Cake Stencils are Awesome!

I love "Designer Stencils" a bunch. My current favorite is the mod flower because it gives the cake a sophisticated texture which seems to be a hot button with my brides. There is a display cake in my shop with this stencil and I swear that is why it keeps being picked. Here are a couple of my  "pearls of  wisdom" on stencils. First, you can absolutely use them on buttercream IF you use butter based icing that you can get cold/hard in the fridge. Sometimes I even but the tier in the freezer for 15 minutes so that it's super cold. Just go straight to the work when you take it out of the cold so that it doesn't get a layer of condensation because then the icing won't stick. I have bought some stencil holding "kit" but it was just two book clamps and some stretchy gauze. I found that it did more harm than good, so I don't use it. I sometimes use a corsage pin through the hanging hole and hold the other end with my fingers. Using a small angled spatula, I put on a clump of buttercream and spread it down the stencil. Once you get icing on the end your hand is holding you won't have to keep holding it down. I then used a plastic, cheap, dough scraper and take of most of the icing. You have to be consistent with the "thickness" or "depth" of the stencil icing or you will have really high sections and some barely there at all. That looks bad so it's a good habit to chose how you like the depth and be consistent. While the stencil is still attached, I airbrush the entire stencil with luster dust. Remove the stencil from one side first, scrape off the leftover airbrushed icing to throw away, wash and dry the stencil for the next section. Sometimes you are going to have some areas that "bleed" under the stencil. Just clean them up with a stiff paint brush (and soft to blend) after you have chilled the cake back up.

My next tip is to stencil the tiers before you stack them. If you want the design at the top of the cake you can raise the cake by placing cake boards/drums under the cake until you get the perfect height. That's a good reason to keep cardboard singles for just the right height. Don't forget to use shelf liner/grip so the doesn't slip when you are stenciling. When doing the cake pictured, I saved the bottom tier until last and then I had to trim the "extra" off the bottom so that it could be flush. I think the hardest part of this cake was the caulking the tiers so that there was no borders. I took out some of the stenciling, but I couldn't help it. The very best idea is to talk the customer into a ribbon border (fondant or real). It gives you lots of material to hide the union of the tiers.

Closeup of Stencil...  It adds so much detail and texture!

Just remember that every cake is going to have a backside. Seams won't match up perfectly. Just blend and love on it so that it's not so apparent. That's all you can do, so don't worry about it. It's just cake :)

Don't forget about the height. Lots of stencils are only 4" tall and I make 5" tall or taller cakes. Luckily some stencils are taller, so focus on those to buy if you make tall tiers too! If you really want to use a skinny stencil, allow for the width of your ribbon border and measure. Cut the cake shorter so that the stencil isn't a weird band looking thing, unless that's the look you are going for :)

One note about the cake featured above.  When I got to the venue, the "florist" left me a bucket of flowers the looked like the trash at the bottom of the boxes. Real Junk! I had to make it work but I don't have to be happy about it. The poppies were squished and mostly closed. The blue things were prickly! Sorry, had to get that jewel off my chest.

Do you have any tips on cake stenciling? Please share them with us in the comments so we can all be better decorators!

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. 

Quick Delivery Tip

Some weeks, I have to make several trips to get my cakes delivered.  Sometimes the timing of the deliveries just works out that way.  Some weeks all my cakes are due within a hour or so of each other and basically in the same part of town.  This can pose a problem of how to fit all those cakes in whatever vehicle you use to deliver your cakes.  A couple of weeks ago I had 5 cakes to deliver, and these were some big cakes.  My problem was figuring out the best use of my trunk space.  That's when it hit me!!  I went and got cake boards to match all my cakes and used these to figure out cake placement in our SUV.  I even realized that by rearranging the cakes (first cakes to be delivered go in last) I could be even more efficient.  I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, but it sure won't be the last time I use it.  From now on, anytime I have 4 or 5 cakes cakes to deliver I will be using this little trick to make things easier.

I hope you can make use of this too!  Have an awesome week!!

Banjo Cake Armature Design

Last week I showed you guys the awesome banjo cake I made for Rachel and Daniel's wedding.  They were thrilled with the cake; I even heard from the bridal planner that they wouldn't allow the cake to be cut!  They took the whole thing home with them without a scratch on it!  That's the way I like to think all my cakes go over.  I HATE seeing pictures of my cakes after they have been fed upon!!

Anyhoo, back to the design of  banjo armature.  I wanted this cake to look as much like a banjo as possible and as little like a cake as possible.  Even though it would mean more inedible pieces, I wanted the neck to be "floating", I wanted to use real guitar strings, and I didn't want a visible cake board.

