Sweet Sixteen Birthday Cake

This past weekend I made the cutest sweet sixteen for a young woman in Chattanooga.  I worked closely with her Mom to get a list of all her favorite things so we could surprise her with this grand birthday cake!

Our birthday girl is on the rowing team, so I made a replica of her rowboat in her school's colors.  The rest of her cake followed a salmon and turquoise color scheme.  Does anyone besides me have a problem mentioning salmon and cake in the same sentence? ;-)

I made her favorite shopping bag, and even a set of car keys, something every s16 year-old wants, but I had the most trouble with the birthday girls' pup!  I initially starting molding the dog using Fondarific modeling chocolate, but I had to scrap it.  It was just a little too wilty and wouldn't hold its shape the way I wanted.  I made a quick batch of real modeling chocolate and that worked much better. 

Thanks to everyone that stops and reads my blog; I enjoy telling you my tales in the cake trenches.  Friday is Valentine's Day, so hug someone you love!!

Tiffany Blue Wedding Cake

We delivered a cake to Trevitt Hall in Dalton this weekend.  I loved the bride, but the mom of the bride was precious!  She is the manager for a catering company so she sees weddings, and cakes, every weekend.  I was truly honored that she chose me to make the cakes. What a compliment!  My bride brought me a picture of this cake, in different colors, and didn't want me to change a thing.  I hate to copy other artists work, but I have to make what the brides want, especially when they are so sure.

I've been LOVING my odd size cake pans.  It has added a lot of options and I highly recommend them.  The flowered tiers are cake and the solid tiers are 3" tall styrofoam (from Dallas Foam).  The cake was 7/9/11/13" squares (duh) and the styro was 4/6/9/10".  I tried all of my teal and turquise colors from Americolor, etc but the winner was "5th Avenue Blue" from Albert Uster Imports.  It was the perfect "Tiffany Blue"!

If you decide to make this cake, I have a little advice.  First a 2" tall styrofoam seperator would be fine.  Use lots of supports included a couple of skewers in each styrofoam piece so they don't wiggle or float any.  I used two cake drums (10 pcs of cardboard) and 1/4" MDF for the cake board and then sharpened a long dowel and drove it through the entire cake for stability.  You have to use a "master dowel".  Count on cutting flowers out for 8 hours - yes 8 hours, just ask my sweet husband.  He cut and cut and then cursed me for not planning "better" as we worked until 11pm on Friday night.

Cake decorators are often lucky to have time to let gumpaste dry up for a bow, but we are know we should do better and plan better.  What I did right on this cake was to cover the cake board and styrofoam pieces on Tuesday so that they would be hard and dry before I manhandle them to death.  This makes the construction much easier.  Lastly,  turn your cake boards over and mark a square where it will line up with the styrofoam.  It's so hard to line up a cake with you are doing in from the underside.  Since the cake was 36" tall we had to put the top tier on at the venue. This made this very quick and easy since we are all the "entertainment" when we are setting up our cakes.