Micah's 9th Birthday

 This summer we got to enjoy Micah's birthday at Green Lake again.  Wonderful for celebrating a birthday, miserable for making a cake.  But, I'm not one to shy away from a challenge, so I went for it anyway.

Micah wanted a Zelda cake, but since I have done one of those before, I wanted to do something a little different.  I chose a character from the video game (a korok seed) and decided to go with a shape cake.  The body was made of cake while the arms and top points were made of rice cereal treat.  Despite the humidity, I was able to get it all covered with fondant in a somewhat tree-like coloring.

I created peanut butter balls which I painted with gold dust to look like the seeds around the bottom.  The face was difficult to get to stand out, but ultimately a bunch of toothpicks gave it some dimension.  I was sure to keep it in the refrigerator as much as possible to try and stop any drooping, and in the end it kept it's shape pretty well.

Not many people knew what it was, but Micah was pleased with the outcome.

Paige's 11th Birthday

 This year Paige has been very into Boba Tea.  So, she asked for a Boba Tea cake.  I clarified that she didn't want the cake to taste like Boba, and she said no but showed me a photo of the cake she wanted.  So, once again I duplicated something.

This cake didn't really force me to try any new techniques.  I worked on getting nice smooth frosting, making cute fondant cutouts, and finding the exact right toppings which looked like Boba (but were actually dark chocolate covered cherries and blueberries).  In the end it was adorable, Paige loved it, and it was easy.  Guess I'll have to save learning something new for next time.

Allie's 13th Birthday

This year was Allie's golden birthday so I wanted to make sure I took things to a new level.  Allie is a big fan of books, so I decided to try that stack of books cake, using her current favorite series as my model.  This meant I needed 5 books, which made for a very tall cake.  I also wanted to try my hand at modeling paste to see if I could make a character which looked okay.

The cake was a challenge as I had to cover each cake separately and then get them to stack without bending.  The edges had to be propped up, and they still got a little saggy, but I was hoping that would give a "used book" kind of feel.  I then attempted to dust them with darkening powder to make them have some dimension, but the condensation got the powder wet and it was hard to get it to spread lightly.  The same happened with the gold dust so in the end the gold was a little more overpowering than I intended.  I also found that using the dust as a paint for the words was a challenge as the pressure to fit all the letters in the small space made it feel a little less professional than I wanted.  But maybe that's my perfectionism coming through.

The character made out of modeling paste turned out wonderfully.  I attempted to make Allie and in the end I think we were all impressed how close it came.  The paste was reasonably easy to work with, but dried quickly so there were times I had to move quickly.  Fortunately it made for a nice stiff character on the cake.

Overall the new techniques I tried worked, but I learned a lot about dusting powder and molding paste which makes me interested in using them again, but also hesitant.  We'll see which wins...

Cody's 15th Birthday

Cody continues to be dedicating to his video gaming, namely his Rocket League.  While this offers some creative ideas for cakes, they are often much more complicated than I would like to take on in my limited time.  This year I decided to go with the logo from his favorite Rocket League team.

Fortunately for me it was a black-white logo which made it pretty easy to replicate.  I was able to print off a copy of the logo in the size that I wanted and thus just trace the shapes onto the fondant.  I started with a black base and then added white cutouts on top to avoid having to do a lot of detailed outlining.  I then added the smaller stuff inside the features, and while it took a little maneuvering to get them to look right, overall the effect came out perfectly.  I think this may be one of the most professional looking cakes that I have made to date, and it has emphasized that printing out items and tracing them is really a great option for making sure I get the exact look I am going for.