Another Birthday Cake

This birthday cake was for one of my 3rd Grade students. Pink cake swirled into the white, a 3 layer topsy turvy, decorated in pink & black. I added some pink butterflies for added interest.

Birthday Cake

This cake was for my daughter who loves cool colors. It is a round, square, round cake, with the square cake being red-velvet with cream cheese frosting.

Wildcat Birthday Cake (Again!)

Seems all my friends are K-State Wildcat friends, so when making the second cake with the same theme I needed to change things up. This cake is a red-velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. It was HARD to work with! But I did like the overall end results!

Another Baby Cake

I was asked to create a lime green & black Madagascar themed topsy turvy cake. The zebra is inspired by the zebra in the movie. The cake design was what the client asked for.

Wildcat Birthday

I have a friend that is a K-State fan, so I created a simple purple/white wildcat cake with a purple/white checkerboard design inside.

Firefighter Birthday Cake

I tried something new on this cake, with the top & bottom layers being round and the center layer being square. One of the volunteer firefighters on my husband's department asked me to make him a birthday cake, but he neglected to tell me what kind of cake he wanted. SO, the top layer is strawberry, the center layer is white, and the bottom layer is chocolate. I enjoyed getting to use my edible glitter.

Minnie Mouse Sheet Cake

I was hired to bake a birthday cake for a baby's 1st birthday. This is the cake she asked for.


I'd been wanting to sculpt with fondant for quite some time, so I took this opportunity to throw in a baby cake. This was fun to do & I learned quite a bit!

Topsy Turvy Birthday Cake

I had a credit at Amazon & decided to splurge & use it on a set of topsy-turvy cake pans. Let me just say I LOVE them! Other than the fact that to make the complete 4 layers it takes almost 10 cake mixes. That is a LOT of cake! I decorated it and took my cake to school to celebrate my birthday. All my students enjoyed it tremendously!

Julie's Birthday Cake

Julie's birthday snuck up on me. I stayed up late one night baking a red velvet cake, & forgot about it for awhile, so it is a little overdone. I stayed up late decorating it, & sure enough, walked out the door the next morning without the cake. Since I won't be seeing Julie again for a couple weeks her cake will be going to the teacher's lounge tomorrow. We'll see if the "over-doneness" matters to the guys I work with! This was also my first attempt at cream cheese frosting.

My Final Cake Class...

I'm so sad that my 3rd cake class is over. It's been a lot of fun! This was the fondant & gum paste class, so this cake was made of flowers I learned to make. I actually liked this cake overall.

Dad's Birthday Cake

Dad's a Jeff Gordon fan, so I made this cake for him after work today. Little did I know he took a trip to Florida, so he won't even see it for another 2-3 days! This was my first experience working with sugar sheets, as well as the Wilton tubed frosting. Wish I'd had more time to do everything I wanted to, but I don't think it turned out too bad for only having 1 1/2 hours to decorate it!

Basket Cake

I somehow ended up with an extra cake from my last baking spree. I needed to get it frosted today so I thought I'd try my hand at creating a basket cake. I didn't pre-plan the flowers very well. This is a fun technique, but dang, you gotta really like frosting to eat some of these cakes! *L*

Final Flower Cake

Tonight was my "final" for the Wilton "Flower and Cake Design" class. It was SO much fun! My cake had it's challenges but turned out pretty neat regardless. I grabbed the wrong size cake pan when baking the cake, so the top layer is only 1" smaller than the top, AND it was shorter than I expected. So all my royal icing flowers that I pre-made fit differently than I expected. I had fun playing with the borders, practicing a large variety of combinations before settling on the scallops with alternating stars. I used red, black, & white since I knew I'd be taking this to school tomorrow & wanted to use school colors. The next class is "Gum Paste and Fondant" and I can't wait!

Lil Red Riding Hood Cookies

I took a cookie decorating class to learn a few more tricks. I found it frustrating to be handed a piece of sugar sheet & told to "put it on my basket" without more instructions. Sometimes there is a lot of presumption on what students know! Luckily the little gal across the table & I were able to figure it out. Oh, and the stuff is breakable, so if you ever use it, don't fold it...... :)

We decorated "Little Red Riding Hood" cookies & I enjoyed the new tricks I learned. I love using the decorator bags for piping on the thick icing, but flooding the cookies just really doesn't work well with the bags. I think if I continue the cookie decorating I'm going to invest in a few bottles. The other students didn't have near the problems I had! But it was fun anyways.

I got my cookies home safely and I offered my son's girlfriend a cookie before thinking to take a picture. The missing ax was glittery-shiny before she ate it. I had to stop at the liquor store to buy some vodka for mixing my new edible glitters!

The Beer Cake

This was a fun cake to make! I made it Caleb's birthday, for former student & friend of my son.I frosted it at my daughter's & didn't have all the supplies I needed, so it's not supported. Lesson learned! I loved how it turned out, except for the handle. I learned better ways at my next class, so next time...

Using Up the Frosting...

I had quite a bit of frosting left over from my sunflower cake, so I decided to try creating the same basic cake using different tips. I used the large leaf tip to create the petals, which I think makes this cake a little less abstract. I also had time to finish this cake, so it has a base line and is a bit more balanced.

