Rock Band KISS Cupcakes

I can barely believe I made these! I do not like the band KISS. I would never listen to their music. But my daughter is a different story. She got her father's taste in music. Sigh. I gotta say though - I had fun with this birthday cake idea. She got several KISS albums for her birthday so they helped me with the designs. I copied the word "KISS" and designed the make-up for the cupcakes onto paper, using the albums. I cut out the paper patterns with a small scissors and then I cut them out of thinly rolled fondant with a small knife. I did not even try to make eyes as I can never do realistic eyes in any medium. The whole family LOVED the KISS figures and the cupcakes were delicious!

These were chocolate cupcakes, covered in chocolate fudge icing. All the decorations are fondant. To make the 12 cupcakes, I divided the chocolate cake recipe in half and added 2 Tbsp. applesauce. 

40th Birthday Cake

This may not be my most beautiful cake ever, but a good deal of thought went into it. I made it for my older sister who insists she is not having any more birthdays. ha ha. But she is always busy at something and she is great at what she does, so I had to celebrate it. I put a few of her favorite and/or most important roles and passtimes on her cake in three dimensional fondant figures.

 

The cake itself is a two-layer carrot cake with cream cheese icing and filling. The figures are all fondant and gum paste. Warning: do not put fondant on cream cheese icing until you MUST because it softens quickly due to the fat in the cream cheese. It also turns shiny and looks greasy. Here's the view from the other side:

 

It was easy to decorate, once I had made the figurines. I marked off the cake in 6ths (hidden under border that was added later) and then piped the lettering. Then I added the borders and finally I added the figurines at the last moment. My only regret is not giving more space where it was needed around the tent and less around the "40" but that's how it was divided. And apparently I should have written "Carol is 39 again."

Picnic Cake

If you want to have a great cake for a barbeque or a picnic, try one like this:

I made a double batch of white cake in two 9x13" pans. I stacked them with buttercream icing in between. I used my new "grass" tip (picture a tip with a flat top with 11 holes in it like a salt shaker) and made green buttercream "grass". To cover the cake took about an hour.

Then I applied the picnic blanket. It was made of rolled fondant mixed with gum paste. First, I made strips of red and white fondant/gum paste using my fondant ribbon maker set at 1/2 inch. I lined those up and rolled over them lightly with a rolling pin. Then, I cut strips in the other direction and lifted each of those strips and offset the squares to make the checkerboard. It was all laid out on my roll and cut mat, so when the checkerboard was done, I could "flip" it onto the cake.

All of the picnic items were formed in advance from a mix of fondant and gum paste.  They were left to dry for about a week. To finish the cake, I just placed the picnic items on the picnic blanket and piped the greeting with white buttercream icing.

The trickiest part was definately the picnic blanket. The squares didn't always want to stay together. The most fun part was making the little hot dogs and hamburgers. Those took about 3 hours to form, so it wasn't quick, but I would have been quicker if I didn't have to color the fondant first. It was worth the effort. Happy Picnic-ing!

Canadiens fooler cake

My son wanted a cake that would look like a puck with the Montreal Canadiens symbol on it. Only, since his name is Adam, he wanted an "A" instead of an "H" in the middle. Here's how it turned out:

The cake is a chocolate, two layer cake. All the icing and the filling is buttercream except the "C", which is rolled fondant. I had extra icing so I did the fancy 3-layer deep shell border, but I don't think Adam even noticed it!

A Flower Garden Cake

This could have been a Welcome Spring cake, or an Easter cake, but at our house it was a birthday cake for a four year old girl! She loved it.

It was a chocolate cake underneath, with a buttercream filling. Pretty standard stuff. Melody helped me make the 4 bugs on the cake and we had great fun doing it! Fondant and gum paste are just as much fun as play dough.

This is just a closer look at the details. The smiles on the bugs are an exact match of my pinky fingernail!

Fondant Roses and Tulips

After doing some looking, I found out that the 40th Wedding Anniversary is the "Ruby" anniversary. I need to make a cake for my parents' 40th Anniversary in July, so I started looking for ideas. A lot of the cakes had red roses. I have red fondant, so I watched the tutorial online for making gum paste or fondant roses and I made this one!

That was really quite a lot easier than the buttercream roses I've made in the past. My two little children wanted to make one too, so we made 3 more, then ran out of the red fondant/gum paste I had. The 3 year old did her best, but I had to smooth out her petals and form the flower.

How to make one flower:

• Roll 6 or 7 marble-sized balls of fondant/gum paste
• Working with one ball at a time, (keeping the others covered in Saran), squish the ball to 1/8" all around, then pinch around the top and side edges until those edges are paper thin and the bottom still thicker.
• The petal should be round, and about 1 1/2" in diameter.
• Roll the first one up like a tortilla. The thinned edge should be on one end, the fatter edge, on the other end.
• Form the next petal like the first.
• Wrap the second petal around the first, overlapping the edges of the two petals, keeping the thinned edges lined up at the top and the thick edges at the bottom of the flower. 
• Repeat the last two steps until you have completed the flower. You can fan out the petals as you wish for a more opened or closed flower. 

That was so easy that I decided to try making tulips. My mom likes tulips. They are much harder to make look like the real thing. I tried using the same petal technique as the rose, but that one turned out looking like a trillium. So then I chose to make the petals by rolling out the fondant/gum paste and then cutting it with a round cutter and thinning the edges to make it look oval (with a rolling pin). I used a ball as the centre and wrapped 6 petals around it. When I pinched the tips of the petals, they finally started to look like the tulips I have outside my window.

