Pregnant Belly Cake

This is a baby shower cake I did for my cousin's daughter. Her name is Bryttanie and she now has two little boys, Jordan and Teegan. I had a lot of fun with this one.

I used the Tappit Funky Alphabet set for the letters and dusted them with brown petal dust. There is definitely a trick to using these...you have to let the gumpaste dry out a little before attempting to cut them.

Here are the belly and boobs before fondant. I used the soccer ball pan and the pan with four cone shaped cavities...I forget the name but both are Wilton pans.

I used a wilton mold for the bow and I made it way too big originally. I ended up removing the two loops on the under side because it fit better that way. Here is the lettering all finished.

I used buttercream on the cake and fondant for the dress. I was pretty happy with my icing job on the base of the cake.

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.

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.....

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. 

To Infinty...And Beyond!!!

For my nephew Ryder's first birthday I did a Toy Story cake. I did a trial run making marshmallow fondant and a butter cream transfer and the fondant turned out great...marshmallow fondant is sooo yummy. I made the fondant for Ryder's cake and it turned out great but something went wrong when I went to use it. So I ended up using some pre made Wilton white that I had intended to use for accents only for the bottom cow print tier and used red butter cream for the bandanna tier. Even though it was my first time using fondant and my first time stacking a cake...I was happy with the end result. I didn't attempt to mold the characters because I had seen others on the Internet, and although I applaud their gumption, I decided that I would rather have inedible elements than characters that aren't a flattering likeness of the originals. Here is the main cake....

For Ryder's personal cake I did a frozen butter cream transfer of a green alien. It was a little time consuming but not hard at all and I thought it was a great technique. I don't know if anyone at the party noticed, but my alien was wearing a muscle shirt. LOL. My fiancee came in the room and was talking to me when  I was working on the arms and I filled them with the green instead of the blue for his jumpsuit. Here he is...

Guitar Cake....Rock On!!!!

My fiancee had been teaching Faith to play guitar when her birthday rolled around last year. She wanted a red guitar with black musical notes. I was out of Viva paper towels so my buttercream is, shall we say, less than smooth....hehe. I stressed and labored for weeks about how I was going to go about creating a guitar. I had never used fondant before at this point and was apprehensive about trying on such an important occasion. I went for the trusty star tip and it came out pretty good. I printed a template I found on the internet for the guitar and sized it accordingly, which means I printed it, held it up to the pan I was using and then trashed it three times before getting it right. If I were to do a guitar now I imagine it would turn out far more clean looking because I'm not afraid to try different techniques anymore. You just have to allow time to start over from scratch in case you completely screw it up! Here's the cake....

Oh yeah...I threw my brother's name on it too because my mom decided to combine the parties at the last minute. :)