Kim's Cakes

Okay, now that I have managed to get the computer and camera to transfer photos, here are the cakes I did for Kim's graduation party. Kim is finishing up her associates in Mortuary Science, so that gave me all sorts of possibilities for her graduation cake. However, the more I thought about it, I started having serious concerns about doing a theme cake. I am a bit superstitious and something just told me not to tempt fate. So I found a mortuary science symbol and used that instead.


The cake is chocolate with vanilla icing. I now see that one of the T's in congratulations did not get crossed, and I do not know if it is a situation where I just missed it or if I did it and the icing did not stick and went somewhere else.

Lately Kim and some of her classmates have taken to saying they want to go work in the basement. I guess it is a mortuary science thing, but I thought it was fitting for her cake.

Kim also is in the process of getting divorced and wanted a divorce cake. Well, I thought about getting really creative with that, but I decided not to do it. Instead I opted for tasteful.



I decided to do Corneil lace on the sides, but silly me, I did not thin out the icing enough, so my hand was kind of tired by the time I was done.



It is a four layer chocolate cake with chocolate icing. I baked two layers, then leveled and torted (split) them. It turned out really well--the cake was very moist. The decorative icing is vanilla.

Both cakes were a big hit and were pretty much demolished.

Lynn's Cake

My friend Lynn recently purchased a house with her fiancee, and they had their housewarming a few days after their respective birthdays. Lynn had asked me about doing the cake, and since she helped me move into my house, I was more than happy to do so. She indicated she wanted a My Little Pony cake. As she talked about it more, she said she wanted either Pinkie Pie or Rainbow Dash.

Well, I found a decent picture of Rainbow Dash, so I opted for that.


It is white cake with vanilla frosting.

Now to start thinking about Kim's graduation cake. She is getting her Associates in Mortuary Science.

Kung Fu Panda

This year my niece wanted a Kung Fu Panda themed cake. I have found that pattern transfer works pretty well for most cakes, especially if I use a black gel on the parchment paper instead of the piping gel I was taught to use. I have not had good luck with the piping gel transfering over, especially if the icing is not setting up due to high humidity. Besides, using the black gel skips a step--at least that way I do not have to go outline it with the black gel.

I backed a white cake on Thursday evening and then iced it Friday morning before going to work. I had previously printed out an coloring page from the Kung Fu Panda website. I printed out two versions--one the way it was on the site, and the other was a mirror image. I finally decided which way I wanted the picture to appear on the cake, and I ended up tracing the mirror image one on to the parchment paper. Since the parchment paper gets flipped over, it then looked like it did on the original one I printed out.

I made all the icing except for the black icing. Black icing is difficult to make, and it is just easier to go buy a tube of Wilton black icing. I pulled up the Kung Fu Panda website so I could color Po in the way he is supposed to be. I think I did not have his outfit beige enough, but it still worked.

Patrick's Cake

My friend Patrick turned 22 a few weeks ago, and he had been talking about having me do a cake. Well, not long before his birthday, he decided he wanted an Irish flag with a leprechaun on it.


The cake is chocolate and the frosting is vanilla. It was a fairly big hit at the pub.

Knitting Cake and the Peanut Recall

My friends Jaime and Stepheny both had birthdays this week, and since both of them are knitters, I did a knitting themed cake. I do not think it is some of my better work, but people seemed to like it.


I made the fondant decorations on Tuesday: knitting needles, a pair of mittens, a pair of socks, a hank of yarn, and a ball of yarn.

I baked the cake after knitting group on Wednesday, let it cool over night, and then iced it with chocolate icing on Thursday morning. By the time I got home from work Thursday, it had crusted up nicely and I made more icing to decorate with. I free-handed Stepheny and Jaime's names, and I really should have used a Number 1 or Number 2 tip instead of the Number 3 I used for the writing. The icing I decorated with was supposed to be purple. I am not quite sure why blue and red made brown, but oh well. Using the icing, I piped a pair of socks, a pair of mittens, a pair of knitting needles, a scarf, and a tangle of yarn.

