Cake Endeavours

I have no imagination for my subject lines.  *sigh* For a school fundraiser I donated a cake for a silent auction.  The winner of the auction asked me to do a cake for her son's birthday. The request was to have a soccer theme with some blue and pink on it. With one recipe of the Perfect Chocolate Cake, I divided it into 2 8" trays and the soccer ball tray I have.  I only filled it up with about 2 inches of batter.  Just enough to get the shape of the ball to come out of the grass.  I do enjoy using the grass tip.  It's a lot fun and I'm always surprised at how much it looks like grass when it's done.

This cake was for a teacher's retirement party.  A 10" chocolate cake with buttercream filling. A light forest green fondant base covered with white daisies.  I love daisies.

Miss E took part in a weekly after school program at her day care for science and this past Thursday was the science exhibition.  For the celebration I was asked to make a "science" cake.  This is my interpretation of a flask.  Originally I was calling it a beaker but Mr. T corrected me and apparently this is a flask.  Only making it more obvious that science was not a good subject for me. This cake was easier to make than I thought it would be.  I made a two later 9 x 13 chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  Before I put the crumb coat on I put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to harden.  Then I trimmed the cake into the shape.  The extra pieces Mr. T took to work and were well received.

On Monday one of my co-workers emailed me to see if I could make a cake for her son's birthday.  I already had two cakes to do during the week but I couldn't pass up doing this cake.  It's just so cute.  The picture she sent me had the ninja standing but with the humidity I just couldn't get it to hold. This was a two layer 8" red velvet cake with buttercream filling.  I love the lettering.  It's basically curved triangles.  I did mix up two of the triangles on the M which made it shorter on one side. Again, thanks to the humidity there was no way to get it off once it was on.  Not only is the humidity nasty on my hair, it's nasty on fondant! Especially white fondant, everything sticks to it.

Sunday we celebrated Father's Day at my parents' house.  We also celebrated my mom's birthday, which is today.  Happy Birthday Mom! I always like to try something different for this family feast.  My mom loves blueberries and my dad likes dessert anyway he can get it.  I found this recipe for  Blueberry Lemon Cake with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting . My mom really likes the roses so I went with them.  Unfortunately, I didn't plan ahead.  If you're going to do the roses you need extra icing.  I had just enough to do the roses but not to fill in the gaps. That's where the blueberries came in.  They did the trick. The lemon combined with the blueberry is awesome.  This cake had a coffee cake like consistency which is what we all liked.

Fod Miss E'd end of year celebration at her day care I made a cake for the kids graduating from the Casa I and Casa II program.  They also did a celebration for the older kids, which included Miss E. This was a 9 x 13 two layer cookies and cream cake.  The layers baked perfectly even in the oven.  Unfortunately, they didn't come out of the pan so even!  The bottom layer looked like a massacre occurred but I put it back together, stuck it in the fridge and hoped for the best.

This cake I made for a gentleman who goes to my home church who turned 90 years young last week.  A group of friends were having a celebration for him and asked me to make a cake.  He has a collection of clocks in his house so we thought it would be appropriate to make a clock cake. This is a 8" 2 layer chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  On the roof of his garage is the old town hall bell that rings every day at noon...or so I have been told.  I decided to have the hands read out at almost noon.  This worked in my favour in the end as I was able to add "happy 90th" in the face of the clock. Originally I cut out the letters in black but then it was too much with the black numbers. I thought the ivy around the sides were pretty neutral.  I drew in the vine of the ivy with edible brown marker.   It was so muggy though that the marker wouldn't write very well. It took a long time to get it on but it ended up looking like it was painted on so I was really ha

Again I am behind on posting.  I made this cake the same week as the 31 dozen cupcakes I made.  At work we were to have a celebration for our VP before going off on mat leave.  I even got ahead of myself and made the cakes on Wednesday night to decorate on Thursday night for Friday's celebration.  Then the guest of honour went into labour on Thursday. We decided to have the celebration anyway.  So, I went home on Thursday and decorated.  The bottom tier  was a 10" two layer cookies and cream cake and the top, chocolate with salted caramel filling.  The most difficult part in decorating, getting the black stripe to go on "straight". Not a fun task.  I will be avoiding doing that again any time soon!  Otherwise everything else was pretty straight forward. After displaying the cake while everyone ate lunch, it was decided that they would take the whole cake to our VP's house to be enjoyed there.  I had no issue with this but I was not going to be the one to

