Tom's Birthday Cake......

I made my fiancee, Tom, a fishing themed cake for his birthday in 2011. I made the components for the cake using gumpaste and molds. This was my first time using molds and I have gotten much better at it since. I was really happy with how it turned out. I've learned that when you are trying to judge the size of the pieces that are going on the cake before you've baked the cake, there is a lot of room for error. It is a lot harder than you would think to get everything the right size. I do have a point here...my fish was way too big. The only place to buy molds where I live is the internet and sizes aren't always clear, unfortunately. Here are the components that I made to go on the cake.

I used pastel green and white marbled fondant on the bottom tier and pastel blue and white marbled on the top tier, then blended them together using frosting in light blue and white to look like water. Around the bottom I added grass and things that you would see growing out of the banks of a lake.

He loved it and I was pretty happy with it too!

Purse and Wine Birthday Cakes....

My mom and my sister-in-law, Summer, share a birthday...literally. Lol. Their parties are always combined into one shindig. This was my first time doing two cakes at one time...or even close together for that matter. Thank God the purse cake turned out to be fairly easy (or it just came together more smoothly) because the wine crate gave me all kinds of trouble. It's funny now, but at the time I was in tears over it. This is also when I started documenting my progress, rather than just taking shots of the finished project. I should have taken one of the purse cake when it was carved and naked, but I didn't. I will next time I do a purse. I did a zebra striped Prada with red trim. The logo was the hardest part and I was not happy with it in the end, but as per usual, I had to roll with it. I really loved the purse though.

Here is a close up of the detail on the side where the strap connects to the purse...

My mom's cake was far more technically difficult and took me forever. It was going to be a crate with a wine bottle inside but the panels I made didn't work out. I loved my panels...they were really nice....see...

When I tried to put them on the cake they fell apart. They were also not sized right so would have had to be cut down. I'm not really sure what I would do differently next time to make them work. I definitely should have allowed for the shrinkage when the cake baked. I didn't do that. Maybe make them thicker so that they would be more durable.

I did the wine bottle by laying gumpaste over a real wine bottle and allowing it to dry. I got the color for the bottle by adding a touch of black to green and brushing it on, then I sprayed it with shiny clear luster spray. Here it is with the color on it.

And here it is with the label on it...

The Label gave me some trouble too because I'm not good with hand painting writing on and I tried fondant pens and they looked like cap...lol. I ended up using lettering that is made for clay and found that when I pressed hard enough the green underneath started to come through and it looked good and was dark enough to read. Here's a close up.



The leaves were actually my favorite part..I LOVED the way they turned out. I cut them from gumpaste and colored them with lustre dust....here they are...



Plan B, after the side panel disaster, was covering the whole cake with marbled fondant to make it look like wood grain. Here is the finished cake.