Micah's 8th Birthday

Micah is in love with Space right now, so it seemed obvious that I would do a space themed cake for his birthday.  Unfortunately, once again we were busy coming and going, so there wasn't much time to enjoy it with him.  In fact, we pulled it out, sang happy birthday, and then threw it back in the fridge without eating it so we could head out the door.

The space idea lent itself very nicely to testing a pour-over method of glazing a cake.  The videos I watched on this showed that it was simple, and it definitely was.  It took a while to make the glaze and guess the correct colors so as not to create a yucky colored marbling, but give it a dimensional space look.  Definitely a leap of faith in the end.

I worked very hard to make sure the cake and frosting layer was as straight and as smooth as possible.  Still a weak area in my skill set, but at one point I just had to stop and go with what I had.  I think in the end it was smooth enough.

Overall the glazing was indeed an easy process, however once again I struggled with the glaze not being thick enough to really cling to the cake like I wanted it to.  The glaze ultimately had some spots where you could see through to the white icing, but it didn't mess up the overall at all.  Adding in the spacemen and the sparkly silver star sprinkles actually ended up making this quite an impressive cake.  I would definitely try this technique again.

Paige's 10th Birthday

 This year I decided to try my hand at one of the classic cakes I have seen online and always wanted to try.  Paige was more than happy to let me do it as it involved cake, ice cream and her favorite colors.

The first new technique I tried was an ombre coloring on the cake itself.  I wasn't able to get it to blend very well, so it came across more stripped, but my attempts to get it to be smooth were better than previous efforts.  I will definitely have to try this again sometime to work on the blending.  I also tried to add a line of sprinkles around the bottom, which proved to be a bit messier than I expected, but turned out pretty well overall.

For the ice cream cone I was able to make a reasonably good looking cone, but struggled to get the "melted" ice cream to the right texture.  It ended up being a bit too thin and the drips went all the way to the bottom of the cake when I had hoped they would stop in the middle somewhere.  Not a horrible problem as it still looks good, but next time I will be sure to thicken it up a bit more.

In the end, it was cute, Paige was happy, and I can say I have made one of these types of cake now.

Allie's 12th Birthday

This year on her birthday, Allie had basketball all day, and an end of the season pizza party in the evening.  This meant if we were going to have cake, it had to be with her entire basketball team.  I volunteered to make a cake and bring it to the pizza party, and Allie like that idea.  Unfortunately, this meant I needed to prepare myself for my secret cake making hobby to become public knowledge, as well as to really focus so that my cake was worthy of public viewing.  When I mentioned this to Allie, she didn't miss a beat in encouraging me and stating that my cakes were amazing and she'd take any of them to a party with her friends (Thanks, Allie!)

After much consideration, we opted for a Sacred Heart basketball cake to go with the theme of the day.  I bought Wilton fondant so that I had solid colors and less prep work to do.  I also picked the right cake box brand so that I didn't deal with crumbly cake issues.  This way I was able to spend more time focused on cake decorating than all the other prep work.

I forced myself to work slowly and carefully to make sure my base cakes were smooth and straight.  I measured my fondant carefully and was able to get most of the creases out of each of the bottom two layers.  For the basketball, I was able to use one of those supplies that I purchased with no immediate need, but figured I'd eventually need...I was right!

Other than that, I made sure to put cardboard bases between the layers, and actually cut wooden dowels to place in the cake to help support the layers.  Imagine that, doing what the professionals recommend actually works! 

The cake turned out great (if I do say so myself).  Everyone was impressed, and surprised at my secret skill.  I think I may have even surprised myself at how professional this one turned out.

Cody's 14th Birthday

With a teenager to impress, I have to step up my cake making game.  This year Cody gave me a Zelda theme seeing as that is his video game of the moment.  When I opted for a shield, we negotiated the use of fondant over frosting.  Cody preferred to eat the frosting, but wanted the cake to look sharp, so he gave me permission to prioritize looks over taste.

The shape itself was a bit difficult to create as I had extremely crumbly chocolate cake to work with (only box cake left at Meijer), and it required a large amount of frosting to hold together.  Fortunately, I was attempting to make my own buttercream frosting with this cake, so plenty of frosting was not a problem.  I can't say I really liked the flavor of it, but it was nice to be able to whip up as much as I needed to get my cake solidly formed.  It also helped that it was about 20 degrees outside, which gave me my own blast-chiller to work with.

The rest was all fondant work on top of the cake to get the look right.  A little bit of printing out shield shapes and tracing onto fondant.  The type of fondant I have been using is still not as stiff as I would like it to be for sharp shapes like these, but I will continue to refine that I guess.

In the end, it turned out quite sharp, and the few fans of Zelda who saw the pictures approved.