Emerson's 9th Birthday---11/8/13

My baby boy is officially 9. :)

Sorry for being absent for so long from the ole blog.  Things have been crazy here and I slacked off.  My 2013 family scrapbook album is 2 pages from being done but my blog is way behind.  I am going to play catch-up over the next few days to get everything on here for posterity.  Please bear with me as I have a lot to post.

In November, we celebrated E's 9th birthday.  We didn't do a big party this year since we went really wild last year (Great Wolf Lodge).  I let him bring his friend Jacob with us to Red Robin for dinner and then we went home to eat cake.  He didn't have a preference for what kind of cake he wanted, so I baked him a secret rainbow cake.  He had no idea how pretty it was until we cut the first slice.  The oohs and ahhs made it worth the effort.

These silly boys were a riot at dinner.

Monster High Cake

I made this cake for friend's daughter a few weeks ago.  I spent hours making the colorflow decoration on top. I thought it would be easy to make, but I was wrong, lol.  The image was transferred to a piece of wax paper, outlined with thick colorflow icing, and then filled in with thin colorflow icing.  Because I worried about the black background icing bleeding through the decoration, I used mini marshmallows to prop it up.  One big lesson I learned, you CANNOT use hot water to smooth colored icing for the background of a cake.  It streaks the color and gives it a marbleized look.  That's a good thing to know for future reference.

Wilton Advanced Gumpaste Flowers-Class 4

Stargazer Lily

Sweet Pea 

I forgot to post these on here.  Better late than never, right?  The sweet pea was posted to my blog earlier but I didn't do the shading/coloring to it until the last class.  Aren't these flowers cool?  The flowers are completely edible but I would never recommend eating gumpaste.  It's rather blah.

Advanced Gumpaste Class with Wilton

Briar Rose

Over the past 3 weeks, I have been learning how to make numerous flowers out of gumpaste (sort of like fondant but dries quickly). I am glad that I have had this experience but I don't really see me doing these kinds of flowers all too often.  They are a little tedious and it would take a million to decorate an entire cake.  I prefer piping icing to molding fondant/gumpaste but I can at least do it for a client now if it is requested.  Next up is to finish a big Stargazer Lily in class.  It's going to be so pretty.  I will post it here when I finish it. :)

Gerbera Daisy

Sweet Pea

Gumpaste Flowers-Part 2

Stephanotis 

Ivy Leaves/Lily Leaf

Tallen's Birthday Cake

After making this cake, I realized that I don't like working with fondant all that much.  It isn't hard to use, it is just that it is a totally different decorating process and I don't enjoy it.  I made this cake for my friend Johnna.  Her son had a party last weekend at Bounce.  I talked her into letting me make a cake for the occasion so that I could practice.  This cake looks simple but it taught me a lot of skills. 

Cake Wreck :(

So, the worst thing that could have happened at Hayden's party happened. I dropped the dang cake. It was sitting all nice and pretty on the refreshment table when stupid me decided to move it back a touch.  When I slid the cake stand, the table cloth caught it and the cake went over backwards off my kitchen island.  I stood there just staring at it in disbelief.  I spent hours on this thing and then it ended up on the floor.  Sigh... You know I didn't take any pictures of it before the incident either, right?  Of course not.  Clayton picked it up and set it all back on the stand but there was no saving it.  I ended up getting cupcakes from the grocery store to replace it since I only had 2.5 hours until the party.  Lesson learned.

Beautiful Disaster

To celebrate Crystal's birthday, I made her this cake. I swear I did, lol. This is the photo evidence I have of it. It was homemade Devil's food cake with 7 minute frosting. Unfortunately, I followed the horrible instructions to use the whole recipe of frosting to ice the cake. It said that it would seem like too much but it would be fine. It was wayyy too much but I did it anyway because the recipe explicitly told me to. I should have known to trust my instincts. It was too heavy for the cake and it slid down one side about an hour after I completed it. How frustrating! I ended up removing a good portion of it. The bad thing was that the sprinkles left color everywhere in the frosting (the coloring came off them). I swirled the frosting around to mix the colors around and it looked like a graffiti artist had gotten hold of it, lol. During transport, the cakes slid apart and I about lost it! I had to slide it all back together at Ashley's house. Unfortunately, it looked pretty ragged after all was said and done. It's a good thing that it tasted good because it sure wasn't pretty. Regardless, I won't be making these recipes again

Our 11th Anniversary-12/15/10

Clayton and I have now officially been together for 11 years. Wow, where did the time go? I love him more now than ever!

