Young Women's Values Cake

Last week I made a cake for an event at church (New Beginnings). I was excited about the chance because I've been wanting to do a many layered cake with different colored layers. This was the perfect event for it. New Beginnings is a special night for the girls aged 12-18, the Young Women. In the Young Women program the girls focus on setting and working toward goals in 8 value areas- Faith, Divine Nature, Individual Worth, Knowledge, Choice and Accountability,Good Works, Integrity, and Virtue. Each value has a corresponding color. You see where I'm going with this, right? This was a lot of fun. The pictures aren't great. I felt a little dorky stepping in to take a picture of my cake at the site, so I didn't push it to get the perfect picture. But I think you'll get the idea. It was a real hit with the girls, just like I thought it would be.

Before buttercream:

I'm also a bit obsessed with bunting lately, so I had to make one for the cake. The theme for the evening was "Arise and Shine Forth", which is also the Young Women theme for this year. That's what the bunting says.

(My talented friend Jen made the beautiful cake with swirl roses. It was lemon with a blueberry filling- absolutely delicious, not to mention gorgeous!)

First slice out:



A couple more after it's been cut some more.

Piston Cup Party

I really had good intentions to blog more this year...

Things have been really busy around here, but I'm not complaining. If January is busy it goes by faster. That's fine by me. It also helps that the weather has been unseasonably warm. We had one short cold snap in January that really didn't amount to much. Now we are in the midst of a "heat wave" with temps consistently above freezing during the day. Basically it's sugaring weather the first week in February.

Speaking of the first week of February, my baby just turned five on Feb. 1st. I can hardly believe it. No more babies or toddlers or preschoolers here. It seems like such a short time ago that I thought I would never have all my kids out of diapers.

We let our kids have a friend birthday party on their 5th, 8th, 12th, and 16th birthdays, so this was a party year for Jesse. He requested a Piston Cup (from the movie Cars)cake.


I decided to try sculpting the Piston Cup out of rice krispie treats. It didn't turn out so hot, BUT I know what to do differently next time so it WILL work. The rice krispie treats really need to be made further in advance. They need time to really dry out and harden. Because I didn't realize this, they were kind of droopy. It also made it difficult to work with them for creating detail work. If they were hard I could have carved better detail into them. I will definitely do this again.


I didn't get any good pictures of the decorations, but I used black, white, red, and checkered flags for the decor. I found some fun black and white checked streamers and napkins. I made a bunch of black and white and red pompoms. Jesse told me that even though pompoms are kind of girly, we could use them for his party. I think in the masculine colors and mixed with the checkered flags it works for a boy. Every kids birthday party needs balloons, in my opinion, so I got black, red, and white with checkered flags.


(I took these as an afterthought last night after the balloons had been taken down.)
In keeping with the race theme of the party, I picked up some boxes at the grocery store and let the kids decorate them to use as race cars. The kids stepped inside them, held them up, and ran and ran and ran.


They had a blast! I thought it was an interesting informal study on the differences between boys and girls. The boys were not very detail oriented. They spent about 2.6 seconds crafting and they were already hot and sweaty from racing before the girls had even completed their cars.

(The boys are those blurry spots in the background.)
The girls colored pictures on the cars, carefully placed stickers, arranged streamers in the most aesthetically pleasing manner. It was pretty funny. By the time the girls were ready to race, the boys were worn out!

Jesse had a great time. There was a lot of running and screaming and organized chaos. I'm still recovering.

Another Cake

Wow, has life been crazy lately. The kids have been out of school for nearly a month already. The fourth of July is upon us. My niece has come for a two week visit. My responsibilities at church are feeling a bit weighty of late. My gardens require constant attention. Sometimes I feel like I can barely keep up. It doesn't leave much time for blogging or projects. Today I was at church from 8:30 in the morning and didn't get home until 4:00 this afternoon. By that point I was starving and had a pounding headache. I laid down to take a nap and woke up at 7:30. Tomorrow is the Fourth and I feel completely unprepared. But I did squeeze in a date with my hubby last night and a cake order yesterday. I also did a cake last weekend, and, as proof that I've been barely keeping up, i completely forgot to take a picture of it. I didn't take a single one. But I did photograph this week's cake. In April I donated a custom cake for an auction at the kids' elementary school. The winner of the auction finally contacted me about the cake. She said a superhero cake would be great, as this was a birthday cake for her 3 and 10 year old sons. She especially liked the Spiderman cake I had previously done, so I used it and some other ideas I saw on the internet as inspiration. She left all the details up to me and really gave me the freedom to be creative. Here's what I did:

Good Luck to You (In Chinese)

I know the cake posts are getting a bit out of hand, but here's the latest:


Our good friends have had a lovely foreign exchange student this year from China. Her name is Mo and today she left for her home in Beijing. Yesterday her host family threw her a fun farewell party. As a gift to her, I made the cake for the party.


This is a strawberry cake with strawberry buttercream frosting. I did the very popular ruffle cake design, and added the message on fondant on the top.
I used google translate to find the correct characters, then I practiced a few times before I painted them on the fondant with decorating gel, thinned out to a paint-like consistency. I was worried I might make one stroke incorrect and totally change the message, but luckily, that didn't happen. It was so much fun to learn these characters and I think I would really enjoy the art of learning to write them.

