Pirate Cake

Chocolate cake in specialty cake pan, buttercream frosting, chocolate buttercream frosting

Techniques Used- star, C border,

Focus-the ENTIRE ship!

Boards on ship

making the cake plate with tinfoil and tracing cake pan

C border

Dark Chocolate pirate flag

using a specialty pan

cake was small, but lots of time spent decorating this cake

all the layers!

Cake pan site

This cake was decorated August 2012.

Pinewood Derby Cakes

All cakes-8" vanilla round cake, buttercream frosting

Cars-Rice Krispies treats, rolled buttercream frosting, buttercream frosting, food coloring, melting chocolate, Oreo cookies, skewers for supports

Techniques Used-rope border, shell border, reverse shell border, painting

Focus-the CARS!!!

My husband is cub master and last month was the pinewood derby.  He asked me to do something that would feed 60 people.  The first idea that popped into my mind was making car models, but have them stacked like they do in the Olympics-first place is tallest and in the middle, then second and third follow on the sides.  I was going to make little trophies too, but we decided that it would probably be best if we just made car models, like you would see in a car show or dealership.  We didn't want the winners to think the prize was the car and/or the cake! 

While I was working on smoothing the cakes, my husband worked on shaping the cars with Rice Krispies treats.  Then he smoothed a thin layer of buttercream frosting to smooth out the Krispies and put them in the fridge, to let the buttercream harden a little before putting on the layer of rolled buttercream. 

My husband had to go to work so I took over.  I wanted the cars to have stripes, so I rolled out some of the left-over rolled buttercream, cut it into strips, and then placed them on the cars.  I then watered down a little bit of the food color gel and started painting.  Once I finished painting, I would then take off the strips and put them in the fridge.  The only complaint I had with this method was that the color never seemed to dry, so if they touched each other, the colors would rub off on each other.  With the little bit of rolled buttercream left-over, I think I will try kneading the color into it and see if the same thing occurs. 

 

Here are close-ups of each of the different cars:

 

As I mentioned before, the focus was on the cars, but I also had some borders that I wanted to focus on.  I wanted to see if I could do the reverse shell border as fast as the decorator in this video.  I'm happy to say that it was quite a success, although I think the other cake decorator still would pipe circles around me : ).  I wanted to show a close-up view of the border because I was so proud of how it turned out.

I also focused on the rope border.  Usually, top borders sit on top of the cake, and I think this border looks so much better coming from the side and ending on the top.  I don't know if you can tell with this picture, but the effect I was looking for worked.  I didn't really have a focus for the last cake, so it was mainly trying to make the shell look uniform (see yellow car pictures above).

The numbers were made from melting chocolate.  I strongly advise that you make extra numbers just in case they break.  Also, make sure that the numbers have some thickness to them or they will be more prone to break or melt in your hand.  What I did was trace the number on top of itself 2-4 times so it was at least 1/8" thick.  You don't want your numbers to be really flat.  This would work for thick or thin fonts.  One more thing, when choosing a font, rounder fonts are better than pointy or sharp edged fonts.  The wheels were Oreo Fudge Cremes cookies.  I was planning on getting chocolate filled Oreo cookies, but they didn't have them, so I used these ones instead.  Any chocolate cookie would work though.

These cakes were decorated March 2012.

Orchid Cake

8" round cherry cake (from a box), buttercream frosting

Techniques Used- spatula striping, rosette border, orchid flower

Focus-orchid flowers

I've been looking forward to making this cake for a while.  I saw a video on how to make these flowers, and they looked so easy, yet beautiful!  Needless to say, it took a lot of practice to get the flower to look the way I wanted.  I had to think really long and narrow.  Once I got the hang of it, a flower took 1-2 minutes. 

I also wanted to try having two different colors of frosting for the body of the cake; the top of the cake is white while the side of the cake is purple.  I thought this would be a good time to try this because I wanted there to be contrast for the edges of the flowers, but I didn't want the whole cake to end up white, looking washed out.  I smoothed the top of the cake first, and then did the side.  The top border can cover any mixing of frosting colors.  If you smoothed the side of the cake first, it would be harder to hide the mixed frosting, because the mixed frosting would show on the side instead of the top.

Lastly, I was very happy with how the rosette border turned out.  I learned that when releasing at the end, you have to still go sideways instead of upward.  I don't know if that makes any sense, but if you look at the difference between the white rosettes and the purple rosettes, I think you'll see the difference.  Both borders look fine, but the white ones end going outward (or away from the rosette), while the purple ones look more like a circle because the ends are sideways (or into the rosette).  Also, make the size of the circle big enough so you almost see a hole in the center.

This cake was decorated February 2012.

