Birthday Pie

My husband's birthday was in April and he requested pie instead of cake this year. Can you believe it? The nerve. Ha - just kidding. I love a good pie sometimes too! I pointed him to a couple of my cookbooks and he chose the pie he wanted. This pie is seriously drool-worthy and it tasted every bit as good as it sounds and looks!

This is Martha Stewart's Chocolate Caramel Cream pie. Oh my. So good. The recipe is in her Pies & Tarts cookbook, which I highly recommend, or online here. So, you can make it yourself! Yay for homemade chocolate pie!

I was just going to serve the pie sans decorations, but at the last minute, I decided to add a little happy birthday banner. I cut little triangles from scrapbook paper, stamped them and threaded a bit of string through the corners, then tied the ends of the strings to lollipop sticks. Straws would have worked even better. I love how it turned out. Just the right amount of dressing up for this cute little dessert.

I like to think that my pie made Andy's day. Well, that and my winning smile!

I have made a lot of pies, but before this one, I had never made a chocolate pie dough before. Besides the crushed oreo kind! This was the best pie crust. So filled with chocolate flavor. Make this pie just for the crust alone! Or just make the crust and bake it as cookies sprinkled with a little sugar. Fabulous!

Lordy Lordy Look Who's Forty

Yep, you guessed it. It's me. Back in November I turned the big 4-0. I admit, I had a hard time with it. There's something about 40 that seems significantly older than the previous milestone birthdays. A doctor actually called me "middle-aged" a couple of weeks ago. Ouch!

Turns out, though, that 40 isn't so bad. I wouldn't trade now for younger ages and all the old insecurities. And there really is something to be said for wisdom that comes with age. This is going to be a good decade, I think!

To celebrate my big birthday, my husband threw me a fantastic party with several close friends and their families. It was so much fun! We rented a pinball machine and that was the hit of the party, I think. So much fun!

Of course, I made my own cake. It was huge. And fun. And a little disappointing. Here is a picture of the whole thing.

First, the fun part. It was fun to make such a big cake and get to serve it at my own party. The top tier was gluten-free for a couple of my allergic friends. I loved being able to make a delicious cake customized just for them!

My favorite part was done by my son. He had a grand plan for my cake and I let him design the whole thing. For inspiration, he grabbed a picture of our family that was taken during our vacation last summer and painted it onto the cake. The kid's got ambition! And some serious skills for an 8-year-old, in my humble opinion. I'm not biased at all, of course! After he painted me and his Dad, he got tired and decided the picture was complete. I happen to love how it turned out!

I put a little fondant flower on the top to complete the overall look.

Now for the disappointing part. You can see it on the side of the cake in that first picture and again in the picture of the painting. See that sag on the side of the cake? Yep, my caketastrophe. After I stacked the cakes, the middle tier began to collapse. That tier is an extra-tall tier and required supports halfway through the cake. Though I never figured out exactly why the cake began to collapse, I think that I did not properly space the supports in the bottom half of the tall tier. When I stacked the tiers, the weight caused the cake to buckle.

What you see in the pictures got worse and worse, but thank goodness the cake did not fall down completely before we were able to cut and eat it. If this was going to happen, I am glad it happened on my own cake and not one meant for someone else! And, despite the disappointing look of the buckled fondant, the cake was still delicious and enjoyed by all!

Celebrating 90 Years

Hello Everyone! I hope that you are all enjoying your summer! We just got back from a wonderful vacation up in Michigan. Though it was a little colder than we would have liked, we had a fantastic time.

Before vacation, at the beginning of July, I had the opportunity to make a cake for the grandmother of one of my very dear friends. Vi was turning 90 and they were throwing her a huge party. I was honored to be asked to make the cake!

For inspiration, I was sent a copy of the invitation and I took my colors from that. The design of the invitation matched a stencil I had, so I wanted to use that too. I kept the whole design pretty simple, with a gumpaste gardenia (Vi's favorite flower) on the top.

I'll start here by showing you the picture of my sketch and inspiration pieces. Maybe you'd like to see how I start? If not, just skip this part! :) My drawing isn't the best, so you'll have to excuse that, but drawing out my cake gives me an idea of how all of the elements will look before I begin my cake. Sometimes I get an idea on paper and realize it wasn't a great idea to begin with. Seeing that right from the start saves me a lot of time and trouble in the end! I also use my sketches to show others my ideas to see if I am on their page about what the cake will look like.

Here is my sketch, the stencil and a picture of a gumpaste gardenia I found online. (Jacqueline Butler from PetalSweet made this one. If you like sugar flowers, go check out her site. You will be amazed!)

