Technique Experiment... Strawberry Heart Cake

 

     Joy and I LOVE to cover and decorate cakes with fondant... unfortunately, many people want cakes with just frosting!!  We even turned down a wedding cake recently.  The couple ordered their cake from some place else and when Joy saw it, she said it looked really bad!
     We just need to start experimenting and practicing.  Church potlucks are always a great opportunity to make a cake -  since our family doesn't need to eat a whole cake!! 

     One of the hardest things is getting the frosting right...  too thin or too thick of frosting can bring different problems!!  The frosting here is a little too thin for the actual cake...  it is not holding in the filling well enough!!  The texture was great for piping though!    This is the first time we added swags on the side of a cake with frosting.  It was not as hard as it looked!!

The cake is a triple strawberry cake, with strawberry filling, and a strawberry cream cheese frosting.  This is a very rich cake!!

Happy 5th Birthday Lilly!!

Hello Kitty Cake

Lilly ordered a Hello Kitty cake and wanted it pink and purple.  We showed her a lot of cake pictures and she liked them all!!   So we combined a few ideas from several of these cakes.  

She also wanted a strawberry cake with strawberry frosting.  We made a triple strawberry cake with a strawberry cream cheese frosting. The other layer is a triple chocolate cake with a cream cheese frosting.  


We made a topsy turvy cake and frosted it.  The dots, ribbons, stripes, etc are made from some homemade and store bought fondant.  Joy made the cute Hello Kitty and letters while I frosted the cake and made the bow. We worked together on everything else. 

Every once in a while, unfortunately, we really struggle on a cake... and this was one of them!!   On one layer, the frosting went on easily, the other layer was a real battle.  Joy and I always laugh, because we love cake decorating but hate to frost!!   We really prefer fondant because it is easy to get smooth and professional looking.  But we also know that everyone does not like the flavor and texture!  The next problem was getting the angles right on the topsy turvy and stacking them without messing up the frosting.  The frosting probably needed to be stiffer, because it was trying to seep through the stripes.  Even with the problems, we were content with the finished cake. 

Joy also made a small personal cake for Lilly with a Hello Kitty that she made that was too big for the 'bigger' cake. 

Hope you had a great 5th birthday and party at Incredible Pizza Lilly!!

We Will Miss you Mark J!!

 Mark was in our church for 6 months while he worked at Arsenal Island and lived at the motel near our church.  We really enjoyed getting to know him!!  We had a going away party after church on a Wednesday night.  Joy and I kinda decided at the last minute to make cake for his going-away party.  It is harder to make a cake for men than for women or girls.  For girls you use pretty colors and flowers, and for boys you can make sports stuff.  Mark is in the Air Force and would often come to church on Wednesdays dressed in camos.

So we decided to make the cake with camo colors.  The cake is a red velvet with a cream cheese frosting.  We put a simple shell and added a lot of party 'confetti' - kinda simple for us, but we didn't start on it until after 4 on Wednesday.  We are glad Mark is back with his family... but he will be greatly missed!!