Sugar Dress Pink Lace Cake

I have tried so many lace making products that I almost gave up.  When SugarVeil came out, I thought it was cool but all the mats were kind of tacky (just my opinion). It really did take a while for some better mats to be developed but they are expensive.  I have used SugarVeil in a piping bag so that I could pipe onto parchment with a complicated pattern underneath.  Once dried, I could pick it up and adhere it to the cake.   I can be a real chicken when piping black icing on a white cake!  The thing I don't like about SugarVeil is that it takes a while to dry and it dries out very quickly.  Keep your finished pieces wrapped well in cling wrap or it will be very brittle and fall apart. 

When I saw a video on Icing Inspirations about their new product, Dab, I bought six!  It looked so easy, is ready immediately and they said it stayed flexible.  I tried so many times but I could not get the STUFF to cooperate.  It is really hard on your hands! I still don't know how to make that product work.

Now I have found Sugar Dress.  It is easy to mix, I've even done it by hand. You can speed the process in the oven and it stays flexible for a long time. It is also very strong so when you take it out of the molds it stays in one piece.  It's a little pricey, but so are the two mentioned above.  You can find it on Amazon, so that is good for Amazon Prime members because free shipping!

The mat from this cake was purchased from All About Cake Art.  "Virginia" is the name of the mat and it's $48.50

They have some pretty ones.  I've also found several mats on Etsy that are much cheaper but don't always come in the sizes promised so read the reviews. 
https://www.etsy.com/shop/GLOBALPAFMOLDS
https://www.etsy.com/shop/RomanticCraft

New Yellow and Gray Cake AND Giveaway!

I, like many others, am currently obsessed with Lori Hutchinson, aka The Caketress.  I am seeing works inspired by her designs all over the Internet.  The more I see, the more I like her work.

I had been looking for one of her cutters for literally months, and last fall when we were at ICES we kept seeing people using her "signature" cutter on lots of display cakes.  Chaddy took a picture with his phone and we hit the vendor room, showing each and every vendor our picture to see if they had a matching cutter.  Finally, one of the vendors had one and sold us her last one!  I was SO excited!

So, I used her cutter to outline the yellow section of a new display cake, another in my so-called series of yellow and gray cakes.  And ruffles are such a big trend in cakes right now too, that I had to add some.  I did want to add my own flair to it, so I found this petal border cutter and decided to use that to make my ruffles.

AND NOW FOR THE GIVEAWAY!

Well, I don't have an extra set The Caketress cutters, but I did somehow find an extra set of the cutters I used to make the ruffles on my cake. It's the FMM Sugarcraft Straight Frill Set 3 (9-12) cutter (read more about it here). It's still in the package and everything!!  If you interested in winning this, just leave a comment on this post from now until April 2nd at Noon EST.  Just leave me your e-mail so I can contact you if you've won.  I'll announce the winner here on the blog on Tuesday April 3rd.  This giveaway is sponsored by little-ol-me!

Audio Tutorial: Add Sound To Your Cake

Hey gang!  You remember on Tuesday when I mentioned that we had Tow Mater talking on the cake we did for Kaben's birthday?  Well, I asked Chaddy to put together a little tutorial on just how he did it (it was in fact all his idea).  I'm sure every toy is made and put together differently; but this was our first experience with it and it really wasn't too hard!  So I'll let Chaddy finish this from here on!  Enjoy!

As we were designing the cake for Kaben and the Tow Mater element was discussed, we went out shopping for a model to use for sculpting.  Lucikly, Cars is still a big thing and our local Target had plenty of toys to  choose from, including one that said a few phrases each time you pushed a button on his hood.  I thought it would be really cool to add it to the cake design.

I put a lot of time into deciding exactly how it would get implemented, but my first problem was whether or not I could get the module out without breaking it.  This is how I did it.

Tools / Items that came in very helpful during this project:

• Talking Toy (duh!)
• Small Screwdriver Set
• Electrical Tape
• Hot Glue Gun
• Exacto Knife
• Small Hobby Hacksaw

Click on any image in this tutorial to see a larger version

OK, now that we have our toy, how do we get into it?  Well, if we want to get to the bottom of things, flip this little guy over and see what's on the bottom.

OK, there's some screws here so that's a good place to start!  I started by opening the middle screw first as I figured that housed the batteries.

Yep!  There's the batteries!!  Now I'm no electrician by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm going to leave this alone for now and remove the screws in the front and back.

With those 2 screws removed, the bottom opens right up.  The little wheels were on a small metal axle and lifted right out.  I saw lots of electronic stuff there inside, and that's what we want!

To my surprise, none of the pieces were really secured at all.  A little gentle tugging and the every came right out!

With everything out, we can set the top of the toy to the side.  From now on, I will refer to the elements of the toy with the letters above:

• A - Battery / Power
• B - Voice Module Chip
• C - Switch
• D - Speaker
• E - LED light (we didn't use this as an element in the cake)

OK, so I had everything out... did it still work?  I pressed and button, and it did work, but the sound was very faint.  Had I broken the speaker while removing it?  I looked at it and it appeared to be in tact.  I placed it against the plastic case of my screwdriver kit and hit the button again.  This time it was much louder and it sounded just right.  The speaker needs something to vibrate against which makes it the speaker.  I guess it  works like the talking greeting cards.

I wanted to try and salvage the toy (we still needed it as a model), so at this point I used a small hobby hacksaw to cut out the battery pack (the red/black striped areas) and I was actually able to get the toy completely back together, and I'm not really the mechanical type.

Since I know the speaker needs something plastic or paper to vibrate on, I decide that placing the whole rigging in the underside of the cake drum.  It was at this point that I found that the battery pack I tried so hard to keep together was way too big to fit in the quarter inch space that the cake drum would allow.  I took the batteries out (3 small pill type batteries) and wrapped them together in electrical tape, making sure the positive and negative ends were still exposed.  I then cut the battery pack down until it was just the 2 contact ends with the lead wires on them.  I placed them on the proper ends of the batteries and used a little more electrical tape to hold them in place.  I then pushed the button and made sure I still had sound - yep!  (Sorry I didn't get a picture of that part).

Then I looked at the amount of wire I had between each component and started making small cuts on the underside of my cake drum.  It's just corrugated cardboard on the inside, so you can make a little cut and peel out a layer with your finger.  I did this for each of the components.  The unused LED light?  I just stuck it inside the hole I made for the Voice module (B & E).  I also made a shallow cut between all the boxes so I could run the wires.  If you can make your holes just the right size, everything will fit nice and snug.  If you have some wiggle room, just use a little hot glue to secure things down.

For the switch, I decided that it would look best if it was on the side of the cake board (see "C" above).  I cut a small notch out of the side and it fit in there perfectly.  A little dollop of hot glue held it in place.  At this point I taped a piece of cardboard over the rest of the components, except the speaker.  We later covered the cake board in foil to hide the switch, but you could have just as easily covered it with ribbon, just make sure to keep the speaker opened and the button revealed.

Here's a video of the finished project, with sound!!

We later learned that once the cake was on the board that the sound did get a little muffled again.  Luckily, we were able to have Jenniffer's brother make a couple of support legs to keep the board off of the stand at the last minute.  I would like to experiment again and find better placement for the speaker that would be less prone to the muffling problems.  I also learned that it wasn't nearly as hard as we had it made up in our minds.

I know this post was long and rather text heavy, but I appreciate you sticking around and reading through it.  If I missed anything or you have questions, please leave a comment and I will answer you (if I can)!!

Guinness Bottlecap Grooms Cake

I have been making some extremely "normal" cakes lately, especially groom's cakes.  With all of the awesome choices out there, couples keep going with plain chocolate with chocolate covered fruit or a Georgia or Tennessee theme.  I hate to blog about something that we are all tired of so at least we have one fairly cool cake for this week, but I can't promise what will come next! 

This grooms cake was a less expensive option for my couple than a bottle of Guinness.  Also, since it's got a low profile and minimum carving I was able to use my normal soft cake instead of pound cake (the bottle would have to be pound for strength).  I baked a 16" and 14" round dark chocolate cakes, filled them with Bailey's Irish Cream buttercream and crumb coated. I made a small cardboard template with a rounded end and just went around the cake and cut out the bottle cap indentions.  Super easy.  The hardest part was figuring out how many sections we were going to have and marking them.  Chaddy and his geometry skills were very helpful. 

