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!

Calvin & Hobbes First Birthday

We love Calvin and Hobbes, but we can't recreate those sweet characters in 3-D unless we had lots of time and the customer had lots of money to spend.  We have learned over the years to do our level best not to say "no" to a design.  You have to offer options that fit your skill set and their budget.  I don't feel it's right to agree to make a cake that a baker doesn't know IF they can do it.  Almost every cake is unique in my situation, but most aren't made with unfamiliar techniques.  When you are asking a baker to create something you have not seen in their portfolio, offer to pay for a small cake in the same technique before you sign the contract for the larger cake. Please trust me, it will be money well spent, a lot like cake insurance.

 

Part of the awesomeness of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon is their font, so we made a stencil for the verbiage.  We printed the characters out with edible images and cut them out. For some reason, I wanted the bubble/non flat image so I tried something new. It was not without challenges, mainly trying not to tear or stretch the images. We used the cut images to cut a piece of modeling chocolate out and thinned down the edges.  Then we dry fitted the image again and trimmed again, repeating the process.

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my
lucky rocket ship underpants don't help.”

Kaben's Fifth Birthday - Frog Edition

I have blogged about sweet little Kaben several times before here on this blog.  To date, I have done all of his birthday cakes.  His parties are always the best and he picks his very own themes for his parties.  This year was reptile themed.  His Mom asked for 3 separate cakes.  This week we'll focus on this tree frog cake.  Now I should add that she wanted very realistic looking animals.  It was a little out of my comfort zone, but I was up for the challenge. 

I started out with a trip to the toy store to get some toys.  I walked every aisle of Toys R Us, and wouldn't you know it I found all the toys I needed in the dollar bin by the register!

I started by making a rice crispy frog body and then covered the whole thing in white modeling chocolate.  From there it was just molding and sculpting.  I finished him up with a texture mat and some airbrushing / petal dust painting.

As for the cake, this was basically a 2-tiered tree stump cake with rice crispy limbs.  The cake is rough iced in buttercream and then airbrushed with several shades of black and brown to give it a realistic bark effect.

I hope you enjoyed the frog cake, stop back in next week to the see the second of Kaben's 3 cakes.  What reptiles do you think are on the other 2 cakes??

Merry Christmas Everyone!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

SPEND SOME TIME WITH PEOPLE YOU LOVE!

Chocolate Groom's Cake with Antlers

I have to admit that anytime I start hearing the term "antlers" discussed in a cake meeting, I tend to get a little nervous.  There's just so many ways you can go wrong with antlers.  I definitely like the rustic look, but I guess antlers just freak me out a little.  I guess it's that they come from little baby deer (OK, so I know that "little baby deer" don't have antlers, but they do in my mind!)

I delivered this cake to The Farm in Dalton and when I brought it in it was just a plain chocolate cake.  The florist took over while I was putting together the ginormous wedding cake and when I finally looked over this is what he had done!  I really thought it looked amazing.  The moss near the stump base, the roses, even the pheasant feathers looked great.  And the antlers even looked pretty cool around the base, although I was still a little iffy on the on on top of the cake.  Is there such a thing as artificial antlers?  Is there something you can coat them with or do to them that makes them food safe?  Boil them maybe?

Have a great weekend, and be sure to stop back in next week as we have a really great cake to showcase on Tuesday and a tutorial for you on Friday that you're just going to love!

Grandview Cupcake Tree

I have talked about my brother the master woodworker in the past and about the incredibly awesome cake stands he makes for me.  When I called him up and asked for another cupcake stand he certainly didn't disappoint with this one!

This was my first square cake stand, and I really liked the way the cupcakes looked on it.  On the top, we placed a small 6 inch square cake.  Anytime I do a cupcake tree, I like to include some sort of small cake so that the couple can still get the traditional "cake cutting" photo opportunities if they really want them.

When I arrived at the Grandview, the florist had left us some beautiful hydrangea leaves and clusters so I used every last leaf to adorn the tree.

Over the past few weeks, I have been really scouring the Internet for some new design ideas and some new "mentors" to help me grow my craft.  I read an article about Jim Smeal and I was really blown away by his workmanship.  He did a border that reminded me of bamboo that I really, really liked.  I did my own version of it on the small 6" cake topper.

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!

Head in the Clouds!

When you do as many cakes as we do, you sometimes find yourself using the same techniques over and over. Recently I was asked to come up with a design for a fellow's 75 birthday. He liked Cessna-type planes, but they didn't want a sculpted airplane cake. We didn't feel as though we could make a gumpaste plane, so it was off to the hobby store to find a small model. It was harder to find the plane than it was to put together!! The cake was a 3-tier buttercream cake and we used fondant to make the trees and mountains.

The clouds are where the "new technique" comes into play. I made a batch of marshmallows and piped them into pillowy cloud shapes on a bed of powdered sugar. They came out so perfect! They were fluffy, cloud-like, and delicious!