Now for the other part of the post..

As some of you may know, I am severely allergic to tree nuts and peanuts. The whole salmonella outbreak associated with peanuts is a horrible thing, but something good is coming out of it. More people are reading ingredients, and some are really surprised where they are finding peanuts and other nuts.

When I was surfing on Ravelry this morning, I came across a link to a Peanut Product Widget on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's web site. It is a neat widget, so I decided to add it to the sidebar.

Here there be dragons!

My friend Tim had his 50th Birthday Bash last Saturday, and as I promised, I did a dragon themed cake. The cake is devil's food with vanilla frosting. The base color is a light blue and then I used some black spray color one one edge of the cake to look like mountains.


I had baked the cake the day before, leveled it, and crumb-coated with icing. The icing crusted up nicely overnight, but the additional coat did not want to cooperate. I think it must have just been too humid out. Note to self--get dehumidifier. So anyway, I had tried doing the pattern transfer twice, but the icing was still not set up enough, so I stuck the cake in the fridge and went and did something else for a while. The frosting set up, and I was running out of time, so instead of piping gel, I used black gel, flipped it over on to the cake. It worked so well that all I had to do was fill in the spaces.

I had originally wanted to do something along the lines of Celtic knot work along the the sides, but my pattern book of borders is packed up somewhere, so I opted for the saying, "Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."





Tim loved the cake. Here he is, slaying a dragon.

Of Cakes and Connections

Of cakes..

Last Thursday evening, I baked a batch of cupcakes for my niece's birthday party. Friday morning I baked the sheet cake before going to work. I took that afternoon off to decorate the cake. I iced it with plain, white icing. After that I stamped it with a letter press. Of course, it turns out I got the T and H in birthday reversed. Oh well :)

Next, I traced a picture of the Cat in the Hat onto tracing paper and placed a piece of parchment paper over it. Then I used piping gel to place the picture on the parchment paper. Once I finished that, I flipped it over on to the cake. Most of the gel did not stick to the cake, but it did imprint in the icing enough that I could see the outlines. I went over that with black frosting and red frosting. I finished up with a red bead border.



Cherokee loved it.

I also did cupcakes in case there were people who did not care for strawberry cake.




and connections..

O'Dooley's is a center for cosmic convergences. I am there most Friday and Saturday nights, and a while back I ran into someone from high school. I thought he looked familiar and after a while when we were talking to some of the same people he recognized me and was really surprised to see me. Well, on March 21 he came in with two other guys I went to high school with: Matt Kreutzer and Cory McIlvain. I was rather surprised. They were too, because as I found out later, John did not tell them I am a regular. Another person I went to high school with was there as well.

Then last Friday we did a send off for Susan, who is shipping out to Iraq. I mention this because when she and Mike showed up on Saturday, I invited them to share the table I was at. After we talked for a while, Mike mentioned his last name was Van Doren. I asked him if he was any relation to Brian Van Doren (another guy I went to high school with), and it turns out he is Brian's younger brother. Susan this asked if I knew Sri Donepudi, and I indicated that she and Brian dated in high school. Turns out they are married now, which I think is pretty cool.

It really is a small world. Makes me wonder who I else I know from high school will show up at the pub.

Another Cake

This evening I received a call, asking if I knew how to do a Dr. Suess themed cake. I checked Wilton.com to see if they had any Dr. Suess character cake pans, but they did not have anything. Then I started looking for graphics I could find online. I actually found instructions for making cakes that looked like The Cat in the Hat's hat, but they both have issues. This cake is for my niece's birthday party, and there are likely to be a lot of kids there, along with their parents, so I am looking at making a fairly good sized cake--probably a sheet cake of some kind. One of the ones starts with a 13 x 9 inch cake and then cutting it to the shape of the hat. I could probably do that with a sheet cake too, but I am not sure I want to. The other cake involves stacking four layers and making it look like the hat. That would be cool, but I would have to transport it in pieces and assemble it on site.

