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Elegant Monogram & Striped Cake

Happy May Day, my sweet friends!

Oh my goodness, how life has gotten away from me these last couple of months! Between four kids and their busy schedules, my husband traveling for work and more glorious orders than I know what to do with (because, let’s face it, it’s hard to say no!) I’ve been too busy to write.

But here I am.

This past week was one of those weeks that I adore… with nothing but the most fun projects on my plate. If you know me, you know that I love the beautiful, elegant, feminine, detailed and clean designs the very most. So a week full of these types of orders brings me great joy.

There was one cake in particular this week that I couldn’t get enough of.

Isn’t she a beauty?

The precision of the elegant striped bottom tier appealed to all my senses. I used my upside down method (similar to this video) to create the most perfect seamless stripes.

In order to create stripes of similar thickness in both colors, I rolled out long strips of each color and then laid them side by side and rolled them simultaneously. This gives a smooth, flat appearance on the tier. Perfection.

The elegant monogram encircled with black pearls on the top tier and the gold pearls around the bottom tier added a touch of class.

What is it about a gorgeous monogram that can bring anything to the next level? The way the swirled gold “M” catches the light…

The coral and gold floral arrangement wrapping gracefully around the middle of this cake adds a beautiful change in texture and a gorgeous pop of color. The gold leaves and centers create a bit of elegance and help to blur the line between naturalistic and whimsical.

The clean lines on this cake are so pleasing to the eye, and the sugar on the board at the base of the cake adds a bit of sparkle to complete this design.

Every once in a while, a cake is born in my bakery that makes me feel especially satisfied… this is one.

I hope you love this cake as much as I did.

On another note…

If you would love to know exactly how I created the striped bottom tier, I will consider creating a video tutorial for my YouTube channel. Please leave me a comment below and let me know!

I’ll admit, I’ve been feeling a bit confused lately, my friends! I want to know just who my audience is.

Are you a cake decorator watching videos and reading blog posts for fun? Are you watching or reading them to learn? Are you someone who just enjoys beautiful photos? Are you someone who just loves those mesmerizing cake and cookie videos floating around online?

Please let me know who you are, so that I know what to create for you and how.

Tools used in this project:

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A Watermelon Cake & Tutorial

Something happened this weekend, you guys… something that I’m still in denial about.

My baby girl, my first born and my oldest daughter turned nine! Nine!?

How is this possible? It truly feels like yesterday that this sweet little redhead was born. And now we are looking the end of her first decade in the eye.

Sigh.

So when this sweet one, who also happens to be mommy’s biggest fan, was asked what she wanted for her birthday cake this year and she replied (with a gleam in her eye) that she “had a challenge” for me, I knew this would be good.

Her requested theme? “A watermelon sleepover”.

So, you know what? The girl got a watermelon sleepover!

The party itself was adorable! Watermelon balloons, plates and favors, along with various other pink, red and green details.

I decided to satisfy my need for a “pretty” cake with the actual cake, and use the decorations to create the sleepover portion of the theme. Since she was only having a couple of friends over and the cake size would need to be small, I opted to put the characters on the board instead of the cake.

I wanted to give my #1 fan an awesome sleepover cake, so I took it one step further and created the hand-modeled characters to actually resemble her best friend and cousin, the two sleepover guests at her party!

The characters are created out of fondant, and I used a brand new (unused) dish scrubber to give a sort of carpet texture to the fondant on the board.

I hand-painted the entire cake itself, and I put together the video tutorial below to show how I created the top watermelon tier!

My sweet girl was so thrilled when she saw her cake! Creating my own kids’ birthday cakes bring me so much joy!

Tools used in this project:

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An Electric Guitar Cake & a Fear of Airbrushing!

Here we are again, on a lovely Sunday with a few extra moments (finally!) to write!

It seems that 2017 has so far been about facing my (cake) fears! Which is good! In my life, a fear will nag at me incessantly until I finally stand up and deal with it, so cakes will be no different.

I have dabbled with airbrushing in bits and pieces, while learning to adjust the settings on my airbrush and test out the colors.

I’ve also done an entire white fondant cake into dark colors, such as this style. (This works wonderfully well as a way to avoid black or dark fondant or buttercream!)

