TENNIS BIRTHDAY

These tennis birthday cake truffles were from last August for my friend's mother-in-law's birthday.  The birthday lady's hobbies were tennis and yoga, so I chose to make tennis balls and my friend wanted the truffles to say "Happy Birthday Sandy!"  Since these treats were for a slightly more mature gathering, the truffles are butter cake inside and I made them slightly less sweet (with less frosting).  My friend had been craving chocolate cake truffles too so I just made some for her and added those in!

 

Packaged and ready to for some birthday fun! I split up the tennis balls without letters in separate boxes because I didn't want to cut up the words.

Happy Birthday Sandy!!!

 

 

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!!!

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?  ;)

Safari Pool Party!!!

This birthday cake and these cake truffles were for a special little girl's birthday party with safari animals as the theme. Since it was a summer pool party, it made sense to combine the two and have safari animals relaxing at the beach!

This was also a very special cake because it was our first two-layer cake with filling. We started with a 9" round butter cake for the bottom layer (cut horizontally in half) and coated the bottom half with vanilla pudding and sliced organic strawberries (yes - we washed, sliced, and chopped the green parts off of every strawberry), leaving a thin rim of cake around the filling.

A circle of ganache was then carefully squeezed around the circumference to keep the pudding and strawberries from sliding out. More pudding was smeared on top and the other half of the 9" cake (with the dome sliced off) easily adhered to the filling. The entire cake (top and sides) was then treated to a layer of ganache.

The next step was to cover the bottom layer with blue fondant to represent water, but of course, a monochromatic blue would have been much too simple (and not as interesting). My sister came up with a clever technique for a marblelized pond with circular white-caps (fit for a circular cake) to represent the ocean. Unfortunately, the marbled effect was diminished once the top layer of cake was placed on top, but in this picture, you can enjoy the effect to your heart's content! :)

Our idea for the top layer of the cake was to have an off-set island so safari animals could enjoy both the sand and the surrounding waters. (Our island might be the only island that tastes like carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.) The island was coated with graham cracker crumbs and sloped so the birthday girl's name could be carved into the beach. At first I thought it would be a cool idea to just draw the name into the "sand" just like on a real beach, but I quickly realized the name appeared indistinguishable and wouldn't be appreciated.



Spontaneous Plan B was to use white fondant and pearlize the letters with pink and white edible shimmer. Thankfully, everything worked out beautifully because the letters ended up looking as if they were made from abalone shells (and that wasn't even planned)!





Next came the whimsical task of decorating the island with fondant sculptures: two bronzed palm trees (it took three tries until the leaves wouldn't dry and crack off under their own weight), a tri-colored tropical bird (a mold was used for the bird), a bucket and shovel with a fish poking out (the shovel was the hardest to make because it was so small), a red hermit crab (a pre-made chocolate shell was used but I struggled to get the legs and angle of the body just so), a colorful beach towel to lay out on, and some pretty pink flowers to liven up the island and frame the name.

Having a 3-dimensional cake ususally makes an occassion feel that much more special, so instead of piping seaweed onto the side of the cake, each strip of seaweed was cut out of rolled fondant and attached with the blades turning in different directions for a flowing feel. Baby blue edible pearls representing bubbles gave the cake a touch of elegance, and coincidentally, tied in to the party's bubbleologist performance!

In order to accommodate 40+ guests, we made a fun collection of lemon, carrot cake, and chocolate cake truffles. My sister meticulously made the colorful beach balls putting strips of red, blue, and green fondant on top of a yellow-coated cake ball (by a twist of fate, there were safari animal beach balls at the party), and we also had each safari animal relax on his or her own lifesaver (we used gummy LifeSavers - convenient, huh?) and piece of glimmering ocean (blue sugar sprinkles). We also added some inner-tubers on the cake itself for fun!

Although it was tempting, we didn't want the beach theme to overshadow the safari theme, so on all the chocolate-covered cake truffles, we hand-cut leaves and veined them, curled them up on the cake balls to give more dimension, and propped one safari animal on top of each leaf. One particular monkey was a bit more mischeiveous than the rest and swung himself upside down (so we let my nephew eat him)! Also, in case you were wondering, we bought the safari animals (made of royal icing); sorry, we're not quite that good yet!

The final touch was a banner (the only inedible part of the cake) hung between the two palm trees declaring the happy day: "Happy Birthday!!!"

We surrounded the cake with colorful beach balls and inner-tubers and displayed the rest of the cake truffles on a 3-tier cake stand which turned out quite lovely. The party was fabulous and the cake turned out to be moist and delicious!

Happy Birthday Adelynn!!!

Note: This post is a bit late for July, but better late than never, right?

Bridal Shower Grand Slam!!!

This pair of soon-to-be bride and groom love their sports, so we came up with these "cake balls" for a playful bridal shower.  Footballs, basketballs, and baseballs surround a blushing bride and groom sporting baseball wedding attire (all hand-tailored). The groom and footballs have chocolate cake inside, and the bride, basketballs, and baseballs contain "deWishes" butter cake!

Side view of bride & groom: note the stitching on the groom's baseball cap and the couple's adorable profiles.  The thread on the baseballs were hand-stitched and all the balls were handmade without the use of molds.

Aerial view: shows sample monogram on groom's baseball cap.  The bows on the bride's pigtails are pearlized and set with a pearl.

Back View: shows the pearlized gleam of the bride's veil and the sheen of the groom's cap.   From any angle, this union is a Grand Slam, a Touchdown, and a Slam Dunk all in one!  CONGRATULATIONS to the happy couple!!!

Super Bowl Sunday

Aside from playing in the marching band at football games (speaking for myself), Super Bowl Sunday provided us with the opportunity to advance our creativity.  The Steelers logos were hand-painted, and the Packers "G's" were hand-piped.  Here's a field-level shot: