The BEST buttercream

I love my buttercream recipe. This isn't the "fancy" buttery one (aka Swiss meringue or Italian meringue), but the one that reminds me more like the yummy grocery store-type frosting, but with better ingredients. Fortunately my good friend Sheri happens to agree with me. Check out her recent post for details (ps - go overboard on the vanilla, more vanilla can only make things taste that much better). Thanks for the love, Sheri!

(and while you're at it, spend some time checking out her blog - everything this woman does looks and tastes amazing - I'm perpetually in awe)

Rebecca's birthday cake mashup

Question: What do you get when you take Anna's cake:

add a bit of Pamela's cake:

and throw in the monkey and stars from Allie's cake?

Answer: Rebecca's birthday cake!

Rebecca is a newly minted 10 year old who designed her very own cake after spending time on my website. The names on the sides of the cake are the party attendees. This was a 10" cake with vanilla bean and chocolate layers, filled with chocolate buttercream. Decorations are handmade using gumpaste and royal icing. 

My 4 year old checking out the cake

Mets! Mets! Mets!

Let me start by saying I am NOT a sports fan - not even a little bit. I seem to have lost the gene that makes me care about grown men (and women) hitting/throwing/chasing some sort of ball around a field/rink/court.

That said, my 7 yr old is a big sports fan, thanks to his sports fan father (the 3 yr old isn't that interested yet, but I'm sure his time will come), and after three years of race track cakes, decided his 7th birthday should feature his favorite baseball team, The New York Mets, and their mascot, Mr. Met.

But this wasn't a completely original idea. I made this cake a couple weeks before - totally edible (if not completely palatable) Mr. Met out of gumpaste. Cake was vanilla bean with vanilla buttercream, fondant baseball diamond.

The weather was warm and poor Mr. Met was in danger of toppling over a couple of times, and was very happy that I provided him with an extra stack of bases to keep him upright.

Since the summer was getting hotter and Mr. Met doesn't seem to respond well to hot weather (unless I was going for a "Sloppy Drunk Mr. Met" look) I "encouraged" Max to choose another type of Mr. Met cake - one that wouldn't involve lots of toothpicks and bases made out of gumpaste as props. The result was a 12" vanilla bean/vanilla buttercream Mr. Met head and hat. Fondant stripes in Mets colors on the sides of the cake.

(The NY on the hat was my favorite part of the cake!)

I realized after the fact that a real baseball doesn't have red lines underneath the stitching, but since I'm sure Max is going to request this cake a couple of more years, I'll have a chance to redeem myself:)

Finally, a friend who attended Max's party decided he also wanted a Mets cake for his birthday, but with a twist. Milo might be a bigger Mets fan than Max and his baseball party included "Milo" t-shirts in a Mets-type font for all the kids. I used that lettering and added it to the familiar Mets skyline logo and LOVE the result. Everything was cut out by hand and edible (gumpaste and fondant). Cake was 12" chocolate with chocolate buttercream.

Happy Summer!

Baby shower cake

Two of my very good friends are pregnant and due within a couple of weeks of each other. I hosted a baby shower brunch for them today and you can't have brunch without cake, right?

I bought these daisy cutters a while ago and thought they were a pretty cool shape - I think they kind of look like fireworks. (Side note: does anyone know what the little plastic piece in this set is supposed to be for? I use it to poke out the petals, but I'm guessing it has a more specific purpose.) My plan was to cover the whole cake in baby blue fondant and then add the shapes, but decided late yesterday that life's too short to drive myself crazy and left it fondant free.

Really like the contrast of the chocolate buttercream with the gumpaste colors and am happy with the way it turned out. And as usual, Doug takes the most awesome photos. He could make a grocery store cake look like something Martha Stewart would envy!

Oma's fern cake

I was contacted about making a cake for a 70th birthday party that somehow incorporated greenery and ferns, but not in a very obvious way. I immediately started searching online for some fern shaped cutters or molds, and found what I thought would be an excellent option - a beautiful ferns mold made by CelCakes.

Ha! The mold arrived and I spent the next three nights playing with various formulations of fondant and gumpaste, trying to find the right combination so my ferns would as fabulous as these. On the rare occasion when I did manage to fill the mold, scrape off the excess and get the fern out in one piece, Doug declared that it looked much more like a piece of seaweed than a fern (it's true, it did). Since I wasn't making an underwater mermaid cake, seaweed wasn't an option:) $20 wasted, but lesson learned.

Back to square one, and this time I decided to toss the molds and a much more whimsical approach to ferns, and in particular, fiddleheads. These are all made by hand - rolling out pieces of fondant (not gumpaste, I didn't want them to get too hard and crunchy) and rolling into the fiddlehead shape. I love how it turned out! The cake is vanilla bean, with whipped ganache filling and vanilla buttercream. The letters are funky alphabet tappits (as you can tell, I'm a big fan of these letters!)

Here's a video of the cake in action. Someday I'll learn how to edit. Doug said, "who are you talking to?" The answer? Hopefully you!