I already know how to make daisies and carnations, so I think I need to figure out lilies next!

Two Tier, Two Layer Chocolate Birthday Cake, part 3

Remember me? The two tier, two layer Chocolate Birthday cake? Of course you do. I've been eager to get back to this one and finish it. Today was the day! I had a lot of fun! Every step of this cake was an "I love you" to my daughter.

When I last showed you this cake, the four pieces were still separate and the filling was made. I filled them that day and they've been tightly wrapped in the freezer until today. I made up a batch of buttercream to, as the Cake Boss would say "dirty ice them."

Here is what they looked like after being "dirty iced". The smaller one is directly on a tinfoil covered cardboard that is just its size. I set it on a cookie tin so I could pick it up without mussing the icing. I stuck it to the cardboard with a small blob of piping gel. I wanted to make sure my top layer doesn't squish my bottom layer, so I inserted 5 separators (I cut 2 bamboo skewers to size and pushed them in.)

This was just to show you... then I pushed the spacers in all the way. The dents around the top were made by a plate the size of the smaller cake, so I could be sure the picks would be within the edges of the upper cake.

Next, I used my handy dandy Wilton's Easy Roll mat and rolled the green to size for the smaller cake. Love the round markings - you can get the fondant the perfect size the first time! Then you just invert the whole thing over the cake and smooth it down. This hunk of fondant was, I realized too late, a little small for my cake and I had to do some stretching, which left it a bit bumpy around the edges, but I will cover that with the decorations. I did the pink the same way and then carefully set the green cake on the pink one. So far, so good. 

Funny, I didn't mean to leave anything but the cake in this picture, but it is a clear picture of what tools are essential to the process: offset spatula (on the left) to smooth buttercream and fillings (I LOVE that tool!), white smoothing tool, to ensure a smooth fondant layer, the shortening wrapper - use a dab of shortening to prevent sticking to the fondant and finally, a pizza cutter - to trim the fondant nice and neat around the bottom of the cake.

"Hey, it's starting to come together", I thought, as I added all those bowling pins and balls. I stuck those on with a bit of piping gel. The black details are tinted piping gel. I rolled the green and pink fondant in the ziplocks into long strands. Using the circle markings on the mat, I made them long enough to fit around the larger of the two cakes. Then I cut them into bits with the pizza cutter (but not on my precious mat!) All the bits were the same size so I could make them into even little balls to trim the cake. Remember how "every step of this cake was an 'I love you' to my daughter"? Well, let me tell you, there were a lot of "I love you's" when it came to rolling the 92 balls I made and applied to the cake! 

And there you have it! Took all afternoon and into making supper time, but it was fun and it looks just like I wanted it to. I take no credit for the idea, by the way, it was on the internet at CakeCentral.com, but the execution was all me!

Happy Daisy Cake

Today I went to work, baking up a storm. After making a dozen oatmeal chocolate chip muffins, a dozen and a half apple oatmeal muffins and two and a half dozen blueberry bran muffins I realized I had nothing new to show you! So, I looked through my old pictures again and found the birthday cake I made last March. I'll call it my "Happy Daisy Cake".

It was a chocolate cake (do you see a trend yet?), with chocolate fudge filling. I covered it in butter cream icing and a layer of yellow fondant. I made this cake as the final cake in my Wilton's fondant and gum paste flower making class, which is where I easily learned how to make the daisies and the leaves and the swags. They were all made from fondant/gum paste mix. My daughter loved her cake! I have a tool to cut the ribbon, but a pizza cutter does the job in a pinch!

Tomorrow I'm going away to an un-wired house for a few days so I'll see you when I get back!

Valentine Chocolate Cupcakes

As promised, here are some cupcakes that I made today. They were a hit. I made enough for all the children in my school children's classes (45) and 4 extra. My 4 children wanted to eat them all!

Once they were cooled, I covered them in chocolate butter cream icing and added fondant hearts.

Each cupcake has a monogrammed fondant heart with a child's initial. I used my Wilton press set of letters again. These were a lot of fun! I hope the children enjoy them tomorrow!

Happy Valentine's Day (a little early)!

Surprise Birthday Cake

This is the result of my finding out about a friend's birthday the day before it happens. What fun!

On Thursday evening, she invited me and a few friends over for coffee on Friday morning. So, I went to sleep thinking, "I should make a cake for her!" I woke with the children at 6am, fed them crepes like usual and started baking my standard chocolate cake at 7 am.

The cake was out of the oven and cooling in a snowdrift at 8:00. I made up a batch of chocolate fudge icing and a batch of buttercream icing while the cake baked. Then I hustled 2 children to the bus stop, filled the almost cool cake layers with the fudge icing and put the cake in the fridge. I took the third child to pre-school and returned to decorate the cake (I used the time in the van to think of how I would decorate the cake).

When I returned to my kitchen, I slapped on a crumb coat of buttercream and quickly rolled out the white fondant. I used the Wilton's "wide glide rolling pin" and their "roll and cut mat".  Those tools made my job easy. I used the Wilton "Italic Make Any Message Press Set" to imprint "Happy Birthday Melissa" on the white fondant. I rolled out a few pink fondant/gum paste hearts and a length of "ribbon" and applied them to the cake with a dab of water. My drive called saying she was on her way which meant I had 10-20 minutes so I added the blue piping at 9:30, to finish the cake. Melissa was very surprised and delighted!