Super delicious birthday cookies

In blog posts past, I have written about how much fresh flowers can affect the final vision of the cake.  So I decided to do a little "before and after" shot to show you what a huge impact they can have.  This could also serve as a example of how proper lighting can affect your pictures, but I digress (Grrrrr....).

The florals for this cake were provided by Helen Humphrey from Humphrey's Flowers.  She made the topper using two different types of orchids and fiddlehead ferns, which I just adore.  To put the fiddleheads in the cake, I simply snipped the ends and inserted a toothpick and then inserted the toothpick into the cake.

Our cranberry splash of color is just satin ribbon.  Remember my ribbon tip: wrap ribbon around a buttercream cake twice and it will keep the buttercream from seeping through and making the ribbon look greasy.

Believe it or not, this is a wedding cake!  This whimsical cake was another wedding cake I delivered to Trevitt Hall in Dalton, GA.  They have a quaint little reception space and they're always ready for a party!

As you can see, my bride here wasn't afraid to think outside the box and leave "traditional" wedding cakes in the dust!  This fun little number is decorated with fun fondant swirls, fantasy flowers, and a snazzy monogram.  Notice the bling on the bows?  That's some clip-on earrings the bride provided to give the cake a little extra sparkle.  I don't think I could have created as sparkly that was still edible!

As always, thanks for stopping by!  If you haven't finished up your Christmas shopping, there's only 11 more days until Christmas!!

I did this cake a few weeks ago and I really enjoyed doing it.  So much so that I am planning on doing a display cake in a similar fashion.

This bride wanted the ornate lacework on her dress recreated on her cake. She provided me with a scan of the lace pattern.  We printed it out and then traced it on copy paper.  From that black and white drawing, we could scan it in and resize it to fit the cake.

Once it was the right size, I went to work with my Sugar Veil icing tracing that lacework over and over.

My brother even made a new custom cake stand to place this cake on!  The bride liked it so much, she just decided that she would purchase it as a keepsake.  How sweet is that?

Hello everyone!  I hope you all had a very Happy Thanksgiving and are resting comfortably instead of fighting the masses for those Black Friday deals.

This wedding cake reminds me of Thanksgiving and fall.  The cake gallery on my website is full of wedding cakes, but there's not a lot of fall themed weddings on there.

This cake, is fairly simple, but getting the separators just right to allow space for the flowers was a bit of a challenge.  It was just a matter of measuring.  Like the old carpenters say, "Measure twice, cut once"!

I did use my Cricut Cake to cut my monogram letters (as always).

The flowers were provided by the always amazing Amanda of Divine Designs by Amanda.  Her florals are always SO beautiful!

Have a great weekend and enjoy some leftover turkey!!

I just love it when we get to make a non traditional wedding cake!  My bride was so fantastic and let me take inspiration from another cake, an invitation, and a save the date card.

It was one of those cakes that would have been pretty if I stopped at the first stage, which was the trees.  It would have been prettier if I stopped at the next stage which was the curly vines.  That was by far the most time consuming.  Getting the little chocolate fondant snakes thin enough while staying even.  I still don't know why I didn't get my clay gun out?!  The one thing that made life easier was that after stacking I put the cake in the cooler for several hours while I worked on other projects.  When I brought it out the condensation made it just the right amount of sticky!  The trees and vines stuck on perfectly.  It was a shame when it dried up and I had to go back to attaching with water or piping gel.  I had it good for a while!

Back to the cake, I then added the leaves and it was prettier....and I could have stopped...but no!  The "Save the date" cards had Autumn colored dots so I added a few.  That is what made the cake for me!  Pop pop pop...dot dot dot!  I used the little circle cutter from Polymer Clay Express.  These will be worth every cent!  I love that site!  The impression mats are good, not to mention the extruder guns.  I liked everything about the cake except for the delivery which was 90 minutes one way and the last 2 1/2 miles was all on a gravel road that was not at all cake friendly!  It was called Laurelwood and it was a beautiful location once we got there!

I did this cake a while back and I wasn't as thrilled with it as I wanted to be.  The couple wanted a bird silhouette on top of the cake.  I cut at least 4 different sets of birds out of modeling chocolate, but they all just looked so... FLAT!  I guess that's just how it works with silhouettes, huh?

The rest of the cake is pretty simple - square cake with buttercream, piped vine design on the chocolate layers, and piped dots on the middle tier.

I finished it off with a fondant ribbon border and some gumpaste calla lillies.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend!

I really love this cake and btw... I don't often use words like "love" when speaking of one of my cakes. lol This cake eventually sported a 50th anniversary cake topper... but I don't have that photo available.





The beads and leaves are fondant covered in luster dust... the roses are simply white fondant. Very simple and elegant. Why I don't normally like to recreate the same cake twice... I think this piece of artwork might be the exception. :)

This weekend I delivered a cake to the Cleveland Country Club.  The bride and groom were super great to work with!  They decided to go DIY with their florals; didn't they do the best job?

