Barrett’s 5th Birthday

Do you ever have grandiose plans…and then when the moment comes–they shrink? Well, that is this cake! Originally Barrett wanted a Shrek cake (or rather, mom wanted to make him a Shrek cake) but as the time I was supposed to be working on this awesome cake was ticking away…I was out enjoying my family. So come Monday morning, the birthday, and I didn’t even have a cake out of the oven!! So single tier…smaller cake…piped on top cake came into existence. Barrett is going as a Ghostbuster for Halloween this year–and I thought it would be fun (mostly easy) to just pipe him the Ghostbuster logo. And ya know what??? He LOVED it more than he ever would have the big, grandiose Shrek cake (which I will make at a later date!!)

Having heard a lot about the combination, this is a banana cake with a peanut butter cream filling. My family members enjoyed it. I wanted more banana and less peanut butter!! But it was a hit with everyone else, especially the birthday boy!

Baptism Cake

I have never enjoyed making a cake as much as I did this one. Oh, if only I had had more than one little girl! This was for a baby girl’s baptism last weekend–and I was pretty much given a license to do just about anything I wanted to with it, just make it girly…add roses and a cross and the inscription.

I was a little worried about the cross. I don’t know “Cross Etiquette”…is there one particular cross that is for one particular church? You know, I didn’t want to put a Lutheran cross on a Methodist cake!! But when I looked online for cross ideas, I found this one. It’s kind of Celtic with it’s swirls–but have you ever seen anything so girly? It looked like a piece of ribbon–and I had to use that one!

It was my first attempt at making sugar roses–those things are super fun…a bit on the time consuming part and holy cow…are they delicate. I always laugh on the cake shows when they say they only need 20 sugar flowers, but they are making 50. I just thought they weren’t very careful….no—these babies shatter at the slightest pressure. But they were so cool!

I’m not the best photographer in the world…and I wish the pictures were better–but to date, this is my favorite cake!

It’s All In The Family

Do you remember some months back when I entered a cake competition at the Arlington Heights Frontier Days?  Well, once we got there we found that there was a young person’s category as well.  My 9 year old immediately decided that he wanted to enter the competition next year, and I let him know that it wouldn’t be fair if I helped him–he’d need to learn how to decorate a cake, practice…and make his own!

Being self taught myself, I didn’t want to teach him.  I wanted him to learn the proper technique right up front—so we signed up for piping classes at the local hobby store.   The first class we just watched the instructor put together a cake and frost it.  The second class we worked on the basic star tip and had to decorate our own cake.  This was Grayson’s first attempt at decorating…and honestly—even though the stars aren’t perfect (he’s 9 and it’s his first try) you can totally see that it is the Wilton golf bag cake.

At last nights class we practiced shells and hearts and dots and faces, and next week is our final exam and graduation!