This was by far the biggest cake I have made for another person. It was meant to serve 75 people, though some of those servings came from a separate sheet cake so that I could keep the main cake more simple and save costs by not using fondant for the sheet cake.

Here is the main cake finished.

The stencil is my favorite part, I think. I love that it is subtle and adds an element of sophistication and simple prettiness to the cake.

The message on the cake was what was written on the invitation. The whole thing reads "Celebrating 90 Years. And her story continues..." I really love this for a milestone birthday because it shows that it is not only the life lived that is celebrated, but also the life yet to be lived. I was going to use fondant to make the message, but in the end it didn't seem right for this cake. The spacing would have been off and the block letters just didn't seem to "go" with the rest of the design. So, I chose to hand-paint it with food coloring. I really love how it looks on the cake! I was so nervous painting black onto white because every little mistake would show and I'm not really used to painting, especially letters. It was so much fun to "write" with that long, thin brush. Makes me want to learn calligraphy! You know, because I need another thing on my to-do list! :) It would be fun though...

For the topper, I made the birthday girl's name out of modeling chocolate and placed it on top of the cake next to a gumpaste gardenia.

Competing for my favorite thing on this cake is the gardenia. These little guys gave me a bit of trouble, but in the end, I think they are beautiful!

The sheet cake (actually a quarter sheet cake) was iced in smoothed buttercream and decorated with a fondant plaque. I admit that the look of this one isn't my favorite, but I do like the different elements. And I heard that the cake as a whole was loved by all! That absolutely makes my day and makes all of the effort totally worth it!

For those of you who would like to imagine eating this beauty, let me share the flavors with you. The top two tiers were vanilla bean cake with raspberry vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream filling, covered with white chocolate ganache. The bottom tier was chocolate cake with vanilla bean Swiss meringue buttercream filling covered with dark chocolate ganache. The quarter sheet cake was chocolate cake covered with vanilla buttercream. Of course I had to taste the scraps. You know, just to make sure I'm giving away a quality delicious cake. I may have had a bowlful. I won't tell you how big the bowl was! But I will tell you it was delicious!

Thank you Ginny and Julie for letting me be a part of this celebration! And to Vi, may you have many more happy birthdays to come!

Thanks for stopping by!

My Baby Turns Six

Last week, my baby turned 6. I know it's a total cliche that time flies, but it is so true. It doesn't seem that long ago that Kate was itty-bitty, screaming her head off at me over absolutely everything. Yep, she was a crier.

All. The. Time.

I am glad the days of crying are over and I really love the age she is at now. Apparently, Kate got all of her anger out during that first year because she has been pretty much happy with everything ever since then. She is a breathe of fresh air and a joy. And I'm not just saying that because I'm her Mom! :)

This year was the first year Kate had a friend party. (I know, she is so deprived!) She invited all of her best friends, mostly from her school class, to a Princess & Superhero party here at home. What a lot of work that was! But it was also so much fun. The theme fits Kate to a "T". She loves superheroes and princesses equally and can hang with both the boys, all rough and tumble, and with the girls, with dolls and sweetness.

I had elaborate plans for her cake, too. It was going to be a castle, with many turrets and different sized tiers of cake, stacked up and decorated like a real castle. On it would be standing a sweet princess. A dragon was going to be climbing the side of one turret, breathing fire, and Superman himself was going to be saving the day.

Did I mention that I have never done any figure modelling before? That proves important later in the story!

I made the princess and was pretty pleased with her. I think I could do better next time, but I thought she was very nice for a first effort.

Here she is...

A few nights later, I began the dragon. He was coming along fine, but wouldn't dry. So, I propped him on some tissues to keep his shape and started molding Superman. Let me tell you, that was NOT easy! Two hours later, I had a figure that was just okay. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning and I could barely see straight anymore. I set my headless superhero down and realized he was bigger than the dragon. And about four times bigger than the princess. Ugh! I think I will blame extreme focus on the task at hand for my not noticing the size discrepancy earlier! The bottom line is he was unusable on this cake. The proportions were just all wrong.

It was two days before the party. The cake was baked, but not trimmed or assembled at all. None of the turrets, which were to be styrofoam, were covered with fondant or started at all. The buttercream for the filling and the ganache for covering the cake (under the fondant) were still unmade. And I had a day's worth of party prep to finish. I'm not ashamed to say I cried a little!

