Floral Ombre 50th Birthday Cake

For my aunt's 50th birthday, she asked me to make her a cake!  I obviously happily said yes :)

I pretty much had free reign on the cake, so I thought I should try something new.  I had bought the Wilton's gum paste flower cutter set, so this was a perfect excuse to use it.  Since I like purple and ombre always looks pretty, the colour scheme was chosen!

My cousin said that Red Velvet with Cream Cheese was his mom's flavour of choice, so that was chosen too!

This was a 2 layer cake, covered and filled with cream cheese icing and then topped with fondant.  This was a big mistake!  Cream cheese icing does not work well under fondant at all, hence the dome like shape! It doesn't hold it's shape and just slides around creating large bumps. When I needed to use cream cheese icing under fondant again, I created a buttercream dam around the cream cheese filling and then covered the cake in more buttercream before covering in fondant, which worked much better.  Buttercream stays fairly firm at room temperature which allows the cake corners to be sharper after it's covered in fondant.

I spent hours creating these little flowers, and  then went to work adding them from the bottom up.  I think the effect was pretty :)

From this view you can see how the cream cheese icing made the cake so lob sided :(








The '50' was made a few days in advance, so the gum paste had time to dry.













In the end, my aunt and family enjoyed cake, so I was happy with the overall result :)

Care Bear Cake

I was asked to make a cake for a combined 1st and 5th birthday party.  The girl who was turning 5 loves care bears, so I made a care bear cake, which had a care bear and a cake tier for each child :)

This was a fun cake for me since I loved the care bears growing up and in order to make the cake accurate I had to do some research, which meant watching some care bear episodes :)  The Care Bears have really changed since I was a kid, now it's all computer generated, but the episodes were still fun to watch.

This was my first time trying to make figurines and it took me forever!  I spent at least 2 hours on each.  

I found getting the right shape of the faces to be really difficult.  I was continuously trying to adjust it until it was as close I could get it.  I used a mixture of fondant and gum paste to make them, so I tried to work as quickly as I could as it started to dry out and harden.

I made all the body parts separately and left them to dry overnight.

Then the parts were all stuck together with water.  I used props to hold the arms up while they dried over night.

The bottom tier was a 4 layer 9" vanilla cake and the top tier was 4 layer 6" chocolate cake.  They were both filled with Italian meringue buttercream and covered with chocolate ganache.  The ganache I made had too much chocolate to cream, so as I was using it, I had to thin batches of it out with dashes of more cream, but it still worked out well on the cake.

I made the LMF fondant the day before and tinted it blue.  The first time I tried to cover the top tier I rolled the fondant too thin and could see through it to the ganache in some parts, but since the ganache was pretty firm, I just peeled the fondant off and tried again until I was happy with it.  I find when using LMF fondant, you have to roll it a little bit thicker than store bought fondant, but that's okay since LMF tastes better than store bought, it's ok to have more of it on the cake.

The cake board/drum was covered in fondant the day before stacking.  I made the mistake of covering the board too late before, so I knew to cover the board at least a day in advance to let the fondant on the board dry before trying to put stuff on it, otherwise the fondant on the board is soft, so it nicks and rips while stacking.  After covering both tiers with fondant, I put some bubble tea straws in for supports and stacked the top tier on.



Now for the decorations :)  I made rounds of white fondant for the clouds.  The rainbow was made by rolling out long strips of each colour, sticking them together with water and forming them into an arc. This was left to dry for over 24 hours until it was firm enough to stand up.  It was stuck into the cake with toothpicks.

The letters and numbers were made with tappits and then the stars were cut out by hand.






This cake took me many hours to make spanning over an entire week working every week night after work and then another 5-6 hours on the weekend, but I'm pretty happy with the results and so were the customers, so that's all that really matters :)