I won’t deny that the cake above is really pretty and somewhat impressive looking, but it does come at a price! That would be me, heart pounding, hands shaking, second guessing and panicking.

This week, I once again decided to give another little push at my discomfort towards airbrushing. While I know that I am creative, I feel that I am creative in a structured design aspect as opposed to a wild artist aspect, so painting and things that are more artistic can sometimes throw me a bit. Such is the way with airbrushing. When other cake artists airbrush, I see gorgeous, vibrant colors spraying wildly at a cake and turning it into a stunning canvas of perfectly dispersed color molecules.

But when I airbrush? Ugh… not so much!

However, I do see the potential of an airbrushed cake and I’m determined to at least partially master it.

This week, my biggest project was an electric guitar cake! Not just any electric guitar – the specific one that the birthday boy owned. And it was not just a plain old guitar, but one with a detailed pattern and colors. This one!

I knew right off the bat that some airbrushing was going to be needed. After much brainstorming and mulling it over with my husband (which I do often), I decided to use fondant to create a similar design pattern and airbrush the color to achieve the purple edge effect.

It was not without it’s challenges (never forget that any lumps and bumps in your surface pick up airbrush color), and I am positive there is a purple layer of color dust coating my entire bakery, but it turned out pretty well!

All the tiny edible details were super fun to create. I chose to go with silver floral wire for the strings. I decided that it was more important to me that they look realistic than be completely edible, and I was quite happy with my choice.

Due to the amount of servings needed, I chose to create the neck and head of this guitar out of foam core covered with fondant and other edible elements (please, no angry musicians being mad at me for my lack of guitar knowledge and terminology!) and propped up by clear bubble tea straws (which you can see in this photo).

Oh, and the wooden board that this guitar is sitting on is actually a silver cake drum covered with white fondant and decorated/painted, and you might notice that I use this look quite often on my cake boards. If anyone is interested in learning how I create this, let me know and I will put something together!

I hope this musician had an awesome day!

Supplies used in this project:

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Pooh Cake Version 2.0

Have you ever created a cake that was a hit… and were then asked to recreate it later on? Me too… often.

I was a hairstylist for 10 years and also did wedding hair for much of that time. Eventually, I gave up the wedding hair part of it for a specific reason. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the updos – I loved them! I would meet with the bride for her practice hair appointment and all would go just swell. Frustratingly, though, I would go to recreate the updo on the wedding day and struggle with it. Every. Single. Time. I felt like the wedding day hair was never as good as the practice hair… but what bride is willing to forgo the practice session? So, I eventually dropped that from my hair menu.

I find that recreating cakes can be the same level of difficulty for me at times. It’s not like I take step by step measurements and notes all along the way, so my colors might turn out slightly different or my sizes may vary. It has taken me some getting used to stepping back and re-entering the initial design mode that allowed me to create the first one.

You might remember this cake:

With it’s soft, hand-painted look and classic appeal, this cake was a blast and a favorite.

I was asked to recreate this cake and was excited to do so! My customer wanted some changes made, however… she wanted this cake turned into a two-tier and with more characters included. Begin the design process once again!

How was I going to tie the beehive at the top in with a two-tier cake, and how was I going to include the characters and the classic storybook sky without having one big open sky tier?

I decided to go with one of my favorite parts of the classic storybook… when Pooh “rides” a balloon up to the beehive in the tree.

Being that this was a birthday cake, I decided to ahead and bring the birthday balloon theme in as well, and as a way to tie the other characters in to the overall theme of the cake.

And of course I included the birthday boy’s name on top.

Overall, I was pleased with this cake!

I could definitely pick on the details… of course I have already. I could be worried that the colors are too vibrant, or that my blue sky sponge effect turned out a bit differently than last time. I could go on.

But this is where I’m going to learn that each cake IS actually a different project, with previous cakes only as inspiration.

Just as we strive to avoid copying another cake designer’s work exactly, I’m going to decide that we should do the same with our own work. I would say Pooh cake 2.0 turned out fabulously, right down to it’s tiny wafer paper bee wings!

Oh, and bonus:

A cute little coordinating smash!

Merry Christmas a few days early, my friends!

Tools used in this project:

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