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!

Ally and Robyn's Cinco de Mayo birthday cake

My friends Ally and Robyn celebrated their birthdays last weekend with an early Cinco de Mayo party - which means lots of tequila and a cake topped with a pinata, sombrero and maracas, all made out of gumpaste.

Update: I love a cake in action shot, and never remember to take them or post them. This time I remembered!

Rachel's Guitar Cupcakes

Rachel is a singer in a rock 'n roll band (and a great person, to boot) and just celebrated a big birthday. We celebrated with guitar cupcakes. I used gumpaste for everything, except the frets, which were a last minute addition from royal icing.

He takes the best photos, doesn't he?

Olivia's Owl Cake and Cupcakes

I probably say/think/write this a lot, but Owls for Olivia is probably my favorite project. My style has always leaned more towards whimsical rather than realistic and this was definitely no exception. Olivia's favorite colors were purple and pink, so realism went right out the window!

I found some great line drawings of owls online and started from there. The decorations are all out of gumpaste or fondant and the letters are Tappits. Cake and cupcakes were vanilla bean cake with vanilla buttercream.

I want to do a whole cake covered in these "feathers"

I say this a lot, but these boxes and holders are the best.

baby owl

as usual, all photos taken by the lovely and talented Doug Schneider.

I realized today, after reading this post on the super cute My Owl Barn (for all owlovers), that I never blogged about these guys. Thanks for the mention and the reminder!

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: