Tip Toe Through the Trees TUTORIAL

Why is making really pretty trees out of sugar so hard?  I'm not judging others efforts at all because it's hard!  My advice is to make evergreens/Christmas trees!  They are really easy!  Our friends were making a cake for a charity and they needed trees of  a tall variety.  This is a picture tutorial of our efforts.  Some were better than others but I hope you can take something away from my experiments.

We always started with a center support and heavy floral wire from Wal-Mart.  We twisted them all around and then hot glued the crap out of the joints so they are secured and won't slide down and have more stability.

We added lots of brown modeling chocolate for the trunks and branches.  You can score lines with a knife to get some texture. For the tree above we piped tiny leaves all over the branches.   Don't try to pipe all the leaves on a particular branch at one time.  Do a couple of rows and let them dry before the next bunch.  This will keep all the icing from just falling off the wire due to the weight.  

We have a lot of branches to begin with but once we covered them all with leaves, the tree still looked very sparse.  We decided to try to make some additional branches and attach them, once dried, by inserting into the modeling chocolate.  This didn't work very well :(  We did add some of them once the trees were in place and weren't going to move around at all. 

Next we attempted a weeping willow type tree.  We learned on the first tree that it's best to cover the wire branches with brown floral tape.  This was good to give the leaves a thicker branch to hold on to and also if some brown shows through the leaves that's way better than silver wire. 

Same leaf application as before, just pipe a lot of leaves over and over.....an over.  There is still a really weird trunk ending up top.  I should figure a better trunk structure going forward for this odd look.

This tree reminded me of the twisting tree called "the womping willow" in the Harry Potter movies.  Here I tried to fix the weird top trunk problem by tapering the tree into large branches.  I also added a few more since adding branches after doesn't work so well.

Believe it or not, this is a tiny leaf cutter I used here.  I did not like the look so I gave up pretty quickly.

So in the interest of not loosing my mind, I tried this "look".  If I made large balls of fondant instead of these flat blobs, they would have been much to heavy for the structure I built.  I could make the structure much heavier and try that look next time.  For texture, I banded several toothpicks together with the floral tape and twisted it all over for lots of leaf fluff!

These trees took me hours to make and I want to emphasize that in case you decide to make a forest!  I hope you have picked up a trick or two for your trees!

Collaborations Can Be A Blast!

I have talked before about the importance of having cake friends.  It's nice to have someone to complain to and to bounce ideas off of, but sometimes you get to collaborate on really cool projects.

Our friends Kimberly and Andrew of Couture Cakes were asked by country music super-station US 101 to do a cake for the Heartstrings for Hope concert benefiting St. Jude.  On these types of cakes there is SO much to do, and they asked us if we would like to help out.  In return, we would be their guests at the concert.

 

They know of our (OK, Chaddy's) prowess with logos and the cutting machine, so they gave us a list of words and the US 101 logo and we started rolling out modeling chocolate.  I came up with a really cool trick while working on all these millions of letters.  I used strips of parchment paper with some vegetable shortening on it an used that to adhere the paper to the FRONT of the letters.  The spacing is kept in tact.  They were easy to apply to the cake too - just apply a little tylose glue to the back of the letters and place them against the cake.  Hold your hand over the paper and the heat from your hand will release the shortening.  Easy peasy!

We ONLY did the words & logos on this cake...

So here's the cake and it turned out amazingly, don't you think?  Andrew did an absolutely perfect job sculpting each of the artists Which included Randy Houser, Tyler Farr, Kelly Lovelace, Jared Neimann, and Sheryl Crow!  We were also treated to a backstage meet and greet - getting to meet all of those talented artists was almost as much fun as helping out our friends!

Santa Claus Holiday Cake

So it's Christmas Eve, and this festive fella will be popping down our chimneys in just a few hours!

This is the last Christmas cake that I donated to the "Nutcracker Sweets" charity event.  Again, I found a sweet little Santa face online and printed it out.  I then hand cut several pieces out of fondant to give ol' Saint Nick a little more dimension.  Then I got out the glitter and gave Santa's hat a nice dusting!

Again, these pics didn't turn out so great, but it looks better when it's larger (just click on the picture).

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!!

Christmas Tree Holiday Cake

Here is another cake I donated to the "Nutcracker Sweets" charity event.

For this cake, I found a cute Christmas tree graphic online and printed it out.  I cut the entire tree out of green fondant and then painted each of the elements (trunk, star, tinsel, and ornaments) using luster and petal dusts.  Otherwise, it's just a simple buttercream cake!

Stop back in on Friday and see the last cake in the Christmas trilogy!  Maybe we'll even have some eggnog - well, I'll be having eggnog anyway!

Snowflake Holiday Cake

About a week ago, I donated a few small 9 inch holiday cakes to the Partnership for Family, Children, and Adults annual "Nutcracker Sweets" charity event.

On this snowflake cake I used my Cricut Cake to cut out this snowflake from modeling chocolate.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize until after the cake was gone that my camera was on night mode - sorry!!

Check back on Tuesday for another Christmas themed cake!  Next Friday is Christmas Eve!  Don't get on Santa's naughty list!!

Vote for Icing Smiles!

We interrupt the normal flow of levity and cakery for this very important announcement:

Icing Smiles is a relatively new non-profit organization that helps get cakes to children with critical and terminal illnesses.  I found out about the great work Tracy Quisenberry was doing a couple of weeks ago and immediately contacted her to see how I could help.  As I read through the website I was overcome with emotion.  Others have been too... so much in fact that poor Tracy is now having a hard time growing her organization quickly enough to connect all us bakers with all these children fighting for one more birthday.

I have offered my baking services, and I wish the economy and my finances would allow me to offer this organization my financial support as well.  Tracy, not to let a little thing like the lack of a fat stack of cash stand in her way, has submitted her idea to the Pepsi Refresh Project.  The Pepsi Refresh project is where people like us can vote for altruistic projects that we deem worthwhile.  At the end of the month, the top 10 contenders get $25,000 to help get their ideas off the ground.  Icing Smiles desperately needs this money and this is where we can help!

Visit the Icing Smiles page on the Pepsi Refesh Project at:

http://www.refresheverything.com/icingsmiles

We can vote for them once per day, and if you have a Facebook account, you can even vote for them without signing up for a separate account.  If you haven't yet heard about Icing Smiles, please visit their website to read more about the wonderful work Tracy is doing and the stories of the children she has already helped.  As I write this they are ranked 331... lets get her down to the single digits, huh?

Chad even added a voting button to my blog's sidebar to help me and all my visitors remember to vote everyday.  Please help get the word out about this amazing organization!

Thanks,
Jenniffer

UPDATE: Just checked this morning (Aug 5) and their current ranking is 52!!  This is great news but we all have to keep voting to get (and keep) her in the top 10.  Tracy informed us that Pepsi has said it was OK to vote using multiple e-mail accounts, so break out all those old hotmail accounts and vote again!!