Best of luck to you, Mo! You will be missed!

More Cakes

I completed a cake order today for one of the teachers at the high school. She called me last week with an order for two sheet cakes. She requested a lemon cake with a bridal shower theme and a chocolate cake with a farewell theme for the other. Today the teachers were having a combined farewell and bridal shower party for two fellow teachers.

I sometimes find it hard to be creative with a basic sheet cake. Sheet cakes were ordered for ease of cutting and serving, however, so that's what I worked with. I also would have preferred covering the cakes in fondant for a clean, smooth finish. But Buttercream frosting was ordered as well. I think the chocolate cake would have been better with chocolate frosting, but the color didn't work with my theme. If I could have covered it in fondant, we could have had the best of both worlds. But that's OK. I'm here to make what the customer wants!

The farewell cake was for the music teacher at the middle and high schools.



My design changed from more complex to rather simple when I faced a bit of a time crunch. I really love the tuxedo ruffles around the cake, however.



They turned out just how I envisioned.


I really love how the bridal shower cake turned out.



This was a fun one to play with. My favorite part is the beaded bodice on the dress and the border around the cake that looks like a string of pearls.



I worked all day on these cakes yesterday. I finally had them done and was just finishing up cleaning the kitchen, when I turned around to see the dog sticking her nose up to the table to chomp my bridal cake! I yelled, Lincoln yelled, and we both chased her down. I was initially so mad I couldn't see straight! I was so angry that she had ruined the pretty dress! Lincoln tried to be helpful and make some suggestions for how I could fix it, but I just needed to walk away from it for a while. I took an American Idol break (lamest finale since Jordin Sparks), then with fresh eyes and less spitting anger, I looked the cake over again. As you look at the cake, the dress hangs off the bottom left corner. She had bit that, but hadn't gotten in as far as the cake. I was able to cut off the fondant she had touched and scrape off the frosting she had breathed on, then I replaced and redesigned. I actually like the dress better with the added band detail on the hem.



Unfortunately, when you get down low and look from this angle, you can see that I should have trim more fondant away, or made the ruffle a little longer.


You don't notice this when you're just looking down at the cake, but I wish I would have noticed before. This could have been so much worse. If she had actually bit into the cake I think I might have had to send her packing!

I'm linking up to:

Sweet Sixteen Cakes

They're done! This has been a great learning experience for me. The number one thing I've learned is that I need to charge a lot more for my cakes! I haven't even stopped to figure up how much time and ingredients I put into these, but I know it's more than what I charged. Which is OK, because right now I'm happy to have people giving me the chance to do this and practice and actually get some money for it. But going forward, I think it's time to reevaluate what I'm charging.

Remember the inspiration picture?



Cake #1


Vanilla cake, vanilla buttercream frosting. This is a ruffle cake, just like the pink cake in the inspiration picture.

Cake #2


Fresh strawberry cake, strawberry buttercream between the four layers, marshmallow fondant ruffle tiered covering, gum paste flowers. The cake gets all its flavoring from fresh strawberries in the batter, no artificial color or flavor.

Cake #3


Chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream between two layers, marshmallow fondant covering, gum paste daisies. I love these daisies. I want to do a cake with daisies and brown eyed susans. They are my favorite flowers!


I think these are so summery and fun, while still being beautiful. I hope the clients like them! They will be here shortly to pick them up.

I'm linking up to Funky Junk Interiors' Saturday Night Special:

Trying to catch up

This has been a busy week, but it seems they all are lately. I wouldn't say it has been crazy, just busy. I guess I'm starting to adjust to life with a fuller schedule. As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm doing a cake order for a sweet sixteen party this weekend. We decided on three cakes and I'm really excited about them. I can hardly wait for Saturday when I will actually decorate them. In preparation, I have been experimenting with gum paste. Gum paste is similar to fondant, in that it is a powdered sugar-based edible clay. But unlike fondant, gum paste dries very hard, to the point that, although it is technically edible, you probably wouldn't want to eat it. Because of this, it really holds its shape well. For my birthday, Lincoln got me a set of gum paste flower cutters. These are great for cutting out the basic shape of the leaves and petals, then you can assemble and sculpt and mold them into the final product.

The design for the cakes I am doing is very simple and elegant. The client sent me this inspiration picture.



The colors requested are purple and white. I will do one tier ruffle cake, like the pink one in the picture, one larger layer cake in white with a ring of daisies around it, and one smaller cake with very simple, understated ruffles around it and violets either in a border around the base, or cascading from the top to the base. I'll have to play with that a little to decide what I like best with the ruffles. I don't want it to be too busy, since clean, elegant lines are what we are looking for, with the variance in size, shape, and texture taking center stage.

I have worked a little bit the last couple of days creating these:



I added a little glitter to the violets which you can see a little better in this photo (you might have to click it to enlarge):


Cake decorating has really proven to be a great creative outlet for me. Every cake I do I try to learn something, create something I haven't before. This weekend I need to print off some pictures of my cakes for an auction at the elementary school. I am donating a cake to be auctioned and I need people to be able to see some of the cakes I've done so they know what their options are. I'm hoping this might be some good publicity/advertising that will land me a few more cake orders.

