Elmo Birthday Cake

I wanted to make a birthday cake for my niece's 2nd birthday and her mom told me that she's into Elmo and Barney.  I'm not very partial to Barney so I decided to make an Elmo cake.  Her mom also wanted to stay away from too much food coloring so the cake is carrot cake with buttercream frosting; I also made and placed the decorations in a way so they could be easily taken off.  Since my niece is turning 2 and won't be a baby much longer, I made a "baby Elmo" cake topper.

Instead of rimming the bottom of the cake completely with fondant, I sporadically grouped fondant balls (so they can be easily taken off).

Right view:

Left view: 

Aerial view:  The letters were cut out of a mixture of fondant and gum paste and I surrounded each letter with sugar confetti (I put them on one at a time with tweezers).  I thought the mosaic effect of the confetti was pretty cool!

Sesame Street sign: I used yellow sprinkles to create the sign's border.

One more picture:

 HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADDY!!!

Brave Cake Truffles

These "Brave" cake truffles from the Scotland Highlands were for a 9-yr old's family birthday party.  Her mom basically asked me to create something for her daughter and mentioned that her daughter really wanted to see "Brave" for her birthday.  I wavered between making "Brave" cake pops or cake truffles, but due to the design, I settled on cake truffles.

The design of the two dozen "Brave" cake truffles include Melinda, a target & arrow, Eleanor's crown, three bears, and gold leaves with yellow pearls.  The butter and chocolate cake truffles were first covered with blue candy melt and then covered with a piece of blue fondant to achieve a smooth finish.  All of the decorations were hand-molded from fondant with the exception of the leaves and flowers; I used a cutter.

Close ups:

Aerial view:

Packaged and ready to go!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Perry the Platypus Cake Truffles

These Perry the Platypus cake balls were made to celebrate the launch of Disney's "Agent P Strikes Back" online game.  As part of my research for this project, I ended up playing several minutes of the game which included collecting coins in the shape of platypus feet and battling robots; it's quite a cute game!

Here's a link to the game:  http://disney.com/agentp
This URL also works on mobile Safari/Chrome browsers too!

Blue and yellow candy melt were mixed to match Perry's turquoise color.  I came up with using a little star-shaped fondant cutter for the feet and a Rolo candy on top of a circle of fondant for the detective hat.  I mixed my own orange and brown fondant since I usually only have a few colors on hand (primary colors, white, and black).  The hats were allowed to dry overnight before I attached them to Perry's head with a dab of candy melt.

I sometimes delay putting eyes on my creations due to the discomfort factor of having so many pairs of eyes staring at me...it's a bit disarming.  Makes you wonder what the guy in the lower left-hand corner is looking at.

This brigade of partially finished Agent P's made me a little nervous when I went to bed around midnight; I kept wondering what mischief they might be up to downstairs.

Perry's tails were hand-molded and detailed.  All the vanilla Perry's have straight tails and all the chocolate Perry's have slanted tails.  For the final detail, each detective hat was rimmed with black "ribbon" making Perry an official cake agent.

Aerial view for Agent P's different expressions:

Agent P's packaged and ready for their next assignment: 

Estimated time for this mission: 7 hours.

For the Perry fans out there, there's also Disney's iPad/phone app puzzler game called "Where's My Perry?" modeled after "Where's My Water?"  It's Disney's number one phone app right now, and I downloaded it this morning and it's really fun!

CONGRATS TO THE DISNEY TEAM THAT WORKED SO HARD ON THIS PROJECT!!

Chanel Cake Truffles

These Chanel logo cake truffles were created as a birthday present.  The birthday girl loves Chanel and pink, so I combined these designs into cylindrical discs of butter cake.  So pretty in pink!

Baker's Dozen:

 Packaged and ready for delivery:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WENDY!!!

Butterfly Garden Cake Pops

What else is more fitting then butterflies and daisies for a 7 year old's birthday?  I was asked Wednesday to create a cake pops gift for Sunday; a bit of a rush order, but tons of fun nevertheless.  The birthday girl's grandmother wanted lots of colors on the cake pops so I made various-sized butterflies out of different colors.  All of the butterflies were covered with shimmering pixie dust.  The yellow cake pops are chocolate on the inside, and the butterfly cupcake pops are delicious butter cake.  I got lucky and found the matching butterfly and daisy basket AFTER I already made all the cake pops!

  

 Side view:

  

Ariel view:

A different arrangement I put together at home:

Ready for delivery later today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNIKA!!!

La Crosse Teamwork

I was requested to make 25 cake truffles for a high school girls' lacrosse team for an end-of-the-year celebration.  The girls' main team color was blue, so I decided to put white chocolate lacrosse sticks on top of blue cake truffles.  The truffles are a mixture of chocolate and cookies and cream on the inside, and the lacrosse balls were made from fondant.

I was really happy to hear that the girls "LOVED" these sporty treats and enjoyed eating them!  

WAY TO GO GIRLS!!!

