Butterfly Cake

 

Lilly wanted a butterfly cake for her birthday,  but the closer it came to her birthday, she decided she wanted flowers too.  So, with the help of her mom (Sandy), we came up with the cake you see here!!   She wanted the cake flavor to be a strawberry cake, so we also made the frosting a strawberry flavored butter cream.  We baked the cake in a petal pan, to make a scallop edge all the way around.  The pink butterflies are made of fondant and a gum paste mixture.  The fence posts, flowers and other butterflies are made with just our homemade fondant.  The green grass is frosting.  This was one of our favorite cakes to make!!  The small pink flower cake you see on the right was designed and created by Joy from a picture that Lilly saw of a flower cake. Small cakes are very hard to work with, but she did a fantastic job!!  

Envelope Birthday Cake

My friend Twyla wanted a frosted envelope cake for her husband's birthday, since he works for the United States Post Office.  She wanted a marble cake with chocolate and yellow cake flavors, frosted with a butter cream.  She chose what she wanted written on top, and also a heart stamp, and lips.  We did a triple chocolate cake mix and a vanilla yellow cake for added flavor.  Joy made the stamp using food writers and a rubber stamp.  The sun and candles are made with frosting.  We tried to make the lips with a red food writer marker, but it wasn't working, so I painted it on with food coloring and a paint brush.  This was a fun cake to make!! 

Christmas Party Cake (wedding cake practice)

 Joy and I have been asked to do wedding cakes for 3 friends.  We did not know if we were ready, and we didn't know where to even start..  How much time would it take?  How much would it cost to make one?  Are we ready for such a big project?  Where do we even start??   So, we planned for the past three potlucks to make a wedding sized cake.  But, each month something would come up and we would not get to make it.  When the adult Christmas party at church came up, it seemed like the perfect time to pull it together!!

We decided to make specialty flavors for the cake, frosting, and fondant.  The top layer is a lemon flavored cake with lemon frosting.  We have a homemade white colored fondant (to match the decorations) with lemon extract (to match the flavor of cake and frosting.)    This was our first attempt at making our own fondant.   It had a better flavor, but was VERY hard to work with.

Our second (middle) layer is a Candy Cane Cake.  The cake and frosting have added peppermint extract and crushed peppermint candy canes.  Again, we added peppermint extract to the fondant to match the flavor of the cake.

The bottom layer is half red velvet and half carrot cake.  Both of these cakes usually use cream cheese frosting, so that worked out perfectly!!

On the way to church to set up the cake, it was SNOWING.  The problem was, there was a car wreck at the bottom of the hill, and we were stuck in the middle of traffic.  It took us a while to find a good spot to U-turn and go to the church a different way (back tracking some too!!!)  The snow falling on the fondant left little shiny dots - so, we will have to see what to do if it rains or snows on a day when you have to carry a cake outside. 

Even so, we got the cake set up on time and you can see the finished product here!  It was not perfect, but we were excited about the fact that we did it!!  Now to figure out the full cost to make, as well as the time put into making it!!  Thanks for stopping by and looking!

Pumpkin Roll

One of the things we have been looking at recently is specialty cakes.  We have looked at different layered cakes, specialty flavors, and cream and fruit fillings to give us experience in other types of cakes.  Since Thanksgiving is just around the corner, we chose to make a pumpkin roll.  It has been a long time since I have made one, so we were excited that the first two came out so well!  This is a great recipe because these cakes can be frozen and thawed out later when needed.  The pumpkin sponge cake is filled with a rich cream cheese and butter filling - the perfect completion after a big Thanksgiving meal!  Keep your eyes open for more specialty cakes on the way!!

Four Wheeler Birthday Cake

Last year for Ty's birthday we made a superman cake.  So, for over a year now, Joy has been planning a four wheeler cake and had some great plans! She even picked out the four wheelers she would buy to put on the cake... until it was time to shop and decorate it!  Walmart did not carry them any more, and after a desparate search at 7 stores, we went with larger four wheelers and had to replan our cake.  We were disappointed, because the bigger the vehicle, the bigger the trail would be and the less we could do, but we made the best with what we had!!


The cake is two triple chocolate cakes stacked on top of each other with a green buttercream frosting grass. On the trail is brown frosting with crushed chocolate and vanilla cookies on top.  The evergreen tree is a sugar cone with frosting leaves.  The other trees are wafer ice cream cones with rice krispy cookies on top and frosting trunks.  This was a fun cake to plan and make, although we both thought it would have been more fun with smaller four wheelers!  Each cake is definitely a learning experience for us and we learned a lot through this one!!!  We do look forward to each challenge and thank each person who gives us the chance to experiment on them!!

Happy Birthday Chelsey

Joy has been teaching Chelsey, a sweet teen girl in our church. Today is her 14th birthday, so we planned a small party with a cake that had her favorite color, a meal of her choice, some friends, and presents.

