Beach Cupcakes

These Birthday cupcakes are for a very cute 9 year old girl.

The Flip-flops are made of chocolate.

Everything is edible except the umbrellas.

Enjoy!

Fondant Flowers

I have had so much fun this weekend with my new fondant flower cutters. My colors turned out weird on this pic, but it really is the same purple as in the pictures below. The cutters came in 4 different sizes, and I just had to try them all out.


Once the flowers are dry, they last for a long time.
I have really had fun making them.
Enjoy!

While I had the fondant out I thought I would try fondant roses. There are different ways to make fondant roses, but I think these are very sweet.

My Favorite Cake Ever!

For my birthday this year, my sweet husband gave me plane tickets for me and our daughter to go visit my mom across the country. We spent 3 days and had a wonderful time. My daughter saw snow for the first time and got to play with her Gram. We had a great time just talking and laughing.
When I got home, this great cake was waiting for me, my husband and my son had spent the day making for me! The cake was perfect because it was made with love. This is my husbands 1st cake and I thought he did a great job! It was just so nice to know he was thinking of me and went to the effort of making something he knew meant so much to me. The frosting is homemade and he even did the lettering! He had seen me put frosting in a ziplock bag and cut a corner off and use that to put frosting on cookies, so he thought he would try it. I love my family!

Keep Moving Forward

I have been thinking a lot about about the statement "Keep Moving Forward". If you are not aware, that statement comes from the Disney movie, Meet the Robinson's. Which I think is one of the most underrated Disney movies ever. There are so many great lessons to be learned from this movie. So how does "Keep Moving Forward" relate to cake decorating? Maybe it doesn't, because cake decorating is certainly not life or death, but as I look at the picture of this cake, as the decorator, I only see the mistakes and the flaws, all the things I wish I could redo. They are so apparent to me that they seem to scream at me. But if I take a minute and pan out, away from the cake, I can see the beauty of it. If I try to see it from an outside point of view the cake is beautiful.

Sometimes in our lives we spend so much of the time looking at the mistakes and the flaws in our own lives, we miss the beauty of the life we live. As the saying goes, We are our own worst critics.

So how do we pan out and change our perspective? I think that comes from inside ourselves. For me I try to see myself the way others see me. I try to uplift the people around me, I try to leave them better then I found them and I try to Move Forward.

Everyone makes mistakes, everyone is going to have a bad day, everyone is going to need to "vent" to someone. But then if we continue to move forward, if we dust ourselves off, I believe our world grows larger and our view broadens and then we can step back and see how far we have come. Then we can turn and see the beauty that others see.

Happy Earth Day

I know I am a day late, but Happy Earth Day! My son and his friends have been learning a lot about the Earth and keeping the planet clean. So in celebration of Earth Day, my kids and a few friends decided we needed an Earth Cake. Today was Take you child to work Day and since I had 4 children with me, we decided to make this cake. The kids loved eating North and South America, Africa and Asia. It was a fun cake to make.

Cowboy Birthday

Yehaw!!!I made this cake for a boy having a cowboy party. The party was on his grandparents horse ranch. It was a beautiful place. They had hayrides for the kids and bobbing for apples. This cake was one of the biggest cakes I have made, It was about 2 feet tall and sat on a 2 foot square base. The cake is all chocolate with chocolate buttercream icing. The horses and fence are plastic, but the mountain is all cake.

Fruit basket cake

These pictures aren't the best, but the cake was beautiful, if I do say so myself. HeHeHe All three teirs were done in a basket weave with cream cheese frosting. It is covered with fresh fruit which was covered with a glaze then sprinkled with sugar. This one was really fun to make.

These are the close ups of the top teirs. I was trying to get a better picture of the basket weave, but the pictures didn't turn out. I made this cake many years ago and found the pictures with the last cake I posted.

I have talked a lot about my Grandma teaching me to decorate cakes and how much fun I had watching her work. But in the past few years it is my mom who had guided me through decorating cakes. My mom was always patient with me. She spent hours helping me set up and glaze all the fruit. In the last cake, she was the one who taught me how to curl the white chocolate, then spent hours at my house chatting and curling chocolate while I finished the cakes. She has also taught me how to carefully place flowers and fruit on a cake. She has an eye for decorating and I am grateful for all that she has taught me.

I finally found them!

A few years ago, before digital cameras became the norm, I made some wedding cakes but had lost the pictures. So for the last few days I have been searching for them. I am so excited I finally found them!
This cake was for a really good friend of mine. I worked with her in a microbiology lab for about 5 years and she is one of the smartest people I have ever met.
The cake I believe is Chocolate or Carrot cake(It's been about 8 years, so I can't remember) covered in a thick layer of Cream Cheese frosting, then covered in a thick layer of large white chocolate curls. It was extrememly fun to make.

Birthday Cakes

This was a cake I made for a little girl. She told me she wanted a cake with horses and rainbows. The horses are plastic, but everything else is edible. I love to make childrens cakes and to see the excitement on their faces when they get a custom cake, made from their very own ideas.

I made this cake for my son. He asked for a Hot Wheels cake, with a race track going through a volcano. He also wanted a ramp with a ring of fire so the cars could jump through it and dinosaurs to attack the cars. This one took a lot a planning because there were so many elements involved. He loved it! He even got out his cars and was trying to play on the cake when I wasn't looking.