I have learned a LOT in this class. Can't wait till Monday when we start learning flowers. I just hope my kit arrives by then. With the cheaper price on the ultimate kit, plus my points from Amazon, I got the kit for $63 - it sells for $199 at Hobby Lobby! When I complete my classes I'm going to start selling my cakes - I just need a good name for a cake business...

Sunflower Cake

My last class for Level 1 was tonight. We learned how to make roses, which was fun. The instructor turned us loose to decorate our cakes. Everyone else created a rose cake, very formal & elegant. I just wasn't feeling it, so I made sunflowers on mine. Completely different from anyone else in the class, but very fun to create! I ran out of time to add any borders, but I'll try again a different day. I signed up for Level 2 - I can't wait! Who knew I'd like this so much - and as much as it all costs I better like it a LOT! :)

Creating Flowers on Cupcakes

So this class we are to bring in 6 cupcakes and pre-colored frosting (Dk.Blue, Lt.Blue, Pink, Green, White), all in specified amounts. I'm not sure our instructor had a clear view on where we were going with this project. She had us frost all our cupcakes and then had us practice the flowers we had just learned to create. Talk about some UGLY cupcakes! *L* The best part about this lesson was learning how to stuff them. Yummy!

I had tons of extra pink & blue frostings left when I got home so I practiced my two favorite flower cupcakes, just to prove it wasn't all me! They turned out really pretty, but if I'm going to be making cupcakes with this much frosting I will HAVE to find a lighter frosting. The recipe I use is yummy, and not super rich, but still....

My First Cake Decorating Class

So tonight I took my first cake decorating class. THIS cake was a comedy of errors! First I had to take in an 8" cake. Well, normally this is not a big deal, but my oven is not working. So I mix my batter, throw it in a pan, & head to my mom's to bake my cake while we watched Big Brother (it's a guilty pleasure of mine, I admit!). I get home & discover I'm supposed to have an 8" cake and I used my 9" pan. Oh well, it'll have to do. I'm supposed to torte it (one of my fancy new words! *L*) so I cut it in 1/2 and go to put the parchment paper in the center and the stupid cake falls apart. I decide my cake is just going to have to work. I freeze my cake per instructions, make my frosting & head to class. It was SO much fun! I learned how to properly use some of my tips, how to smooth my frosting with parchment paper. I also learned how to transfer designs onto my cake. For those of you who decorate cakes often these are probably simple tips, but for someone who's always just figured things out on my own these tips were huge!

So I finish decorating my cake (yeah, it's not exactly round anymore - I need to work on the whole transportation thing) & decided I'd drop it off at my kids house. Umm, didn't think about transporting a decorated cake after class.... So I bought a box to take it in. 9" cake, 10 " box. The math works, right? I thought so too, but then I went to put the cake in the box & realized I'd used a 12" cake circle. DUH! So I cut off the edges to make it "fit". I learned a lot tonight...

Mom's Birthday

So I found these cute cupcake papers & butterfly cake toppers and knew they'd be perfect for my mom's birthday. I have a cupcake tree already, so I baked the cupcakes, frosted them, & tried the hot knife method of smoothing them out. Pretty cool! Then I did some experimenting with frosting to make the flowers. There is a LOT of frosting on these!

Fourth of July

For our celebration I wanted to try out my new checkerboard cake pan. I didn't cut the cake from the center so it doesn't look exactly right, but close enough...I'd been wanting to try this idea & I liked the way it looked overall. My fondant still isn't quite right - I'll have to look into taking a class on fondant when I'm finished with my current class. My 4 week class is now up to 6 weeks - they postponed the first class due to weather, and didn't have class on the 4th, so at this rate I may not get to take another class until next summer. :( Good thing there's YouTube for when I can't figure stuff out!

Baby Cakes

I don't think I really had the time to explore these as much as I had planned. I wanted to create personalized cupcakes for all my family members, but ran out of time. Soooo, I ended up just playing around with the idea of baby boy cupcakes. I'll try again later....

In the Beginning....

Every summer I have explored a new hobby. Last summer I geocached. This summer I am learning to decorate cakes. I am starting to feel like the zucchini lady - the one who is always trying to give you all her extra zucchini, only in my case it is cake.

I started by watching YouTube videos, loving the concept of fondant icing. How did we ever survive without YouTube? I started out trying to make a Topsy-Turvy cake. I quickly discovered that maybe I ought to start smaller after tossing out my first absolute disaster. Wish I'd taken a photo - it really was bad! I didn't do too bad on my first "Fireman's Cake", but I decided that if I'm going to do this then I'd better take some classes. Here is my first cake:

Next I tried a Father's Day cake. I was going to attempt to make a BBQ grill cake, but I didn't have the correct colors AND I got ahead of myself & didn't have enough of my base color gray to finish. SO I turned it into a card cake for my dad, with "Happy Dad's Day" lettered on the side & the 4 suits on the top. Plain & simple, but my dad liked it.


I have taken one class & learned how to torte a cake (I didn't even know what a torted cake was!). My next class we begin decorating - I signed up for the beginners class & I'm excited to learn some new techniques. Maybe there' a little money in this for me......