The next day, Kate and I had a heart to heart. It turns out the only person really invested in having an elaborate castle cake was me. So, we came up with an alternative, thanks to some inspiration from Sweetapolita. The dragon, which was still not dry a full 24 hours later, and headless Superman were scrapped and instead, I did a sweet and simple stacked and buttercream covered cake in pink, blue, and white. The princess stood alone on the top and simple fondant flowers were placed beside her and scattered around the base of each tier. I also sprinkled some pink sugar stars around the edges and on the top.

All the kids, including my own, greeted the cake with many ooh's and ah's, proving that really all one needs is cake. And sometimes simple is better than crazy. Crazy as in me turning into a wild crazy yelling person with no sleep and too much stress. No good for kids or birthdays!

Ahhhh...such a long story this time, huh? I bet you're ready to see the picture of the entire cake! Without further ado, here it is in all it's simple glory. I hope you like it!

It's definitely not fancy and not perfect, but that is part of it's charm. For me now, simple is in and over-complicated time-consuming designs are out!

Do you want to know what's on the inside? Even if you don't, I'm going to tell you! So just skip this paragraph if you don't want to know! :) The bottom tier was made with two chocolate layers and one strawberry layer with vanilla American buttercream (the powdered sugar buttercream that most of us know and love) filling and covering. The top tier is strawberry cake with vanilla buttercream. The strawberry cake was a sort of experiment that turned out pretty well. I used fresh strawberry puree that I reduced to about half as the liquid in the recipe and threw in chopped fresh strawberries just before baking. It tasted really good, but I had some problems with the baking, so I'm going to tweak the recipe before I share it. That's a little recipe teaser for you!

Want a peek at the insides? Here you go!

The chocolate layers tasted a little like brownies. Mmmmm....

Most importantly of all, my little now-six-year-old princess loved it!

Thanks for stopping by!

40th Birthday

Hello friends! I can't believe it has been almost a month since I've posted! Sorry about that! Things have been pretty busy around here and I've got a big project in the works. If it all works out, I'll be posting about it soon...

In the meantime, a few weeks ago I had the privilege of making a birthday cake for a friend of mine. Happy Birthday Matt! I was given a little guidance in the design, which I always like, but was given some creative license, too. So this one was a lot of fun!

Here it is!



This was my first time attempting a square cake. I think it turned out pretty well, though the fondant gave me some fits. Perhaps I need to tweak my recipe. In any case, I really like how it turned out in the end! I really love the combination of colors on this one! Very simple, but elegant and masculine. Perfect for a 40th birthday party.

The decorations are all made of modeling chocolate, which is so nice to work with! It cuts beautifully, holds up very well, and tastes delicious. You can also fix little imperfections by simply rubbing them out with a finger. The warmth of your finger will melt the chocolate just enough to fix the flaw or join a seam.



The hardest part of this design was the argyle pattern on the bottom tier. I thought it would be simple math, especially on the flat side of a square cake, but it ended up being surprisingly difficult to get the diamonds to line up properly. After about the third try, though, I managed to nail it! Ahhhh....learning is never simple, is it? And learning was never so tasty either!



The dashes are made from royal icing that I piped on by hand. To keep them straight, I marked out the lines first using toothpicks and a ruler.

I am usually the one taking pictures of my cakes, but my friend insisted I be in one with the cake this time. I guess it's kind of nice to be in a picture with one of my creations!



This cake was also so, so tasty. One of the best combinations: chocolate cake with coffee buttercream filling, covered with chocolate ganache. I have never been so thankful for cake scraps and leftover icing!

One of these days, I should have a cake scrap party and, when I'm finished with a cake, invite friends over to sip coffee (or wine) and eat the cake scraps with the leftover icing. Who's in?? :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Ornaments

I know Christmas is over now, but I wanted to share with you this Christmas ornament-inspired cake that I did over the holidays. It was a very special cake, made to celebrate the birthday of a very special person: kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Spence.

My son was in Mrs. Spence's class last year and my daughter is in her class this year. We love her! This year, the parents discovered that her birthday is the day before Christmas, so we planned to surprise her with a cake at the kids' holiday party.

It worked and she was very surprised! Yay!

Everyone loved the little sparkly fondant ornaments, berries and leaves. The one that looks plain white was actually sparkly, too, but it didn't show up as well in the photo. I love how everything looks against the chocolate ganache background. Simple. Beautiful. And tasty!

Thank you, Mrs. Spence, for giving my kids such a wonderful time in kindergarten! I hope you had a wonderful birthday!

Will's 7th Birthday

Small and simple.

My (not so) little boy turned 7 last week. I still can hardly believe it. Time really does fly by us at an incredible rate.

Will is amazing. Those of you who know him know what I'm talking about.

