Posts

, , , , , ,

A High-Heeled Shoe Cake

This week I created a shoe-lover’s dream! A shoe… cake!

When a return customer contacted me to order a cake for his wife, I was thrilled because, as I told him, I love making grown-up girl celebration cakes! He then told me about his wife’s love for shoes and I knew this would be a fun one.

I had just one week prior seen an amazing magnetic shoe mold via a YouTube video and had to pull my finger away from the purchase button about three times, reminding myself that I had no immediate use for it. Side note: does anyone else find humor in the fact that I had to use self control not to buy a shoe mold?? That is a true cake decorator for you! I will count my husband lucky (and we won’t discuss my handbag addiction). 😉

Anyway, I immediately jumped back online and grabbed the shoe mold that had been my heart’s desire. When it arrived, I eagerly sliced open the box and ran downstairs to my bakery, and it only took me one wasted try before I found success!

Isn’t that a seriously gorgeous, shiny, smooth piece of chocolate “designer” footwear? I added the edible jewel for more wow, and I’m really not sure if I wanted to eat it or wear it! Hopefully my customer felt conflicted in the same way.

I then created a “shoebox” cake in a similar manner to how I created last week’s chocolate box cake (you can watch the video here), but with modeling chocolate since my customer is not the biggest fan of fondant. I did a 50/50 mixture of modeling chocolate and fondant only for the top panel in order to be able to paint the logo on the top (food coloring beads up on modeling chocolate).

I used the fabulous wafer paper rose tutorial from Cakeheads.com to add a beautiful detail next to the shoe box. I printed my wafer paper two shades of purple using my edible printer.

I put the cake on a textured fondant cake board and was done!

This cake made my eyes happy!

Tools used in this project:

Classes you might enjoy:

/1 Comment/by
, ,

An Edible Coloring Book!

Some of the most eye-catching photos floating around social media these days include non-edible items made edible. People are fascinated by the ability to turn a regular item into cake! As a cake decorator, it is so fabulously satisfying to have someone say, “I can’t believe that is cake!”

However, when I hear comments such as these, it is usually regarding the smoothness of my fondant or the sharpness of my buttercream edges, as opposed to the realistic quality of my decorations or design. Admittedly, I am a round cake kind of girl. I love a gorgeous round cake with straight sides and sharp edges… tier after tier of traditionally beautiful cakes make me swoon.

But I have to admit… lately I’ve been eyeing the amazing designs of realistic and novelty cakes and wishing I could steal a little bit of that talent!

So… since I’m not the type of person to stay where I am and never move forward, I decided to step a little bit out of my comfort zone for my daughter’s third birthday cake this year. While I think traditionally classic cakes will always be my true love, I did enjoy a bit of carving, shaping and imitating real objects on this one!

My daughter LOVES to color, so we went with a coloring theme! I decided to try to create a coloring book cake!

As I started to create, I got that familiar tingle of excitement and took the idea further, deciding to create a cake that she could actually color on. I found some fabulous printable coloring sheets created by SamanthaBDesign on Etsy and printed them with my edible printer.

And then I became even more ambitious and chose to create the crayon box out of cake as well!

As I was staring at the finished cake at 10:30 p.m. at night (because that’s how my own kids’ cakes always go), I knew that there was no possibility of me being satisfied with this cake if I did not create a couple of edible crayons to embellish the final product.

And then I knew I was done! I loved it! It did not come easy… me carving cake is nothing like those awesome videos you see on YouTube… more like a disaster of cake and frosting and the occasional sweat and tears. But when I finished my design, I was pretty pleased!

The best part was bringing my baby girl to her cake while her daddy covered her eyes, and then seeing her looking around confused and wondering where her cake was! She didn’t realize the coloring set in front of her was her cake! Once we pointed it out to her, she immediately tried to pick up one of the edible crayons to color!

In case you’re wondering, she did color her cake at the party (with edible markers). She loved every minute of it, even coloring so long that part of the cake started to get smooshed!

She wasn’t even sad when we cut into it, because… well… she loves cake. <3

Tools used in this project:

/2 Comments/by