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!

Happy Birthday, Howard!

I was lucky enough today to make a 56th birthday cake for Howard Stern! His wife Beth wanted to surprise him with a cake on the air and suggest doing something with the show's raised fist logo.

The cake was a 12" devil's food with chocolate espresso buttercream, covered in red fondant. I made the gumpaste logos by hand and the letters are lower case Tappits.

I delivered the cake early this morning to the studio and got to hear Howard talk about it on air. He said he "almost wanted to see the cake framed instead of eaten," but he fed it to his staff instead. Beth said the staff thought it was delicious and it was gone in no time. Can't beat feedback like that!

Special thanks to the wonderful Doug Schneider for taking photos of this cake at 1:00am last night when I finished it. Everything looks better through his lens!

I used a pattern for these, but it was too small and I cut them out freehand.

Howard's producer Gary with the cake:

Sam's Penguin Cake

Sam's mom wanted a simple chocolate cake for a small family party she was having for his second birthday. Then she mentioned that he was really into penguins, so we decided on a chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream, with a couple of gumpaste penguins and snowballs as decorations.

I searched on flickr for ideas, but nothing jumped out at me, so I did a little experimenting.

(the poor guy on the right ended up getting the boot)

Sam has an older brother, so I decided to make a whole family of penguins. His mom tells me that three have survived - the older brother ate the biggest one, but soon realized that although gumpaste is edible, it really doesn't taste very good!

(yes, those white things are supposed to be snowballs, not eggs, like my husband and son thought)

The birthday penguin and his party crown

cupcakes for Anna's dinner

vanilla cupcakes with white chocolate decorations
Originally uploaded by the schneider clan

I used the left over decorations from Lindsay's cake to top these.