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:

Allie's pink ladybug cake

My good friend Heather's daughter celebrated her 3rd birthday this weekend and I got to make the cake! For kids that age you need to feed/entertain the kids AND their parents, so the cake was big enough for everyone. 12" with a layers of chocolate and vanilla cake, filled with a thin layer of melted bittersweet chocolate and chocolate buttercream, covered in vanilla buttercream.

When asked, Allie said she wanted, "Ladybugs, pink ladybugs..... and black spiders." You can see I listened to half of her request. They're made from gumpaste and the letters are funky lowercase Tappits (I have the uppercase ones too, but they're kind of a pain to use - they're just too big!)

One last thing - my 3 yr old son takes after me and LOVES dessert. He takes his time, and loves to savor every bite. Check out the last man standing in the party room.

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!

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!