ugly cardboard to show in the pictures ... so this is my version of creative photography.

Yes, I know ... I should leave the photography to eldest daughter.

Cookies for The Matriarch

A dozen highly decorated teacup and birthday-cake cookies for a family matriarch who is turning 90. Her granddaughter is gifting her with these, along will 11 more treats and goodies, one each month, for the year ahead. Stay tuned to see what we come up with for the year as she moves toward 91!

Waiting for the Frog Prince

Another little shipper cake, sent to youngest daughter's best friend off at college in Fort Worth. I'm afraid Mr. Frog probably melted a bit during his trip ... but this is what it all looked like when it left here! Pink champagne cake. Buttercream iced, fondant decor.

Back to School

UPDATE: Not a single crumb was left. Not one. And this was a 3-layer, 10" round. Next time I'll go for a 3-layer, 12" round.


Youngest daughter wanted to take a cake to the teachers and staff at the elementary school where she works in the Extended Day program. I hope it made their first Friday back at work a little bit more fun. This turned out to be a Neapolitan cake ... one layer chocolate, one layer white, and one layer pink champagne. Iced with buttercream. The Wise Owl mascot was done with royal icing. Can't wait to hear how many crumbs were left. I love teachers -- they love my cakes!

A Change of Taste (so warn your taste buds before viewing)

I couldn't resist posting this beautiful picture of Mother Nature's Bounty. I grew up in southwestern Michigan where Dad planted tomatoes in our summer garden every year. I took those luscious beauties SO for granted back then. I can still taste a Michigan tomato BLT in my mind. The tomatoes in Texas, and modern tomatoes in general, don't hold a candle to what we grew up with.

But these gorgeous orbs come darn close. This is a case of organic heirloom tomatoes that we are wildly fortunate to be in possession of. I'm eating tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner as long as this supply holds out.

I hope you warned your taste buds before viewing. Cake and tomatoes don't go so well together.

Flutter by, butterfly

I don't know if you can see those butterflies very well or not, but they're printed on rice paper with edible inks, then cut out and applied to the cake. This young woman ordered her own birthday cake, and wanted realistic-looking butterflies on it. I originally thought I'd do an authentic nature-scape type cake, complete with all the plants that butterflies love ... but as it progressed it turned into more of a Secret Garden type cake. When she came to pick it up, one look at her told me that the cake had turned out perfectly for her personality.

Photo Chick

A last-minute cake for a gal who has a regular day job but is also a freelance photographer. Do you just love that little fondant camera and the filmstrip bottom border or what???

A stitch in time

Another little shipper cake. This time it's going to my other aunt in Michigan. She's been known to sew a mean seam or two in her life. She's also the best sewing machine tune up and repair person I've ever seen. I loved making those buttons.

Quarter of a Century

Hard to believe it's been 25 years since our eldest daughter burst onto the scene and turned our lives (delightfully) upside down. We celebrated last night with this pink and girly party cake. Alternating layers of vanilla bean and pink champagne cakes, swathed in buttercream, decorated with fondant. I think we've got a new favorite in that pink champagne flavor. It was delish!

Once in a Blue Moon

... was the theme for this wedding. A wonderful fairy tale story of true love blossoming at mid-life. Although the real hydrangeas they're selling in all the grocery stores right now are absolutely gorgeous, I'm glad we decided to go with the silk ones back when we were planning the cake. It took nearly 3 hours to place all these flowers on this cake. With our 100+ degree heat and humidity right now, I'm afraid the real blossoms would have perished before the ceremony even started!

The Groom's Cake

As the bride perused my cyber-space cake catalog, she knew what the groom's cake would have to be -- a stack of books cake along the lines of the one I did last year for daughter's high school graduation. The groom is an avid reader, and very active in politics. He chose the book titles and the bride did all the writing on the book spines. I hear there wasn't a single crumb of this lemon poppyseed cake left.

A Game Player

The birthday boy requested cards, dice and dominoes on his cake. The cards are clever little piks from the cake supply store, but the dice and dominoes were hand made with gumpaste. On top of a German Chocolate cake covered with fondant.

Curve Cologne

Another first for me. A cologne bottle cake. That "Curve" word was quite the challenge. A chocolately-chocolate cake, iced in chocolate buttercream, and covered in fondant. This one was shipped to Dallas. Sadly, it arrived looking quite a bit worse-for-wear, but at least we have the picture of what it looked like when it left here -- and word is that it tasted pretty gosh-darned good.

A Wedding in Hunt

... Texas, that is. The wedding site was at the headwaters of the Guadalupe River. Gorgeous spot. Especially for Texas.

The bride and groom are grads of OU, thus the red theme. These cakes were transported 289 miles from our front door, with only two minor heart attacks on my part during the trip.

The popular White Almond Sour Cream cake, buttercream icing, covered with fondant, then decorated with more buttercream.

The Groom's Cake

Two layers of chocolate cake, filled and iced with chocolate buttercream, surrounded with slabs of chocolate, topped with chocolate-dipped strawberries. The wedding guests were swooning.