So back to the graphics. When I took Course I, I learned how to do pattern transfers. What you do is put the picture under parchment paper, make an outline on the paper using piping gel, than flip the parchment paper onto the cake piping gel side down. Then you go over it on the outlines on the cake and fill it in. I have found one image so far that seems reasonable, but maybe I will see about coloring books this weekend or see about getting a copy of one of the books.

Hmm..maybe this is what I will do for my friend Tim's dragon cake later this year.

Dad's Birthday Cake

Now that Dad has seen his cake, here are some pictures:




Dad was very impressed. He also remarked that when he said it was his chessboard birthday, he did not think I would take it literally (there are 64 squares on a chessboard, and Dad is 64). However, I had no idea that he was calling it his chessboard birthday.

I first got the idea for this cake back in August when I took Course 2. We worked with color flow icing, and I thought that it would be neat to do chess pieces. After discussing it with one of my friends, she sent me a link to chocolate chess molds at Confectionery House. I looked around the site and found the molds I ended up using for these pieces.

Cake Update

Well, the cake is not going as well as I had hoped. I thought I had gotten the chocolate tempered when I was melting it, but it bloomed and looked very unappetizing. I have one set made from white candy coating setting up, and I am about to go out and buy chocolate flavored candy coating. At least the candy coating sets up more quickly.

Cake Update

I removed the first set of chocolate decorations from the molds this morning. I did two of each piece so I can stick them together with melted chocolate. A few of them broke, but I think they will be okay once I get them put together the way I want them. If not, I will go get another bag of the Hershey's Special Dark chocolate chips and start over.

The second set of chocolate decorations is currently setting. This set is Hershey's semi-sweet chocolate swirled with Kroger white candy coating. They have a very interesting marbled look.

Why Hershey products? Nestle chocolate chips all seem to carry a warning about nuts/peanuts, and I am very allergic. Dad is also allergic, just not to the level I am.

My father is a chocoholic, so the cake will be dark chocolate fudge (Betty Crocker Moist Deluxe). I currently plan to ice it with chocolate buttercream icing and the other icing will be either dark chocolate buttercream or vanilla buttercream. Once it is iced, I will decorate it with the chocolates I am making.

I know the descriptions are very vague, but that is in case Dad happens across my blog. I will post pictures after he has seen the cake.

Switching Gears

Over the summer I started taking Wilton method cake decorating classes at Michael's. I took Course I in July, Course II and Course III in August, and the Fondant and Gum Paste class in September. Since then I have done birthday cakes for friends and coworkers. My coworkers were certainly more than happy to eat my class projects, as were my friends and family.

Some of my cakes:

The Happy Feet Cake


Chocolate cake with buttercream icing. Yes, the penguins are edible. I piped them out of frosting.

Course 2 Final Cake:


White cake, buttercream icing. The flowers on the left are made from royal icing. The two roses on the left are fondant ones I made in Course 3.

Course 3 Final Cake


White cake with butter cream frosting and fondant roses. My classmate in Course 3 suggested that I only do one layer when I did my Course 2 final cake, and my instructor suggested I save the other layer for the Course 3 final cake, so that is what I did. Fondant roses take a lot of work, I think they are easier than doing ones out of buttercream icing.

Gift cake:


After I did this cake, I realized I should have iced the cake with the blue and done the ribbon in white--then it would look like a Tiffany's gift box.

Tonight I started working on the cake I am taking to my parents' house for Thanksgiving on Friday (my parents have usually had it on Friday for years, although last year it was on Saturday, and the year before that it was on Sunday). I am decorating the cake with chocolates, and the first batch is setting up as I post this. I will do the next batch tomorrow, and then I will probably bake the cake on Thursday.