Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Shannon's Birthday...

This is Shannon. She is my fiancee's daughter. This was in 2011 on her 11th birthday. I just realized that I can never forget how old she is because of the year/age correlation. I'm sure this will come in handy as I age.

Shannon loves Monster High...has the dolls, books, clothes. You get the idea. So I made her a Monster High birthday cake. I have to say that this is still the hardest cake I've ever done. I worked on it, mostly the logo, for 12 hours one day....yes, that tiny little logo took me 12 hours to do. I printed it from the computer and used the pin prick method to leave the impression on fondant. First the black back ground....so far so good. Then I pin pricked each letter onto white fondant and cut each one out with an Xacto knife. At this point I should have lined them up on the black background to make sure they fit....but I didn't. I proceeded to use color dust to brush the color on each letter. (Side Note: The color I used on the letters was called Fuchsia...that is NOT Fuchsia...looks more like a rose of some sort. I had to roll with it.) When I finished coloring the letters and went to place them on the black background...they didn't fit. I figured out at this point that you have to cut the components a touch smaller than you think you should. Soooo, I cut each letter down rather than start over. This took off half of the color I had brushed on and I had to re-do the areas I had cut. Finally they fit! I had the cake out of the fridge for so long that the heavy logo on the front started to droop. Originally there was room under the logo for the bottom border.

I used a topper that I ordered from a vendor on Etsy...check her out: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Have2HaveIT

The cake is a hybrid of sorts. I gave Shannon a cookbook with various cakes in it, showed here where to find the ingredients list and told her to read through them and pick one. She was torn between Hummingbird and Coconut so I made a Hummingbird and threw in some coconut for good measure. Here she is with her cake....


And here is a closer view of the cake.....

Friday, April 13, 2012

My Dad's Birthday....

My dad is into rock crawling and has built a rock crawler from the ground up. I wanted to do something really cool for his birthday but here is a picture of the crawler....


Far beyond my skill level, so I came up with this idea using Hot Wheels. I'll be adding more pictures of this one later because I have a close up of the fire pit in front of the RV and that was my FAVE. So cute...I made the logs out of tootsie rolls and sprinkled red, orange and yellow sprinkles on to look like fire.