Several months ago I was asked to make cupcakes for a wedding.  These were going to be used for the guest bombonieres.  On top of the cupcakes they requested a skull for decoration.  I still haven't asked the significance of this...if I find out I will update the post. Now, when I agreed to make the skull, I thought it would be an easy task and procrastinated getting supplies ready.  I did have one silicon mold that had 4 skulls and 4 cross-bones.  I foolishly assumed that I could go back out last weekend and easily pick up a few more or another type of skull mold.  When I came up empty I began to panic wondering how I was going to make 168 white chocolate skulls with only one mold.  I did the math and figure it would be 41 batches of 4.  I had five nights to make them.   My life at home has revolved around 25 minute increments. That's exactly how long they took to chill in the fridge, empty and start over again.  In a few minutes I will be pulling out the last batc

I was asked by one of the project teams at work to do cupcakes for the 150th branch opening celebrations. I think originally it was 12 dozen then turned into 17 dozen. 3 Perfect Chocolate Cake recipes make about 10 dozen cupcakes and 3 French Vanilla Cake recipes made  almost 8 dozen cupcakes.  I did make an error in my vanilla cupcakes though and I didn't realise this until I went to make the 3 batch.  I had put in baking soda instead of baking powder.  The idea of redoing close to 6 dozen cupcakes really didn't appeal to me.  So, I sacrificed one cupcake to taste test with Mr. T and Miss. E.  Both said they couldn't tell.  I could taste the soda slightly and I'm not sure if that was my imagination or not.  So, I resorted to Googling the difference between the two and this is the link I clicked on:  Difference Between Baking Soda and Baking Powder .  Fortunately I had used half buttermilk and half 1% milk.  The acid in the buttermilk counteracted the soda.  Phew!

For one of my co-workers her kids were finishing Greek school this weekend and she asked me to make some mini cupcakes for the end of year celebration in Greek colours.  Each cupcake has a mini Oreo on the bottom.  These mini Oreos are getting harder and harder to find.  Poor Mr. T went to four different stores for me.

This is a sweet 6" carrot cake, covered in buttercream icing.  I had to double check for sure that they didn't want cream cheese icing.  It felt so wrong! :)  Carrot cake is a vessel to the cream cheese icing.  But, to each their own.  Carrot cake is so great to work with because the batter is thinner than regular cake batter.  The cake always bakes flat.  I added some fondant carrots for extra decoration.

This cake I made for a very neighbour friend of mine.  Love it when the delivery is within my building.  The bride's colours are a pale peach and Tiffany Blue.  I made a 2 layer 8" chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  I love the way the flowers turned out.  For the two flowers on the side of the cake I did add a tooth pick in each one to help ensure they didn't slide off.  The hole is covered with a silver dragee. If I were to do a cake similar to this again, next time I would add more decoration in between the flowers as filler.

For Lindsay's birthday cake I wanted to make her another owl cake as she loves owls.  I thought that this little guy was cute.  This is a 3 layer 9" cake with chocolate filling and covered in an almond flavoured buttercream icing.  I love the almond flavouring over the vanilla.  It makes it taste grown up, in my opinion. This was the 3rd cake I made that day.  It was so nice to save the best to last, since I got to have a piece of this one!

Scott works with Mr. T asked me to make him a 6" cake for his birthday.  This is a half recipe with salted caramel filling.  So good! :) This was a birthday present.  I told him the first one's free!

For Kai's birthday cake I made a 2 layer 8" vanilla cake with lots of sprinkles.  She was having some animals visit her party so I thought I would make a garden themed cake with bunnies running through.  After several failed attempts at a full bunny (they all looked rather scary and alien like), I went with just ears and one burrowing into the ground.