Will and I had grand plans for his cake this year, but time got away from us. So, we simplified things. I still think it's pretty nice. And Will loved it!

The candles on the top spelled out his name. Kate picked those out and Will was so tickled with them.

The little Spiderman is a toy. Maybe sometime I will learn how to make Spiderman out of fondant.

Happy Birthday, Will! You are the BEST!

Will picked the flavor of this cake. It's a new recipe I'm still working on: Almond Buttermilk Cake. It's yummy! I am hoping to be able to share the recipe soon. Just tweaking it a bit still. I filled it with vanilla bean buttercream. A match made in heaven. Will practically licked his plate clean! We ALL practically licked the plate clean! I then covered it in ganache and fondant. The buildings, web and name on the side of the cake are all fondant, too.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look!

Birthday + Anniversary

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Anniversary to you, Happy Birthday to you!

I have a friend whose mother-in-law is celebrating both her 70th birthday and her 40th wedding anniversary. My dear friend threw her mother-in-law a big party and asked me if I would do a cake. I was happy to!

This cake had a lot going on! It looks different from every side.

There are a lot of little things to look at on this cake!

The design on this cake was really a challenge for me. When I first talked to my friend, she mentioned that her mother-in-law liked golf and the beach, was a retired nurse, and has four grandchildren. Oh, and she likes the color green. I wanted to incorporate as much of this as I could because I wanted the cake to celebrate her life. But I wasn't sure at first what to do with the anniversary aspect of everything. I found out that the birthday girl and her husband enjoy playing golf together, so at first I thought I would focus on that, but it seemed to leave out the birthday aspect of the celebration.

Finally, after a couple of weeks of thinking about it, I decided to do a sort of pattern around the cake that would incorporate little symbols of all of the things my friend's mother-in-law loves. I was happy with the design and my friend gave me the go-ahead. So, I thought I was set.

Then the time came to actually do the cake and the decorations just didn't seem right. The pattern wasn't coming together like I wanted it to or like I envisioned it in my head. In order to fit, everything would have needed to be really small. In my head, this was okay, but I very quickly discovered that on the actual cake, it all needed to be bigger.

One thing I have learned about cake decorating is that you have to be able to adjust your vision, or your design, at the last minute. Flexibility isn't always easy for me! But I'm learning. And in this case, I think I did a pretty good job. :)

I was nervous the whole time that the final look would be messy with all of the names and symbols scattered rather randomly around the cake. I really wanted the cake to seem appropriate for a grown-up but with a touch of whimsy. I wanted the birthday girl to be able to look anywhere on the cake and see something that spoke to her life and the things that she loves.

I think that I succeeded in making it look streamlined rather than messy. Thanks in part to the clean and simple white background. And to careful editing in what I put on the cake. I didn't want it to be too busy, but I did want the space to look filled. I admit that I leaned on my hubby and kids for advice on this! I wanted to add more, but wasn't sure, then my husband took a look and said he thought it was enough. So I listened! I know, it was shocking to him too! :)

There really are so many little things to look at on this cake. I can't decide which is my favorite.

My son liked the bandaid.

My daughter thought the stethoscope was a dog leash. I guess it does look a little like a leash! I'm not sure if nurses use stethoscopes, but I included it anyway.

The golf club is one of my favorite things. I really like how it turned out, along with the little golf ball. The ball is hard to see here, but it is so cute!

This cake included a first for me - a big fondant bow. I actually broke the first one I made. I put the bottom loops on the cake, then bumped them and they were crushed. And I was crushed! Thankfully, it was still the day before the cake was due, so I had time to make some more and let them dry. The lesson I learned was to always make extras the first time! Oh, and don't crush them! :)

I wrote with royal icing on the "tails" of the bow - "40th" with overlapping gold rings for the anniversary and "70th" with a balloon for the birthday. This part was actually my friend's idea and it was a good one! After the icing dried, I painted the rings and the balloon with a mix of petal dust and vodka.

You are probably wondering what's underneath all of these decorations, aren't you? Beware - it will make you crave some cake! Don't say you weren't warned....

Both tiers are dark chocolate cake with vanilla bean buttercream. I covered them in chocolate ganache to create a nice solid (and delicious!) base for the fondant. All of the decorations are made of fondant and everything you see is edible!

Thank you, Jaime, for letting me be a part of your family and celebration in this small way. I am SO glad that you all enjoyed this cake!

And thanks to you, dear readers, for stopping by! I hope you all enjoyed this cake as much as I did! Stay tuned for more projects to come. This week is my son's birthday, so you know I will be making a cake for that!