When I arrived at the venue, they had the flowers for the cake all ready for me.  I arranged them on the cake and then the groom popped in and gave his approval.  And then the photographers ran in and wanted to take pictures of ME placing flowers on the cake.  I relented and let them, as I'm sure such photos won't make it to the final album!!

Well, I'm keeping it short and sweet this week.  Make sure to keep voting for Icing Smiles in the Pepsi Refresh Project so you can win that coveted autographed Cake Wrecks book (see last post)!  The winner will be announced on Friday!!!

Have a great week and good luck!!

Cake structure is SO important.  I hope to take Mike McCrary's class on it this year!  For a simple, but very tall, round cake it can still be pretty tricky.  This cake was made with :

2 layers of 11" round cake
1" thick 9" circle of Styrofoam
4 layers of 9" round cake (with 9" cardboard circle in the middle)
1" thick 7" circle of Styrofoam
2 layers of 8" round cake
2 layers of 5" round cake

Most all cakes that I make are 3 layers thick and about 5 1/2" tall.  I don't really care for the look of squatty cakes, I like'm nice and tall.  This one was done this way because the bride wanted a tall cake, but didn't need to feed a lot of guests.  Also, it's a very modern look that she really liked.  I am always so proud when a bride is brave enough to do something so different and bold!

The ribbon, bows and black separations are fondant, everything else it buttercream.  I don't know how other bakers do the separators between layers, I guess I could have "Googled it"!  I just covered the styro with piping gel and then fondant.  Please let me know what you use.  I have only done this look twice, so I'm sure I have much to learn.  The silver sparkly things were very pretty hair clips that the bride purchased. 

I like real wood for the base cake board because there isn't any flex to it.  My icing is all butter and when it's hard and  the cake board flexes, it will crack the icing sometimes.  Even when I use wood, I usually put an extra board with a piece of shelf liner under a very heavy cake until I get to the venue and place it on the display table.  For support purposes, I used cardboard, covered top and bottom so they don't get  soaked in butter, for all of the cake boards.  The bottom board is two drums put together so that supports could go through them for even better stability.  95% of the time, I travel with my cakes fully stacked.  This one, I should have left the top two tier off until I got there, but you know what they say about hindsight!

I used a lot of straws, skewers, and one big wooden sharpened dowel through the whole cake.  I held it by the top of the dowel the entire trip, hand cramping and all.  The force of the cake when we were going up or down a hill was so strong that I was really glad that I put a "handle" so I could keep it level.  I put a level on each layer and it was perfect, until it was done :( .  I should have put even more than 12 supports into the bottom layer.  Instead of taking it all apart, I sharpened a wooden dowel in my pencil sharpener, cut it the length to only get to the bottom cake board of the big blue tier.  I tapped this dowel in from underneath and when I got it in, I took it out and replaced it with a non sharpened dowel of the same length.  What this did was give extra support from the bottom up to help out a slightly leaning cake.  Sometimes the answer doesn't always come from the top!   I hope sometime in the future this tidbit of knowledge comes in handy!

I left this little buttercream wedding cake in the very capable hands of the Trevitt Hall staff this weekend.

It looks a bit plain now, but I'm sure that once the florist finished putting some fresh flowers on this it really popped into life!

Bottom tier has a half scroll pattern, the middle tier has some dainty swiss dots, and on the top tier, the couple's monogram with a pearl border.  All tiers are finished with a black ribbon border with a fondant pearl overlay.

The pearls were made from a fondant mold, and I used my incredible Cricut Cake to do that monogram.  It was so thin that I was afraid it might not cut well, but it cut through the chilled Fondarific like nobody's business!

Oh, I almost forgot!!  Chad and I signed up for the Food Blog Forum Seminar in Atlanta in September!  Anyone else going to be there???

I spent hours putting pearls on this cake, but once it was said and done, I was very happy with it,  It has a simple elegance that would fit in at almost any wedding.

This 5 tiered beauty was monstrously large though.  I deliver all my cakes in my hatchback, and this thing barely fit in there.  To beat it all, on the way to the clubhouse (which is riddled with cake-killing speed bumps) this lady rode my bumper almost the whole way there.  She finally did get close enough that she saw the cake and backed off, but it still made a stressful drive even more so, and unnecessarily at that!

I have magnetic car signs on my door that advertise my business, but I have often thought about getting a sign for the rear of car that says something like "Cake Delivery Vehicle".  Do any of you use anything like that on your delivery vehicles?  If so, what wording did you use??

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!!

Growing up, some of my Mother's most favorite jewelry was the Elizabeth Taylor sets put out by Avon (in the mid-80's I guess).  The earrings and brooch to the left have always been one of her favorite sets.

Sometimes, when I'm looking for inspiration, especially for my dummy or show cakes, I turn towards treasures like these.  Some time ago, I bought some silicone molding compound and used her earrings and brooch to make molds so that I could use them on a Styrofoam showcake.

At the last bridal show I had a bride that just went bonkers over that "fish" cake.  She loved everything about it.  We booked a consultation, went through the whole design process and in the end she still wanted that as her wedding cake.  Professionally I took it as a real compliment that she liked it just the way it was.  I love it when I can have that type of connection with a client.