Fleur de lis Cake

8" round yellow cake, buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-Fleur de lis, rope border, rosettes, reverse shell

Focus-side garlands, using one tip

I saw this one video on how to measure out the side garlands and I wanted to try it out.  He took a plastic cup and made an imprint on the sides.  He was a little bit sloppy with his piping, but I still liked his idea and thought I would try it out.  For my imprint, I used tip 789 (as seen below).  I wasn't sure if they would be evenly spaced, so I first made an imprint on north and south, then roughly checked to see how many would fit in between.  There was enough room to have 12 imprints altogether, so I then proceeded to make an imprint on east and west, and then two between each. 

Here are some pictures of the imprints before the piping.  This made piping the rope border very easy and look really nice because I wasn't having to eyeball it while in the process. 

I also used the same method for the top of the cake.  I don't think it would've turned out as nicely if I tried to eyeball a perfect circle.

Lastly, I thought you would like to see close-ups of the different techniques.  When learning a technique, it's nice to have as many pictures and examples as possible. 

Rope garland with rosettes, reverse shell borders

Rosettes

Top view of reverse shell border

This cake was decorated September 2011.

My First Wedding Cake!

6" round white cake, rolled buttercream, buttercream frosting, raspberry preserves, strawberries

white cupcakes, buttercream frosting, sprinkles, "C" signs

Techniques Used-quilting, balls, dots, rope border, rosettes, rose (sort of Wilton), spatula striping, spiral cupcake

Focus-decorating 300+ cupcakes!

I have now done a wedding cake, and what a great experience!  It was good to work with someone and see what they wanted and then create it.  There was still a lot of stress and things go differently than I imagined, but I enjoyed seeing this cupcake tower come to life. 

Techniques Used-quilting, balls, dots

 

 

I finally figured out how to make the quilting look professional.  Firstly, I made marks at the top and bottom of the sides of the cake, dividing it like I would if I were doing a basketweave (if looking from eagle view, mark North, South, then East, West, then halfway between each, and then halfway between each once more) to make 16 marks for the top and then the bottom.  Secondly, I used a wooden shish kabob to first line up the top and bottom marks, and then make the diagonal impression.  I found that making the impression before the quilting tool was much better, because then I'm just following the line instead of trying to make my own.  The key to making the quilting look nice is to not "eye" things, but to measure everything, like you would with making a quilt.

Technique Used-spiral cupcake using tip 1M

This is a quick and easy design, and looks pretty nice too.

Technique Used-rope border

Once the cupcake has been frosted, the border is very fast.  I learned that if the cupcakes weren't frosted all the way to the edge, then the rope border will make the edge look clean.  This picture is not one of those examples (you can see frosting underneath the rope border).

Technique Used-rosettes

The nice thing about rosettes is you don't have to frost them beforehand as long as the rosettes are slightly overlapped.  I found that frosting each cupcake doubled or tripled the amount of time spent on each cupcake.  With 300 cupcakes, time is a big deal (3 min./cupcake x 300 cupcakes=15 hours).  Using rosettes made a nice texture change from the other cupcakes.

And last, but definitely not least.....

Techniques Used-Wilton rose (sort of), spatula striping

 

 

I really liked how these turned out.  They brought just enough color to the cupcake tower without being to overbearing.  I wanted to mention why I call this spatula striping and not brush striping.  It has to do with what you use for the striping.  In this case, I made red frosting for the striping, so you would most likely use a spatula to stripe the frosting onto your decorating bag.  For brush striping, you would use straight food color gel and use a brush to stripe it onto your decorating bag.  Compare these pictures with a cake I did using brush striping, and you will see the difference. 

 

 

I liked these cupcakes so much that I took more pictures of them.  The lighting is different, so they look like they are more red-orange than red.  I like how each rose is different, just like if you were to find actual roses, no two would be alike. 

I wanted to mention a few more things about the cupcakes.  For one, I bought undecorated cupcakes and buttercream at Sam's Club.  Each case has 150 cupcakes in them, and the buttercream is a 5 gallon bucket (one bucket is enough for at least 300 cupcakes).  It ends up being about $2.50/dozen cupcakes, but I think it's well worth it.  Could you imagine trying to bake 300 cupcakes in a standard oven, or making all the frosting?  Also, if I were to do cupcakes again, I would know that I need 2-3 days to work on them, because it takes a lot of time and energy to decorate all of these cupcakes.  Transporting them is also a big problem, because I don't have a good way to package them.  I made the rose cupcakes at my home, and a handful of them got damaged along the way.  Right now, it is more realistic to transport a finished tiered cake than finished cupcakes.

This cupcake tower was decorated September 2011.