Custom Dog Cake Pops

A friend asked me to make cake pops of their two dogs for her husband's birthday; six cake pops of Alfie and six of Juno.  They are all chocolate cake on the inside.

Here are the real Alfie and Juno:

Both dogs had amber irises, so I gave the cake pop version of Alfie and Juno amber irises too.  You can see the color better in Alfie's picture below.  For Alfie's scruffy look, I meticulously dipped a toothpick into the candy melt and added "fur" strand by strand.  I even made sure to copy the direction that Alfie's fur grew!

I also made nostrils for all their noses so they could smell better:

 Here they are packed and ready to go!  When my friend came to pick them up, she said that the cake pop Alfie has the same expression as the real Alfie.  I hope they enjoy the cake pops, but I'm wondering if it'll be hard to take that first bite!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARREN!

Sports Baby Shower

This was a sports-themed baby shower and the client wanted a main cake as well as cake truffles to give away as shower favor.  The bottom tier of the cake was Belgian chocolate covered with chocolate buttercream, and the top layer was red velvet covered white buttercream.  

I started covering the bottom layer with different stripes of brown and blue (two different widths of blue), then covered the entire top tier with a piece of blue fondant before decorating it.  I pretty much had to mix and knead the blue, orange, and brown colors of fondant.

The decorations on top were made of a mixture of white chocolate and fondant.  The baseball cap with a "W" is made of fondant, as is the basketball.  The golf ball and baseball were solid pieces of white chocolate; the red on the baseball is fondant.  For the soccer ball, the base was also a solid piece of white chocolate, but then it was covered by individual pieces of black and white fondant to achieve the soccer pattern.

 For the party favors, I created 35 plain baby blue cake truffles dusted with light blue shimmer (not pictured).  These were cookies and cream...yummy!  I also made 25 baseballs and 10 soccer balls that were butter cake on the inside.  The soccer balls took the longest because I had place each hexagon and pentagon on individually.

I hope everyone had a blast at the baby shower!

WELCOME BABY WIGHT!!!

Golf Ball Cake Truffles

I was asked to create golf balls with a logo as a promotional item for a company, and the only requests were to have a dozen golf balls  in each box and to place them on some type of green background.

For the dimples of the golf balls, I used candy molds.  But even then, I had to dip only one side of a cake ball at a time and make sure I used just the right amount of candy melt (so the molds wouldn't overflow once I placed the cake ball in the mold).  After I attached the two halves together, I chiseled all the way around to get rid of any unsightly seams.

Two days before the pick up date I actually spent four hours trying to figure out what method would work best for putting the logo on.  Initially I made my own stencil of the logo and protected it with mailing tape,  but when I tried to hold it over the golf ball and "color" it in, the result was just a smeared mess.  I tried using royal icing and edible markers (which I really don't like to use to decorate treats) for the stencil, and I even tried piping the logo freehand onto the golf balls.  None were to my satisfaction.  Finally, I remembered I had rice paper and edible ink so I experimented with that, and added a red sprinkle to finish off the logo.

 Each box contained a mixture of three flavors: the golf balls with the red dots were red velvet, orange dots were butter cake, and green dots had chocolate cake inside them.

Below are the golf balls packaged to go to the driving range - that would be interesting, wouldn't it?

I hope these golf balls are a hole-in-one at the office!

Here is one of the Regus golf balls with my own golf balls:

Which one is made of cake?  ;)

Chanel Purse Cake

I've been wanting to make a cake purse for a really long time, so with my friend's 30th birthday right around the corner, I offered to make her one.  Since this was my very first purse cake, my friend found a purse design online and I basically tried to copy it.

I baked layers of cream cheese pound cake, leveled them off, and stacked them on top of each other.  To make the layers stick together, I carefully frosted between each layer with homemade buttercream.  Using a really sharp knife, I then carved the small mountain of cake into the shape of a purse.

All the surfaces of the cake also received a coating of buttercream to seal in the crumbs (I forgot to take a picture!).  After chilling in the fridge for a few hours to harden the coating, I colored and rolled out a large piece of soft pink fondant and covered the cake.

Then I gave each side of the cake diamond details:

Next came the black corner fabric, rolled piping over the two edges of the cake, the Chanel logo, and an extra piece of fabric on top with stitching details for the zipper.

Zipper detailing and the metal rings for the double straps came next; I had to figure out how to give the straps the knotted detail at each metal ring.

Top view of purse straps and zipper detail:

 To finish off the look, I rolled out white fondant and placed it on a cake board.  Such a large piece of fondant is quite difficult to work with , but the wavy effect of the cloth was worth it.  I wanted some different colors in there as well so I made a small bottle of nail polish, and since my friend said she normally uses lip gloss rather than lipstick, I also created a little jar of lip gloss.  And of course, what's Chanel without a string of pearls?

Top view: 

 Side back view:

Other side back view:

 Entire display with fondant lettering on board:

HAPPY 30TH BIRTHDAY JOHANNA!!!