So I recreated that dummy cake for her.  I molded and painted, the fish, applied the sugar pearls to make "bubbles" and even added some "crystal doomies" to the top to give a water spray effect.  We even placed it on our aquarium cake stand to add to the aquatic effect.  The venue we took it to was very dark and our pictures didn't turn out very well at all, so I know you're missing out on all the effects.

This little buttercream number took a drive up Lookout Mountain recently and settled in at the Rock City Pavilion.  It was out first trip there and it is a very nice venue.  Cheryl Hyland with Blissful Moments was the wedding coordinator and she had everything setup perfectly when we arrived.  That was a very good thing - it was hot as blazes and it was an outdoor wedding so we showed up moments before the guests arrived.

With the exception of quite a bit of piping, this was a simple but elegant wedding cake.  The florist left some Gerber daisies for me to place on the cake.  Once I had them on there, I thought that little splash of color really made the cake pop!

Everyone have a great week now, OK?  Let's meet back here on Friday for another installment!!

Happy Friday!  For the longest time I have had this cake in my "inspiration book", and I finally had a bride that picked it as her wedding cake.

Once she had picked it, then came the task of figuring out how to do it.  Well, I finally decided to use modeling chocolate panels, and I was very pleased with the results.  One tip:  initially cut the panels larger than you need - no matter how hard you try, cake will never be truly square.

I think this was also the first cake where I used smaller separators for the tiers.  I used styrofoam, coated with piping gel and covered in the same modeling chocolate I used for the panels,

Lastly, for the blue behind the cut-outs, I took a sheet of edible image paper, colored it with blue luster dusts and stuck it to the back side of the panel.  It kept me from making a big batch of blue icing and it kept icing from coming through the cutout, keeping that nice clean design the bride was looking for.

A couple of weekends ago I did a wedding at the Dalton Trade Center for a wonderful couple.  The bride brought in a fabric swatch from her sari and wanted it represented as a major design element of her cake.

It was a fairly complicated design (see the gold diamond patterns) so we accomplished this by taking a picture of the fabric swatch and tracing the image on tracing paper with an ultra-fine Sharpie.  I then colored in the tracing with a thicker Sharpie and scanned it on the computer.  My hubby worked his computer magic and took the black and white image and made it a faint yellow.  We then printed these patterns out on edible image paper.  After that, I cut out each diamond and hand painted over the yellow with gold luster dust.  Now normally I mix my dusts with Pure Grain Alcohol (PGA) but in this instance I needed some more working time so I used vodka instead.

Wow!  So much going on!!  And I haven't even got to the isomalt sugar gems we made for the centers!  Oh well, this week's cakes aren't going to finish themselves, so that may have to be another story for another time!  Thanks for stopping by!

This was a wedding cake that I delivered to the Loose Cannon Art Gallery this weekend.  I was very very pleased with how this one turned out.

This 4 tiered wedding cake started with a thorough covering of buttercream.  Then I rolled out thicker than normal strips of blue fondant and cut out this "rolling hill" pattern and wrapped it around each tier.  I then extruded a fondant rope and let it hit on top of that fondant ledge.

I finished it up by piping some scrolls and paisley shapes on the blue fondant.

I'm going to keep this post fairly short as this is a SUPER busy week at the bakery.  I will have another post out on Friday, so check back soon and have a great week!!

I have to admit when the bride first showed me a photo of (the cake that inspired) this cake, I didn't like it.  I'm a very orderly person and at first glance, the the piping on this cake is anything but orderly.

But I'm a big girl and a professional decorator, so I put on my big girl professional cake decorating pants and started piping (with a #1 tip).

If there's any way to pipe this thing orderly, I sure did it.  Droplets first, then then squiggles... I found a way to make order out of the chaos.  And the more I worked on it, the more it grew on me.  By the time I was finished, I was quite proud.

Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this?  Hmmm... we don't always get to do the cakes we want (or like) but you can always choose to have fun doing it and if you're lucky, wind up liking it in the process.

This weekend we took this lovely cake to a new event hall. The Loose Cannon Art and Events Hall is a very nice little spot near downtown Chattanooga. Their style is very eclectic... I could totally see Chad and I having a party there!

This bridal cake is all buttercream with buttercream piped branches and gumpaste dogwood blossoms. I even molded the birdie toppers using one of my ceramic birdie knick-knacks.

I delivered a Tennessee Vols groom's cake along with it, but we'll save that one for next time, OK?

Have a great week!

Happy 2010 Everyone! I rang in the New Year by delivering this cake to a happy couple that were getting married just as the ball dropped at midnight on New Year's Eve. What a special time to get married (I imagine that husband will NEVER forget their anniversary)!

This cake is a simple 3 tiered buttercream wedding cake, simply decorated with copper fondant bands and red gumpaste poppies. It was very elegant and striking. I plan on making a dummy cake based on this design for an upcoming bridal show.

It's another busy week here at the bakery so I'll keep this post shorter than I would like. Stop back in soon to hear more of my cake adventures!