In the picture above, I have removed the neck from the armature and screwed 6 small eye screws into the bottom of the banjo.  These will hold the strings.  The bottom cake is om the armature.  I included the thickness of the cake board into my design so that the banjo would keep it's scale and since it was the same size as the cake (14"), you would never know there was a cake board.  Even though the cake actually only measures 1.25 inches thick, I decided to put in some supports because I didn't want ANY shifting or sinking.  The cake above has it's basic decoration already done, which was a block modeling chocolate top with a wood grain modeling chocolate wrap around the sides.

This is the 2nd tier of the banjo, which is a 12 " cake.  It is sitting on a very thin cardboard round.  I cut out the holes for the armature.  Once it was on the cake I had to fill in the bottom with just a smidge of modeling chocolate to fully round out the bottom.  From there, it got a similar coating as the bottom tier.  White on the top with a gray wrap around the sides.  The neck could then be attached and then the details could be added.  Here's one more shot of the completed cake, just in case you missed it last week!

Have a great week!

Banjo Groom's Cake

 

I met with Rachel and Daniel several months ago and as soon as they mentioned they were interested in a banjo cake, my eyes lit up.  This is the kind of cake that I rarely get to do, but always look forward to making.  Almost immediately, I called our good friend Jim Pankey, who is a professional banjo player.  He was kind enough to lend us a banjo for a couple of weeks.  Chaddy went to work taking measurements, making cardboard templates, and taking pictures and detailed notes.  He even made some silicone molds of the tuning pegs!

Details on a cake like this is what can take it from great to incredible, but none of it will come together without a proper structure.

In instruments I have made from cake in the past, I used extruded fondant for the strings, and I never liked the look.  This time I wanted to use real strings, which meant that extra structure would need to be in place.

Luckily, our couple didn't care a great deal about how many people the cake fed, they were much more interested in a realistic final product.  The cakes are comprised of a 14" and a 12" rounds, but each "tier" is less than 2 inches high.

The neck is made of 1/4" wood, covered in modeling chocolate.  There's a small block of wood at the top and bottom of the banjo to hold the neck and strings.

 For the neck, all the decorations needed to keep a very low profile to keep the strings from damaging them.  I used thin strips of edible image paper for the frets, and gumpaste rolled super thin for the inlay.  I looked at lots of pictures of banjo inlay, and they were ranged from very simple to very ornate.  In the end, we wound up using a standard fret dot with a heart on either side.  I thought it added a nice hint of romance (it was a wedding, after all) but without being too "girly" or over the top.

So, is anyone interested in seeing the structure used to create this cake?  If so, drop back in here next week and I'll talk a little more about how we made the structure and show a few in-process shots of the cake.  If you have any other questions about the banjo cake, leave a comment on this post and I'll try my best to answer it next week.

Beautiful Roses Can Make the Cake

We delivered a wedding cake to Lindsay Street Hall in Chattanooga this weekend.  It was one of those simple pearl dotted wedding cakes.  I've done many like it before.  In fact, before leaving the shop I didn't even take a picture of it.  I just had to drop it off at the venue and put some fresh flowers on it.

When I got to Lindsay Street Hall I found the flowers that the florist had left for me.  Before I could even remove them from the container I couldn't help but notice that these were the largest, most beautiful pink and peach colored roses I had ever seen!  As I started putting these gigantic roses on the cake I began to really fall in love with it.  I checked the label on the container and saw that Humphreys Flowers had provided the florals.  I don't know the names of these roses YET!, but I will be speaking with someone from Humphreys soon to find out more about them!

It just goes to show that sometimes you can take something perfectly elegant and with just a simple addition turn it into something spectacular.

This Knot Helps No One

At least twice a week I get calls from salesmen wanting me to advertise in their publications, usually a bride-centric or wedding-themed issue.  I almost always say "No", and for two reasons.  First of all, I rarely see any leads from print media.  Maybe that's my fault for coming up with goofy ads, maybe it's the publisher's fault for not getting it into enough hands, or maybe it's the reader's fault.  I really don't know - let's just say I've tried it and not been happy with the money I've spent.

But my biggest problem has to be with the content that these magazines come up with for their "Wedding" issues.  I once advertised in a local magazine that said "Bridal cakes are all the rage these days and prices have gone up; be prepared to pay anywhere from $1 - $2.50 per serving for your cake."  Say what?!?  At the time, I was about the cheapest cake vendor in town (tied with Publix) and my prices started at $3.00 a serving.  I literally had a fit on those people.  I told them I had basically just paid a tidy sum for them to announce to their entire readership that my prices were WAY too high, when that was FAR from the case!  No one at the magazine could even tell me where they got their information for their Wedding Cake article.  Maybe from their grandmother's archive of old magazines?

Another time I found out that I had been voted "Best Bakery" by our local "Your Hometown Magazine".  I decided to run a small "Thank you" ad in the magazine just so people would have my number handy after reading it.  When I got the magazine, I opened it to find that they had done a huge article on a competing bakery across town!  I was floored by the lack of planning on the magazine's part.  It wasn't long before their salesman called wanting to know how excited I was to run some more ads in their publication.  I told them about my disappointment and the only thing they could say was "Yeah, I guess that was bad timing, huh?"  You betcha!

