Lots of baking!!

I've been doing lots of baking in the last couple weeks and haven't been doing the best job of cataloging all of it! Here's a quick run down:

Emma and Clara's 2nd birthday cake
Both girls are big fans of Sesame Street (can you tell?)

(pre countertop clean up)

and a movie!

Red velvet cupcakes for my friend Shannon's bridal shower. Gumpaste flowers, cream cheese frosting.

Artsy flowers, thanks to Doug.

my favorite of the bunch

Trigg's elephant cupcakes

Obviously, Doug wasn't around to take these photos - had to do it myself.

Jeana's Sweet 16 cake
Huge, heavy cake for a big birthday bash! Jeana's all about chocolate and peanut butter, so this cake was 6 layers of chocolate cake with peanut butter buttercream filling. I love these new funky letter molds (once I figured out how to use them, of course)

Much more to come!

Soccer Girl's Favorite Things Cake

Do you know what a moving up celebration is? I didn't, but maybe that's because my kids are still too young to leave elementary school and "move up" to middle school, but now I know! "Soccer Girl" loves the color green, and also loves monkeys, music, camping and, you guessed it by her nickname, soccer. This cake fit the bill. The cake was vanilla bean with green vanilla buttercream frosting and all the decorations are made from gumpaste and royal icing.

Her mom (and my online marketing idol) Ellen, wrote about the cake today on her blog, Confessions of an IT Girl. It's a great read, even when she isn't praising my cakes!

Jesse's Curious George Cake

Jesse turned 2 last month and had a Curious George themed party. The cake was vanilla bean with vanilla buttercream frosting. Decorations made from gumpaste and royal icing.

I realized again that noses are really hard to draw! Fortunately the rest of it looked enough like George that the nose didn't matter.

Fire truck cake for Nicholas

The fire truck cupcakes were such a big hit, I thought I'd do a fire truck cake! Actually, was contacted by a friend of a friend to make a fire truck cake for her son Nicholas, who was turning 2. Nicholas has some food allergies - eggs, milk, nuts and even soy are no-nos, but butter, fortunately, was not.

Nicholas' mom gave me recipe she used to make muffins but had never tried as a cake. I modified it a bit (using butter instead of oil, upping the liquids) and it turned out pretty great (at least from the little crumbs that I was able to taste while putting it together).

All the decorations are made from gumpaste. I'm not a big fan of the alphabet cutters from Wilton, and have been using ones from Fox Run instead. These, called Tappits, are going to be my next purchase, I think, but I hear they're a little trickier to use than regular cutters.

The fire truck shape came from a Google search of fire truck coloring pages. I found one I liked the best, shrunk it on my copier and traced it on to a piece of gumpaste. Much better looking than freehand, especially when it's my hand doing the freehanding!

Happy Birthday, Max!

First it was Mets/Max cupcakes for his kindergarten class, then Max requested a racetrack cake for his actual birthday party, held at a local slot car racing place.

I've had a lot of practice making racetrack cakes, because it's the exact same cake Max requested when he turned 4 and when he turned 5! So this is racetrack cake 3.0! Cake was a combo of vanilla bean and chocolate with vanilla buttercream. Track "dirt" made from crushed chocolate cookies, grass is buttercream, all other decorations made from gumpaste.

Racetrack cake, circa 2009

(thanks to Flickr user CakeJournal for the race car inspiration!)

Racetrack cake, circa 2008

Racetrack cake, circa 2007

My friend Mike Schneider (no relation) says at a good blog is all about video, so here goes!