Zoo Animal Cupcakes

I was asked to make some zoo animal cupcakes with fondant faces for a 2nd birthday party. It took a long time to cut out all the features, (especially the 96 eyeballs!) but I think the results were worth it. The cupcakes are topped with buttercream grass and a fondant animal face.

..........I'm having a hard time getting all the photos to load so will try to get the rest up later.

5 Hours, 3 Cakes

Being organized and multi-tasking really does pay off sometimes. Some how I really cranked through these three cakes today, despite having allotted two days to the project. I guess now I have my Friday free. :)

The first cake is a domino cake I made for my Family Reunion on Saturday. My family plays a lot of dominos and cards so I thought this design would be simple, yet appropriate.



Next is a birthday cake for a friend who requested a 'hippie flower' in her favorite colors of orange and yellow. I hope I got it right.



Finally is a simple 6" round for a small 50th birthday. I'm still getting the hang of buttercream piping. I was a little off center and nearly sliding off the edge on this one.

Buttercream Roses and Basketweave

A friend asked for a chocolate buttercream basketweave cake. Apparently she just gets hypnotized by the basketweave design and thinks it's the coolest, so I of course obliged her. This is my second basketweave cake. My hands were a little shakey as I did this cake at 11pm after 2 full days on my feet of baking and decorating. This was my first time making buttercream roses. I only did one pratice rose before doing the 3 on the cake. The first one I had the tip in the wrong direction so quickly figured out what I was doing wrong and TADA!

WORLD CUP SOCCER CAKE

Finally, a sports themed cake to make! This is a birthday cake requested for a 10 year old who wanted a World cup cake. I made a field with a soccer ball (piped buttercream) busting through a fondant field with the FIFA 2010 WORLD CUP logo. Piped a grass border around the ball and base of the cake. Also added red, white and blue stars around the sides of the cake as Team USA was his favorite team.

Phil's 40th Fiesta

We have a Mexican inspired theme for this 40th Birthday party, so I decided to do a Chili Pepper Cake, a Sombrero cake and some fondant maracas.

The Chili Pepper was done using the Pasiley pan, covered in white fondant and sprayed with red spray color mist. This was my first time covering a cake in the color mist. It made a nice, deep red on the fondant when it dried. It worked great for the top of the cake, but I found it to be a tad runny on the sides and left a couple blochy spots. Didn't work well at spraying vertically.

The maracas are all fondant.

The Sombrero I made using a 12" round with the Wonder mold pan stacked on top. I should've had more layers in the middle to make the crown higher up. I think it ended up looking for like a safari hat than a sombrero, but oh well. This was my first attempt at doing a basketweave so I was very happy with how that part turned out. Especially since I was doing it on a curved surface which made it more difficult to line up the weave lines.

More Monsters!

So it seems that this year Dora is the popular girl theme and Monsters are the popular boy theme. Below you can see the invitation for this Monster theme party which I based the cake design on. I incorporated the monster and color themes from the invite. I also included some other details like the yellow dots and the color shadowing of the letters. For fun I added some green shimmer dust to the name and letter.

Purple Circles with Roses

Okay so I was asked to do a small birthday cake with free creative control and they listed a few colors they liked, purple was of course one of them.. They said they liked the circle cake I did previously in pink/orange. So I thought I'd do a monochromatic circle cake with 3 shades of purple and add in some roses for the topper and ribbon roses as the border trim (both two techniques completely new to me!)

I have to say that I'm really proud of how I did on my first try out at the roses. It took me 3 hrs to make 7 roses, but I think I'm starting to get the hand of the teqchniques and tricks to make them look good.

PHOTOS: The first picture didn't have the flash set properly, but I thought it made the colors look kinda cool and gothy so I left it in. Have a few angles of the completed cake and an aerial shot of the roses and a close up of the ribbon roses I did for the border. Just finished packaging this cake up as it has to make a drive from Rock Island to Des Moines, Iowa tomorrow. Hopefully it'll make it with all flowers and petals entact! Crossing fingers & saying prayers. :) I also have more pics of the base cake with all angles of the various circle designs before adding the roses if anyone is interested, let me know and I'll post them. I'm not sure if you all enjoy seeing just the finished product or the steps involved. Have a wonderful weekend!

PS - My camera is broken so had to borrow my Mom's which is not the most high tech. Out of the 30 shots I took with it, these are the handful I felt that weren't too blurry or color warped.