This weekend I was in Atlanta and stopped in a book store and a quick coffee break.  Someone had left a copy of the Georgia version of The Knot laying on the table next to ours so I decided to thumb through it.  I have advertised with The Knot in the past and I've had my share of issues with them, but they generally give out good information to brides.  So when I found a "What to Ask Your Baker" section, I thought I had better read it so that I could be prepared for these questions.  I almost spit out my latte when I read that brides should ask me if my "buttercream is made from imported Italian butter!"  If I get asked this I am going to respond "No, but I have an imported Italian cow that I milk everyday, just to make butter!"  Seriously?  I consider that my time as well as the bride's time is valuable and asking crazy questions like this does no good for anyone.

So brides, if you happen to read this, make sure that you realize that all these great articles you read in Bridal magazines are usually written by someone who has little to no knowledge of the actual service they are advising you about.  Decide what's important to you, make a list, and ask your baker (or other vendor) those questions instead.

And bakers, have you noticed this type of silly or downright misinformation in publications before?  What was the worst cake "advice" you've seen in print?  And do any any of you use imported Italian butter in your buttercream?

Mad Hatter Victorian Cake

 Some nights I sit in bed waiting to get sleepy and I wind up trolling Pinterest on my iPad.  It usually just gets me wound up.  I see some new cake or craft idea and my brains explodes trying to think of some way to incorporate it into a new cake design.  When I saw this mini mad hatter tutorial on Seeing Things That Aren't Really There, I knew I would have to make one for a cake.

I made this cake for my friend Amanda's birthday.  I decided on a romantic Victorian design with a hint of steampunk.  For the bottom tier, I did buttercream ruffles.  for the second tier, I used edible image sheets to recreate a layered ruffle design.

For the top, I used some molds I got from Kara Buntin along with some button molds to make a small Victorian collage around the monogram.  I added a lace mold to to give it little more of a feminine touch.

I really wanted to make the hat edible, but time ran tight and I just just used the paper template directly from the Seeing Things... blog.  It went together pretty easily and I have have my sights set on doing it again, but out of gumpaste or modeling chocolate.

I really appreciate each and every one of you that stops by here and visits the blog.  I hope you have an awesome week!

Buttercream Comb Cake and Comb Tutorial

 You guys know that I'm all about some buttercream cakes and when I can duplicate a fondant design in buttercream, well I'm just about the happiest girl on the block!

I made this dummy cake a few weeks ago (so this is actually royal icing, but it still works with the good stuff) and I wanted it to have the look of fondant strips.  It took me a while studying a few I found online in order to figure out just how I needed to make my "grooves" to give me the exact shape I needed.  Then on my first pass I used it upside down!  But it still looked neat, so I realized that I got two looks from the same comb.

So How Do You Make It?

Well, I had several freebie plastic bowl scrapers that I picked up at a food show a few years ago.  They are flexible, but still still sturdy enough to mold buttercream.  At the time of this writing I haven't found a source for you to get these, but I will keep looking and update the post if/when I find some.  UPDATE:  Amazon has this for about a buck each - looks like it would work.

From there I just used a T-Square to cut the side straight (the bowl scraper was originally very curved) and used a ruler to measure each of the indentations on the comb.  Then I used a Sharpie and my ruler to complete the cuts.

The possibilities of this technique are only limited by your imagination.  You could do waves, or even something like dental molding, just keep in mind that you want your design to remain fairly shallow, as we are taking away buttercream, and there's still cake underneath that really needs that buttercream.

What design would you make if you made your own buttercream comb?

FULL DISCLOSURE:  As a member of the Amazon Affiliate program, I receive a small commission if you buy a product from the links on my blog.  I actually own the products I recommend and all thoughts and opinions are my own. 

Rough Iced Lemon Swag Cake

I found this lemon floral swag on clearance at Cal Java a while back and it was so cute and such a great deal that I bought it right away and figured that I would find something to use it for eventually.

The rustic look has been so popular here that I wanted to create a rough-iced "buttercram" dummy cake to show my clients and I immediately turned to my lemon swag.  I actually used royal icing to cover the dummy - it looks enough like buttercream, but it will hold up for a long time.

This rustic look is a great option for the budget conscious bride.  Wouldn't this little wedding cake look super cute in a small barn venue?

AND THE WINNER IS...

A couple of weeks ago I teamed up with Craftsy to offer a giveaway for a free Craftsy class.  Yesterday we chose a random winner and the lucky cake designer is... Christine from Cakes by Christine!  She informed me that she just started her business back in January so stop by her Facebook page and give her a LIKE!  Congrats Christine... I hope you enjoy your class as much as I did!!  And special thanks to Craftsy for sponsoring the giveaway - I look forward to working with them again soon!