I'm Stumped!

Ok, so not really, but I did get a chance to do an awesome groom's cake this weekend and I wanted to share it with you. It was rather large - it needed to feed 180 people, but it was a pretty simple carve job. I used rice crispy treats for the roots and the golf tees and golf balls were molded from fondant. I was very pleased with my airbrushing and thought it added a very neccessary level of depth to the cake. We delivered the stump cake to the main ballroom at the Chattanooga Read House. The wedding cake was really pretty too (but that's another post). Have a great week!

Extreme Groom's Cake!

OK, I want to confess that originally I wanted to blog tonight with some shots of cakes I have coming up this weekend. As luck would have it I'm running terribly behind schedule and I didn't want some of my new followers to wait another day so I pulled a cake from our archives.

Several months ago I met with a couple and the groom was a big fisherman. He had a real passion for deep sea fishing and on one such trip had reeled in a 4 foot mahi mahi (dolphin fish). He wanted his trophy fish immortalized in cake for his big wedding day.

We started out with a reference photo from Wikipedia and then enlarged it on the computer. Once it was printed on 20-30 sheets of paper, we arranged them and taped them all together and cut out the shape of the fish. We used this template to carve the cake and make the fins and tail (out of gumpaste). The body was then covered in fondant and airbrushed to match the reference photo.

When it was all said and done, we delivered this extreme groom's cake to the Fairyland Club on Lookout Mountain. I have never been SO swarmed by the fellas in all my life! They all wanted their picture taken with the trophy fish! It was a blast to make and we learned a really cool technique. So now, without further ado, here's the resulting 2 foot by 4 foot mahi mahi cake... Enjoy!

Park's monkey cake

1st birthdays and monkeys seem to go so well together! We got this little design from a napkin on a party ware website that the mommy used. It was cute and I am happy with it. Especially since we made a yellow cake, that way the buttercream won't turn any one's mouth and teeth blue! Plus dark blue icing just tastes funny! Blue fondant doesn't do any of the above, so sometimes I do think practical! I don't want mommy's upset with me for getting all their carpets ruined!

Emily's Cake

This was a very neat cake I made for a wedding this last weekend. We took it to "The Home Place" in Calhoun, GA. It was a beautiful outside venue to hold a reception and wedding. It was the prettiest place I've seen in a long time. Luckily the weather was great. I was so proud that Emily chose a colored wedding cake. I think it really made a nice statement on the pavilion. A white wedding cake would have gotten lost and not really added much to the look of everything. I handmade the little pink roses out of fondant using 3-circles, overlapping a little, rolling them up and pinching them a little to flair the roses. Each set of 3 circles gave me 2 roses. I then painted the edges to give them the 2 tone effect the bride wanted. The cake is iced in our house buttercream (a French buttercream) and is very soft so I put 1/2 a toothpick in each rose so they wouldn't slide off half way through the reception. It's not about it just looking good when you get it there! It has to stay pretty for hours!

Sneeky Grooms

It's not midnight and I'm done! Yeah! Partly because we worked until 11pm last night, but that's ok! I'm really happy with what I made this week and hope everyone else is too! I had one pick up today that was a small anniversary cake that a groom (is he still that after a year?) is surprising his wife with tomorrow. The logo was printed on edible image and pasted (with buttercream) onto fondant then cut out. If you don't put them on a white background, the colored icing seeps through and it looks really bad. The "slime" is just a little piping gel with one drop of green coloring. It's a very simple cake, I know. Check out the original grooms cake on the website. They really were looking forward to the dark chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream they ordered for their reception, but didn't get one bite! It was a ghost busters cake and to my surprise he has the topper as a screen saver on his iphone! Anyway, I hope she is surprised and eats her weight in chocolate cake as she doesn't have to worry about fitting in a dress this time! The other sneaky groom is getting married tomorrow but his bride's birthday is today. So her got her a surprise cake for the rehearsal dinner tonight. I hope she isn't tired of my cake by the end of the weekend. I made a dark chocolate cake with a raspberry swirl in it, raspberry buttercream and dark chocolate ganache on the outside. The butterflies were easy and quick. Just add a little tylose to your fondant so they dry harder and keep there flying motion. I'll blog about the other cakes soon! I can't give you all the goody at one time!

Silly Monkey Heads!!

I just LOVE doing a baby's first birthday cake! Besides wedding cakes and maybe sweet 16 / Quincenara cakes, they can be some of the biggest and elaborate cakes I do. Your very first birthday cake is a big thing and it should be special. This week I am making a cake for a one-year and my inspiration piece is the party plats, which have the cutest little monkey head on them. I wanted them to be really special. I used some wax paper to make a template and then rolled out my fondant to start making the heads. Thanks to my dear hubby, you get treated to a shot of me in action.

Still a lot of cakes to finish before I call it a week, but I'm done for the night. Here's a parting shot of the finished "smash" cake. Oh, I can't bear to think about this little guy actually getting smashed! Maybe the family will just get it bronzed?

5 tier Wedding cake

This is a very large wedding cake that we delivered to Trevitt Hall in Dalton Georgia. I really liked the five dot design in descending order, but it was after this cake that I figured out how to use a laser level on a project like this. It makes life so much easier and doesn't mark up the cake at all. The customer was very happy, but all I saw was the few places that my dots were "off". I'll keep striving for perfection even though it's just going to get eaten! The cake also has fresh hydrangea and calla lillies that we put on at the venue. It was big and took a lot of strawberries to make all that cake! YUM!

Funky 2-tier square cake

I just wanted to share this cake I made. My customer gave me a picture from another baker and asked me to duplicate it. It's a tough place to be, I like to design my own. But sometimes a design really grabs someone. They liked the taste of our cakes better, so that's a good thing! This is a very good customer and I have designed all of their other cakes, so I made this exception. The base of the cake is buttercream, but there is a LOT of fondant on top. I think they had a big party at the Thai restaurant "Rain" on Lee Hwy. I have eaten there, it's yummy!

I hope you like the cake!

Cherry Cake!

It's been a great week and I got to make two cakes that I would love to share. I thought the Elmo cake came out very cute and colorful. I especially like that we didn't break any copyrights. I hope the little boy, Luke, enjoys it and that his Mom doesn't curse me for the blue icing that will be on her carpet! The cherry cake is so cheery and preppy. It's hard to tell, but I brushed lots of glitter on the cherries for a highlight.

We will be closed and on vacation next week, so no post for a little while. Try not to cry yourselves to sleep! First week long vacation in 5 years! So overdue!