Mermaids

... are quite popular with the toddler-girls set this summer. Which is lucky for me. I adore making these cakes! This one is for a two-year-old who's having a swim party for her birthday. How cute is that?

I have a wedding cake and a groom's cake in the works right now for tomorrow night ... tune in again Monday to see pics of them at the venue.

Warrior Drum

This was a 10" round, 4-layer marble cake created for a ManKind Project warrior graduation ceremony. It was a bit of a feat of engineering (I dare you to try to figure out how I got that bottom 'skin' on the drum), but I finally did it.

I would loved to have seen it after it was cut into ... four layers of marble cake separated by layers of buttercream -- must have been quite a delicious sight.

Pink and Brown Polka Dots

A simple, last-minute cake for a friend's birthday. I picked up the ribbon a few weeks ago, eager to design a pink and brown cake around it some time soon. Friend's birthday today provided the perfect opportunity.

Just a small 8" and 6" stacked cake in the marbled White Almond Sour Cream/Chocolate Chocolate Chip flavor, covered with chocolate fondant. Pale pink fondant roses atop. She was the recipient of the "bra-support" cake last year, so I thought it might be nice to do a non-joke cake for her this time.

Crime Deterrent

This cake is a surprise that's being shipped to my aunt who's turning 78 this week, as kind of an inside joke. Her 40-something son lives with her, but travels fairly frequently on business, thus leaving her home alone. Whenever he's going to be gone more than one night, he will stuff the guest bed with pillows, making it look like a man is sleeping there. (Evidently believing the nasty bad men will take one look at those pillows, get scared, and move on to their next unsuspecting victim.)

His latest trip sent him out of town for six weeks, so he stuffed the bed with extra large pillows to look like an extra big man, and this time added the decorative sword that usually hangs by their front door at his side -- for extra protection over a longer period of time.

This potential threat to all crime fighters everywhere is a lump of carefully-crafted fondant sleeping on lime green polka-dotted sheets and a white satin pillow, with a daisy-covered turquoise coverlet atop his large self. The giant copper and silver sword adds quite the ominous touch. There's even a size 14 pair of brown slippers on the floor on the other side of the bed -- ready for action at a second's notice.

I hope she gets the joke the minute she sees the cake ...

Ariel

This summer's most popular mermaid finally makes it onto one of my cakes. I used a small plastic "doll pick" for Ariel's body, and fashioned her tail out of fondant. Cut off all her hair and replaced it with that signature electric red-orange flowing mane. The shells are of white chocolate, the sand is brown sugar, the seaweed fronds are buttercream and the multitudinous pearls are fondant balls rolled in super pearl luster dust. What a fun cake this was to make.

A view from above

Frostingless

Lest you think I am capable only of frosted delicacies ... these are goodie trays that middle daughter and I whipped up for a catering job last week. Lemon bars, Millionnaires and Mexican wedding cookies. Middle daughter has been making these (plus fudge!) for Christmas gifts for the past several years. This particular combination makes a nice assortment for luncheons, teas, receptions and parties of nearly every kind.

Happy 4th of July!

Cookies for our celebration tonight. We will be sheltering in place and watching fireworks on TV, for the first time in 25+ years. Hard to believe.

Summer Bugs and Critters

Cookies I made just for fun this week. There were three times as many before the various cookie monster types walked through the front door.

Well fiddle-de-dee

A surprise cake for my Uncle's birthday today. He played his fiddle (we call him a violinist, he calls himself a fiddle player) through the wind, rain and even hail at our daughter's recent outdoor wedding.

And I have to say -- he survived his 1200-mile trip down here to play in her wedding, far better than my fiddle-cake survived the 1200-mile trip up to his home this week.

But at least we have pictures of what it looked like when it left here. And it still tastes good.

Happy Birthday, Humma!

Our middle daughter turns 22 today. (But I'm still 32, of course.) She graciously agreed to a joint birthday/Father's Day celebration yesterday, having come 'round to the inevitable truth that all birthdays after your 21st are really rather anticlimactic and not all that exciting any more. I loved this pic that her photog-sis took of the cake. More photos below.

Here's the rest of her cake

My new lemon poppyseed cake iced in pink buttercream. She and I share a love of all things lemon, so I actually had two pieces of this cake last night, when I hardly ever eat ANY cake any more. This one is soooo good. Fondant stems and leaves, real Gerbera daisies. WAY too much cake for us, but she'll take the remnants in to work tomorrow for her coworkers to demolish in probably less than 30 minutes.

If the top tier looks a little funky to you, that's because it is. In my efforts to keep this cake small, yet still do a 3-tiered number, I used tuna cans to bake the 3", 3-layer, top tier. (Yes, I washed the cans out first.) If I'd stayed with a 3" 2-layer, I would have been fine. But no. I had to do a 3-layer up there. It ended up going a bit cattywhompus on me, then when I drove the stake into its center to keep it all vertical and standing up together, the hammer (yes, it's a clean hammer) slipped and knocked a whole chunk off the top of that tier. So I had to do the cake spackle routine which leaves the cake slightly less than perfect looking.