The bottom layer of this cake is triple chocolate, the top layer is a funfetti cake mix. Although the decorations on the cake were made by us with fondant, we did frost the cake in a buttercream frosting, since we did not know if she liked fondant. The letters, stripes, flowers, spots, and bow were all made with fondant. Her favorite color is purple, so we picked two other colors we thought went well with purple: green and yellow. We love working with fondant and learning what it can do! It is like playing with play dough (and I always loved playing with play dough!) Now to start planning the next cake order we have for Thursday - a four wheeler cake!!

Chocolate Fondant Package Cake

The highest form of a compliment is to get a second order for the same cake! My neighbor (Peggy) ordered a cake for her daughter-in-law (Teresa) last year for her birthday. Teresa liked it and ordered one herself this year!!

This cake is a triple chocolate cake, with a buttercreme frosting, and chocolate fondant. Chocolate fondant is fun to make, but not as easy to work with as fondant. It does not harden and hold its form quite the same. It also has a unique flavor. If you like tootsie rolls you would like it, because it is very similar! We figured we could get the chocolate fondant to stand up better if we made our bows earlier, but it still had problems standing as nice as regular fondant. We probably need to experiment with it more... maybe for a potluck at church!!

The Pulpit Cake

My husband, Chris, turned 55 today!! We hadn't planned anything special, but a friend (Paul L.) asked if we would surprise him and make a birthday cake shaped like a pulpit for his birthday.

Hummmm... It was hard to figure out how to make it without him being around, because the day before his birthday was Labor Day and we would all be off and at home all day. The day before that was Sunday, and pretty impossible to make then. Which means we only had his birthday to make it on. Again, I would have to make this cake by myself while Joy, my husband, and Chelsey were at church in the morning. Joy and I are a true team, because we each have different creative and artistic talents that when combined, really help in the production of the cakes we create. I was not too excited about doing it on my own, but had no other options.

Before hand, Joy and I talked about different pulpits and the good and bad of working with each. The big kind with two small sides would be hard with all those angles, but the pulpit we have at our church is so skinny. So, what you see is a self designed pulpit!!

Joy did bake the cake the day before, and all my husband knew is that we were going to put a homemade whipped cream frosting on it for lunch the following day. Which was no lie, because I planned to put a whipped cream frosting on it. I found a recipe that was suppose to be a sturdy frosting that could be at room temperature and was used for wedding cakes. It was not an easy recipe to frost with smoothly though!! After about 7 - 8 tries with this recipe, I took the scrap cake pieces and made a small layered cake (single serving) for my husband. He could eat his whipped frosting cake, and look at the other one!! I went to make a chocolate buttercream, but it was having problems too!! After another 7 - 8 tries with that. Becca suggested fondant... I only had an hour before they would get home, but I didn't feel I had any other options. I got out the fondant and started kneading in brown. I painted it with food coloring and vanilla extract. The Bible is also made of fondant (as planned from another suggestion of Becca's) and the microphone is a dark gray royal frosting piped onto a wire. With being so busy with the cake, Becca was the only one to make her dad's birthday meal - fried chicken livers, rice, gravy, and spinach!! She did a great job, and I am thinking she might need to learn to cook meals more often and maybe even do a little cake decorating with us!!

My husband, Chris, really liked the cake! Although I am sure he will eat his cake with whipped cream frosting and not the decorated one... since he does not really care for fondant!!

David's Birthday Golf Course Cake

My youngest child, David, just turned 16 - WOW, where have the years gone?? He loves to play golf and so I made him a very simple 3 par hole from a golf course. Unfortunately, Joy could not help me, which meant I had to wing it on my own. Although, she did come in occasionally to offer her ideas and thoughts, she was just too busy with school stuff and watching the puppies.

David wanted a chocolate cake, with royal frosting on top. Royal frosting is a frosting that dries hard, and is usually used to make flowers ahead of time to put on a cake later. They taste a lot like the premade candies you buy in the store to put on cakes. Both David and Joseph love to eat the messed up flowers we make and they always joked that they wanted their cakes frosted with it. Well, we decided to try it regardless of the fact that the directions say Royal frosting is not intended to frost a whole cake. Let me tell you, they KNOW what they are talking about!!! LOL So... this was the best I could do!! The important thing was that David LOVED it and he actually ate a good bit of it!!

Graduation Cake for Joseph

Joseph graduated from high school!

For his graduation cake Joy and I made him a piano. Instead of flowers, we made books to put on the piano. He will be studying music and Bible at Baptist College of Ministry.

The 'wooden floor' is made of fondant, colored, rolled, and imprinted with a wooden design. The books are also all made with fondant. The cake was triple chocolate with a chocolate buttercream frosting.