I'm looking forward to sharing my final product with you this weekend!

I told you the posts would be sparse...

Life has been pretty busy around these parts. I just got back from a spring break vacation to North Carolina. Since Lincoln didn't have enough vacation days to cover this trip and our two summer trips we have planned, I took the kids and went without him. Spring break fell at the perfect time- the weather in NC was perfect, and the weather here was miserable.
Now that I'm back, I have only a few days to get ready for a garage sale this weekend. They are so much work! But on the bright side, I am doing some major unloading of clutter and unused items. Nothing is coming back in. If it doesn't sell it goes to Goodwill or the dump. I'm done.
Next weekend I have my first large cake order. I'm doing four cakes for a dual sweet sixteen party with 75 guests. I'm nervous, but excited. These two projects should keep me pretty busy. I have lots of plans swimming around in my mind of projects I am itching to do on the house. I can't decide which to do first. Hopefully I'll have something to show you soon!

Today is my birthday and Lincoln got me one of these:



...a grain mill attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer. We've been organizing our food storage lately and decided it was high time we got a better grain mill so we can use our wheat. I can't wait to share pictures of our new shelves, and I can't wait to start canning produce from our garden to fill those shelves!

Spiderman Cake, and Apologies

This past weekend I did a cake order for the boy I babysit. It's especially fun to do a cake for someone I know well. It becomes a lot more personal and lots of extra love goes into it. When I do birthday cakes for my kids, they are entirely works of love. Carson had changed his mind many times about the theme for his cake. It started as Spiderman, then went to Kung Fu Panda, then to Megamind. His Mom and I were both having more success finding ideas and decorations for the Spiderman theme, so we talked him into going with that. I let him look at cake ideas with me online and he found one he really liked. He was most excited about the fact that it had little mini cakes around it. So I modified the design a bit and came up with this:



He requested a toy Spiderman on it, so his Mom brought me one of his to set on top.

The cake itself is red velvet with blue buttercream frosting, covered by marshmallow fondant. That way, when you cut into it, you see the Spiderman colors. I made the red velvet cake from scratch. I thought it turned out rather dry, so I guess I need to find a different red velvet recipe. I think I need to do a little experimenting with cake flavors and recipes. It's got to taste good on the inside, not just look cute on the outside.


As you may have noticed, posting has become few and far between lately. My life has suddenly gotten busier as I've been asked to serve as the Relief Society president at church. Relief Society is the women's organization in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and entails lots of duties that will require me to prioritize my time. Time that I would normally spend in the blogosphere will now be spent in other ways. But hopefully, once I get into the swing of things, I'll settle in and be able to blog more frequently again. And maybe that will happen sooner than I think. Creating and sharing is an outlet for me, so I'm sure I'll be around.

Baby Shower

Boy oh boy has it been a crazy week. Just busy stuff. A big part of this week was getting ready for a baby shower I hosted today. I did my now standard pom-poms for decorations. Yes, it IS my go-to party decor. And I'm totally good with that. Fun, easy, economical.


I also made the cake for the shower. I decided to try a different cake. It is orange almond with orange buttercream frosting and fondant flavored with orange juice instead of vanilla. The jury is still out on the cake. I thought it was a bit heavy and rich for my liking. Almond extract tends to be that way, in my opinion.


I decorated the cake based on the invitation she chose. I just blatantly copied it. Well, maybe not blatantly. I tried a new border I've never done, with different sized balls. I think it's fun and whimsical, playing off the different sized circles on the rest of the cake.


Here's a tip for bridal or baby showers. I'm sure a lot of you have seen or used the idea of having the guest of honor bring her thank you card envelopes and then the host has everyone write their name and address on an envelope as they arrive. The host can draw one from a basket at the end of the shower and give the individual a door prize, and the guest of honor can leave the party with all her thank you cards already addressed.


I decided to take it one step further. I had the guest of honor bring her thank you cards as well. I bought some sticky notes, and as she opened each gift, I wrote down what she received on a sticky note, then affixed the sticky note inside a card and stuck it in the envelope of the person she received it from. When she is ready to write her notes, she can look at the name on the envelope, pull out the note, see what they gave her, write the note, put it back in the envelope, seal, and done.



I love throwing parties, big and small. The only part I don't like is cleaning my house in preparation. Oh for a maid.

Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate

I happen to love chocolate. So when I'm making a cake for someone, if they don't specifically request something else, chocolate is my default. This first cake I made for a friend's birthday. She told me she liked chocolate and raspberry. So- deep, dark, chocolate cake with yellow raspberry filling, chocolate buttercream, and chocolate chips. I did this one pretty quickly and just used fondant I had on hand, which is why I made another brown and pink cake. But I love that combination, so I might have made it that way anyway! This was my first attempt at this rose techinique.






And here is Devon's birthday cake. He requested Lego Indiana Jones. I wish I had covered the cake board, but I was being a little lazy.