Thank goodness for big, beautiful Gerbera daisies!

Happy Father's Day

A personal-sized carrot cake for my frog-collecting husband. Iced in buttercream and decorated with a fondant frog on a lily pad on a lake, with a big ol' slab of chocolate for a sign. And the cattails, my favorite part, are chocolate fondant bits on the end of uncooked spaghetti strands.

Shrek!

I wasn't at all sure I could pull this one off. Seemed like a tall order to me. Thank goodness for the internet. Where would I be without the "Image Search" function? It helped that Shrek 3 is out now, so there were plenty of pictures to study. I wanted to document the creation of this creature for my own records, and thought you might enjoy seeing the pictures of how this guy came to be from just some cake batter, marshmallows, rice krispies and lots of powdered sugar. Problem is, I got so busy doing all the little details when I dressed him and put his face on, that I forgot to pick up the camera and click the shutter along the way. But you can get a little bit of an idea of the process in the posts below.

He was a whole lot of fun to make -- even though I had a horrible nightmare early this morning about it all. It seems I had left home at 5 am and walked to Miami in one hour. Once in Miami, I realized it was going to take me three full days to get back here before I could even think of finishing the cake. While on the one hand being very impressed that I had walked 2,000 miles in one hour, I was in an absolute panic about not getting this cake done on time today.

Yeesh. Do I take my work a little too seriously or what?

"It's only cake!"

We started here ...

with three 8" layers of cake for his body. WAY too much cake, but I wasn't sure I could do anything smaller, so I went big. Wish I would have weighed him before he got sliced into. He was incredibly heavy, despite his relatively lightweight rice krispie treat head.

I wish I'd taken more of these 'in-process' photos - there aren't too many to see after this one. Problem is, I get so engrossed in what I'm doing that I forget to take pics at each stage. Oh well. Better luck next time.

Preparing the body

The crumb-coated body, awaiting the final coat of icing before we take him off to the dressing room where ......

The body is dressed

It was so much fun dressing Shrek. Everything here is all fondant. Arms, hands and shoes are all fondant, legs are rice krispie treats covered with brown fondant, shoes are stuck to legs with toothpicks. I thought he looked pretty cute already, but he definitely needed something more, so.......

Then onto the head

Pretty scary looking at this point. Especially since the head is atop a skewer. The head is shaped out of rice krispie treats, then covered with buttercream. Fondant cheeks and nose build-up shapes are stuck on to the frosting, then I covered the whole thing with electric green fondant, added the eyes, ears, teeth, etc. Stuck the head in the body, and voila! Shrek was born.

We're moved!

We're settled in our new home and we finally have phone, internet AND cable, after nearly a week without (AT&T U-verse was a nightmare for a while, but they seem to have everything fixed now). Yaaay!

And somehow I've done 5 cakes in the midst of it all. This one was a last-minute quickie for our eldest daughter. I already had two cakes due for Sunday which I was working on, then she called mid-morning Saturday to inform me that she and her husband had run into her husband's cousin the night before, and Saturday was his birthday, so she told him she'd have a birthday party for him AND bake him a cake! By 5 pm Saturday!

You KNOW she had no intention of baking that cake herself.

So this is what I came up with -- a small simple chocolate cake with buttercream icing and a melted-chocolate top border, with 3 luscious strawberries dipped in the same chocolate to top it all off.

Scroll down to see the rest of my adventures in cake-decorating since Memorial Day weekend.

Unicorn

Another cake I couldn't say no to ... despite the fact that it was due on the very day of our move! What fun it was to do. Adapted from the party invitations, and my first time to sculpt a unicorn out of fondant.

For Princess Natalie

Despite six days, post move, with no phone, internet or TV functioning in the house, I managed to communicate sufficiently with this mom to provide a Princess cake for her sweet little 3-year-old's party on Sunday. The little doll cake is her own personal cake, and the two-tiered cake was for the rest of the party-goers.

Thank goodness for daughters with cell phones. Yes, I'm the last living human on the planet without one.

Quickie Wedding Cake

I got the call at 2 pm Saturday ... a friend wanted to know if I could have a wedding cake done for him by 7 pm. I laughed. He persisted. "It's just a small one, for 12-15 people. I know you can do it. I'll go to the store for you if you need ingredients."

So, with less than a week inside our new house, and the princess cake above plus our daughter's cake due on Sunday ... I tucked into yet another last minute cake due on Saturday!

This was the best I could do with a five-hour notice to bake, ice and decorate a wedding cake! White almond sour cream with buttercream icing and decorations. Our friend purchased the topper.

Our baby girl turns 19

She wanted a surprise cake this year -- whatever I wanted to do. All she requested was "marble cake." So I created a new soon-to-be favorite flavor. Chocolate, chocolate-chip cake, marbled with white almond sour cream cake. Oh my how incredibly delicious. I think I'll name it "Kate's Cake." It was a huge hit.

Slathered with buttercream, then covered with vertical slabs of white chocolate. Then a red rose bouquet planted on top, with a zillion rose petals scattered on each layer. She loved it.

The view from above