I surprised hubby with a homemade cookie bouquet. He is a huge fan of sugar cookies so this gift was right up his alley. It took me forever to get them decorated (I also did a bunch of smaller hearts without sticks) but it was totally worth it.

We didn't make plans that evening so we ended up going to our usual restaurant, Bonefish Grille. It was Bang Bang Wednesday so that made it an even sweeter deal to go there (the Bang Bang Shrimp appetizer was only $5). Seriously, if you have never tried them, you are missing out! Everyone we know raves about them and our kids even love them.

***Please excuse the weird lighting on the red cookie.  My flash reflected too much.***

Spongebob Cake for Emerson's Birthday

This isn't the best photo that I could have taken but oh well. I spent way too long making it for E's birthday. Using the star tip that much will kill your hands. I really wanted to make him a cool 2-tier fondant cake like the Star Wars one that I made recently but he wanted this instead. Ugh. I will never buy another character shaped pan again. It would have been much easier to have transferred an image of Spongebob onto a sheet cake. Lesson learned, lol.

My First Client Cake

I had an absolute blast making this Star Wars cake for my friend Shannon. It is hard to see, but the edging of the words are sprayed with silver graffiti spray (it's edible and made by Duff). The white stars are painted over with white shimmer powder but you can't see that at all in the photo.

Overall, I am pleased with how the cake turned out. I got the design idea from someone else on the web so I can't take full credit for it.

My Final Cake-Wilton Fondant & Gumpaste Class

This was a super simple but fun cake to do. I should have added a twisted rope border on the bottom but I ran out of time in class. Each of the yellow centers have yellow sugar sprinkes to make them extra pretty. I meant for the centers to be a little bit smaller but I think that it still looks cute. The cake is strawberry with a new buttercream icing recipe that I found (made with real butter instead of all Crisco like Wilton's recipe).

Gumpaste Daisy and Mum

I made these last night at my gumpaste & fondant class. They were a lot of fun to do and were very easy. The center of the daisy has yellow sprinkles to make it even prettier though it is hard to see in the photo.

Gumpaste flowers

Please excuse the poor photo quality. I made these flowers for the first time in last week's fondant & gum paste class. They were a lot of fun to do. The Calla Lily flowers have yellow spinkles in the center but the photos don't depict it well.

My First Wedding Cake

A sweet gal from my church is getting married tomorrow and I had the honor of making the cake. I sure hope she likes it!

Please excuse the poor photo. I didn't have good lighting since it is after 9pm here so I will try to take a better pic tomorrow. :)

Level 2-Wilton Cake Decorating Class

I just now got around to uploading photos from my big camera. It took me forever to get a card reader and I couldn't get them to upload on my new laptop without one. :P

Anyhow, this was my final cake for the level 2 class last month. We had made the flowers weekly during class and then let them dry. I didn't think that I would enjoy making flowers but I did.

Spring Flowers

Okay, so they aren't real but they are pretty cool, huh? I made most of these last night in my cake decorating class. I am in level 2 now which focuses on making lots of neat flowers with royal icing. I couldn't believe how much easier the rose was using royal icing rather than buttercream. I love how they turned out. The bottom pic shows of the flowers that will be used on my final cake next week. I made violets, mums, daisies, roses, apple blossoms, pansies, daffodils and primroses. The pansies ended up being my favorite to make. The technique was fairly easy and yet impressive looking. Once I paint them with dark purple food coloring, they will look very realistic.

Cake Decorating-Level 1

The middle rose got smooshed a little bit by my cake carrier.

I took Wilton cake decorating classes last month for beginners. It was a lot of fun and I learned so much. Roses are a pain in the patootie but at least mine look okay. The cake below was my first ever and the cake above was my second. I didn't like how the name and age was done on the rainbow cake but that was how the example was done so I followed suit.

Now I am in level 2 and I have made some really cool flowers. We haven't had to bake a cake yet so I don't have any pics to share. In my last class (next week), we will decorate a cake using flowers from the previous weeks so I will share that when we make it.