I then covered in Elite Ivory fondant.  Have I mentioned lately how much I love Elite fondant for covering a cake?  It's so soft, never cracks, tastes yummy and I can roll it SO thin.  I am also using "The Mat" from Cal-Java for rolling out big pieces of fondant.  I don't have the room in my bakery for a fondant sheeter, so this mat system is perfect.  You can roll fondant, walk away from it for long periods of time and because it's covered it won't dry out.  It's a very inexpensive tool that I really do love!  But, it doesn't work well with Fonderific, go figure!  I decided to use my new fancy airbrush to do some highlights on the edges.  I used a gray after trying a few other colors. 

Lastly, but more importantly, Chad got the logo and using modeling chocolate and the Cricut Cake, he magically made me a logo!  Do you know how long that would have taken to do by hand?!  Much longer than I was getting paid for that's for sure!  I hope you like the cake and can make a differnt logo or size for an event in the future.  There's a lot of soda and beer fans out there, so this should be a pretty good generic cake design! 

Happy decorating! 

Big Flower Petal Explosion Wedding

We began our journey with cake when my bride came in with a with a picture of a cake from a magazine. It was a very plain fondant cake with a big flower on it. The bride liked, the design, but she wanted more. More flower, more petals, more bling. And she wanted it in buttercream. Who could blame her?

The bling was easy to accomplish. We used some of the rhinestone rope from Bead and Trim as a border for each tier. It's subtle, but still classy, elegant, and sparkly.

The flower? It was a lot of work, but the look was worth it. I started by using a teardrop cutter and making petals. In four different sizes. I made SO many gumpaste petals! Chad made gumpaste petals! Did I mention there were a lot of petals?!?

But I did get to use a new tool that I just love. I have never really liked my plastic ball tools. They seem to drag and I don't get the petal curling action that I really want. But a few weeks back I ordered Colette Peter's new metal ball tool... and it is amazing! With the metal ball tool I can get my petal edges super thin, and had much nicer curls than what I had previously achieved.

OK, back to those petals! I let them dry on aluminum foil and once they were nice and dry, I used a triangular makeup sponge (not all my cake tools are expensive!) to apply a mixture of silver and purple luster dusts on the petal's edges. These were the colors the couple was using during the reception.

Now with most gumpaste flowers, you make the petals on wires, you bind them all together with floral tape, and then at some point to pop it into the cake. With this flower being on such a grand scale, I couldn't exactly wire all the petals together. So I had to place each petal individually onto the cake. See? I told you it took me a long time!!

Until next time, have a great week!

A Few Of My Favorite Tools!

I had a fun conversation with a fellow bakery owner today and it inspired me to blog about my favorite tools.  Not to mention that I had NO cakes last week.  We spent the week working on taxes but you really don't want to hear about that do you!?!  Most of you that follow this blog know that I LOVE my metal scraper that enables me to get my buttercream smooth as well as my Cricut cake machine (most of the time).  What you might not know is the little things that help me make pretty cakes every week.

One tool is a sewing gauge that I use when marking tiered cakes.  For instance if you are stacking a 9" and 6" round, once your 9" is cold you can basically center a 6" cardboard circle or cake pan on the top.  Then use your sewing gauge to get your 1.5" on all sides of your board.  Since the tool is so light it's also good for leaning up against the side of the chilled cake to mark something you need.  The little arrow that slides up and down is very handy too!

ACE 1" Food Barrel Extruder

One of the other favorite things is my large Polymer Express Clay Gun.  It's an extruder gun that is easy to load, easy on your hand, holds a lot of fondant and is easy to clean.  Did I mention that it's very cool too?  There are small fondant extruders, which are fine if you are just a hobbyist, but if you are going to make a lot of cakes, spend a few extra dollars and you won't regret it.  The three circle die is cool because if you twist it slightly it looks just like rope.  Trying to make a fondant rope that looks even and smooth is not an easy task without one of these fantastic little tools.  I love this site in general because of all the cool stuff you can't find anywhere else, like some of their great impression mats.

What are some of your favorite tools and why?