Flower Power Cake

9" White and Funfetti round, Buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-basketweave, rope border, carnation, Wilton rose, swirl star flower, rosebud, vines

Focus-letting someone else design and try out some techniques

While visiting family, my sister wanted to decorate a cake.  I asked her to make a design and then we figured out the finer details.  It turned out pretty much how she designed it, except that we had to change out daffodils for yellow carnations.  On the sides, the front half has vines and little flowers.  The back half is just basketweave.

 It was neat to see how the cake developed.  We started off with making flowers.  The flowers were mainly done by me, but that was mostly because I messed up the batch of frosting, so it was harder to manage.  I put more butter than shortening, and there was more powdered sugar than needed.  Anyway, all it did really was make the frosting more sensitive to temperature than usual, and it was also stiffer than usual.  I also discovered that I don't like how the flowers look when using flower formers. I think the formers are more for apple blossoms and daisies. 

After the flowers, we prepared the cake for decorating.  Part of the design was to have the casually smooth top in the front.  Since an assortment of flowers would be towards the back, we didn't need to casually smooth the entire top.  My sister did the basketweave, and I think she did a pretty good job.

After that, my sister did a rope border on the top and bottom and then we assorted the flowers on top.  We went through a surprising number of batches of frosting.  I think altogether I made 12 cups.  All of it didn't end up on the cake, partly because the frosting was so good that other family members couldn't stop eating it, and it was also the plan to make cupcakes, but we didn't get that far.  What's funny is the rope borders are blue and purple because we ran out of white, so we thought we'd better use up some of the other frosting. 

Next in line was adding the vines.  Once those were in place, we added little pink rosebuds, blue swirl star flowers, and a couple yellow and purple carnations to the vines.  Then there were leaves and the cake was finished. 

This cake was decorated July 2011.

Wedding Cake Trial

6" white round cake, rolled buttercream frosting, buttercream frosting, raspberry filling

Techniques Used-balls, dots, quilting

Focus-working with rolled buttercream frosting

This is my very first wedding cake.  The bride wanted a cupcake tower with a 6" round on top.  I decided to do a trial cake because I was using rolled buttercream, something I haven't used before.  It is like fondant except using ingredients more like buttercream.  I haven't tasted a fondant frosting that I liked so this seemed like a great alternative to get the fondant look, but not the taste.  It's more oily than buttercream, but I put a little bit of powdered sugar on top to make it look less shiny.

I learned quite a few things while doing this cake.  Firstly, there needs to be a buttercream crumb coat on the sides.  This is so that the rolled buttercream will lay flat (if you look at the sides, you can see the buttercream dips in slightly where cake layers meet). 

Secondly, I need to figure out a better way to do the quilting technique.  As you see in this second picture, it looks different from the first picture.  The diamonds are bigger in this picture.  I thought I was going the same angle the entire time, but when I got to the end there was significantly more space left at the bottom than at the top.  I think I can fix this by looking at it at eye level instead of looking down.  Also, I will go more slowly so that I can change mistakes and have less to fix.

This cake was decorated August 2011.

Sweet Pea Cake

8" round yellow cake, buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-sweet pea flower, shell border, leaves

Focus-sweet pea border

In one of my Wilton books, there is this cake that uses the sweet pea flower for the borders as well as on the sides.  Although this is nothing like the picture in the book, I wanted to try out the sweet pea border.  I chose to do this cake because I only wanted to use one batch of frosting (3 cups).  This flower uses very little frosting, covers quite a bit of space, and makes a unique border. 

 

Since I was trying to stay within 3 cups of frosting, I had to determine the colors I wanted beforehand.  First off, having the cake frosted white meant that whatever frosting was left over could be used for the design.  I didn't measure it, but I think there was 1/2-3/4 cups of frosting left over.  (On a side note, I didn't fill as much between the layers as I normally do, so a good estimate for frosting an 8"x4" round is 2 1/2-3 cups of frosting.)  Secondly, with the flowers being blue, I could add yellow to the frosting once I was done with piping the flowers or vice versa.  I was able to make my goal and had about 1/4-3/8 cups of frosting to spare.

This cake was decorated June 2011.

Majestic Roses II

 

8" round chocolate cake, buttercream and chocolate buttercream frosting, peanut butter fudge filling

Techniques Used-Wilton rose, shell border, leaves

I've done this cake before, but this one is slightly different.  There are two roses in the middle this time, and I used tip 47 for the shell border, instead of the usual tip 21.  I did this because I use that tip for the vertical chocolate lines and I thought it would add uniformity to use the same tip.  I learned with this cake that frosting consistency really matters.  For example, the roses call for stiff consistency, but if it's too stiff (which is my tendency) then the edges of the petals won't be smooth, and they also take longer to pipe out the frosting.  I used to think that roses were a pain because of how long they took.  I think this time I made 20 in about 70 minutes, which I know isn't as fast as professionals, but it's much faster than what I was doing before.

This cake was decorated May 2011.