Elmo Birthday Cake

Lacrosse Cake

I was asked to make a Lacrosse stick cake for the winning team of the MAYLA Championship.  This cake needed to feed quite a few people so to keep the proportions as close as possible it needed to be big. This was a huge challenge to get the stick head to look like a true lacrosse stick.  After quite a few times in making the netting I decided to pipe buttercream to give it a more fluid look.  The cake it Vanilla white cake filled with vanilla buttercream covered with homemade fondant.  It was a fun challenge!  Congrats MAYLA Champs!

End of School Year

Well, it is that time again and it is the end of the school year.  To say thank you to St. James staff and Principal Sue Hardrath, I wanted to provide a special thanks with a cake honoring our time at St. James Preschool.  I decided to do the logo of the school and the playground.  Included was Sue standing at the carpool lane waiting for her kids to come and go!  It was made with Italian Pound Cake and vanilla buttercream frosting.  The logo is covered with fondant.  The kids are made out of fondant for the faces and modeling chocolate for the hair, bows, and cap.  They were then painted with edible food coloring.  Sue is make out of a fondant and modeling chocolate mix.  The playground is all cake and the slide is fondant.  The rock stream has blue piping gel to give it that watery look.  This cake took quite a bit of time, due to the details, but I really had a great time doing it.  They just loved it!!  Thanks again St. James, we will miss you!

Website up and running! www.creativeconfections1.com

St. James Carnival and Bake Sale

Well, back at it again.  This time it is for the St. James Carnival and Bake Sale.  We have had such a wonderful experience at St. James I wanted to give back to them in hopes they could make some money for such a great school!  I decided to make butterfly cupcakes and a butterfly cake.  The butterflies for the cupcakes are made out of chocolate with different color wings and different color buttercream frostings.  You make these first so they have enough time to harden and then can attach to the cupcake.  The cupcakes were both vanilla white cake and vanilla buttercream.  The antennae are make out of chocolate.  A lot of fun, but takes some work as I make the butterflies the night before.

The cake is also a butterfly using vanilla white cake and vanilla buttercream frosting.  I decided not to include a filling as I wanted to make sure it stood up in the outside environment (the bake sale was being held outside this year). The wings are covered with sugar sprinkles to give it a little extra pop.  My photographer forgot to take a finished picture with the chocolate antennae so this one is missing it, but it really added to the entire cake.  The bake sale was a success as someone purchased the cake and 15 of the cupcakes for a dinner party that night!  I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did making it!

American Girl Birthday Cake

Back again!  Since I have been making weekly cakes for my Wilton classes, some of our friends have gotten the rewards of my labors!  We had a Spiderman cake (a surprise picture for my son) which was a lemon cake filled with lemon curd!  It was truly yummy!  Because of these cakes, my friends requested a birthday cake and cupcakes for her upcoming daughters birthday.  So I asked the daughter what she wanted, and she said American Girl.  Well I had no idea how I was going to make this one. I took a look at her American Girl, Molly and printed some pictures off the Internet to use as a reference.  Then I drew out what I thought it should look like on 2 8 X 10 sheets of paper taped together.  I then used this as a template for the big cake.  In order to get the American Girl hat to stay the shape I wanted, I needed to use fondant (which most kids don't like but I piped Buttercream frosting for the feet and other parts) that way she could peel off the fondant and eat the rest below.  Her glasses, braids, and bows are made of modeling chocolate. This was challenging as the cake was filled with Vanilla Whipped Cream but overall it turned out cute.  They just loved it!

Getting Started

Well just getting started baking cakes and creating designs. I started with my sons’ 3rd birthday of dinosaurs and an exploding volcano.  The volcano came out great but I would have more of the dry ice to really make it explode... I will add some pictures of the volcano as I have attempted some grander feats since then. 

My next attempt was with fondant for my sons 4th birthday Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  (Can I try something easy?!? lol)  It took a while to figure out how to make all of the pieces of the Clubhouse and after reading some other peoples attempts at the Clubhouse part and people using styrofoam, I thought I could make the actual Mickey part light from hallow rice crispy treats and fondant.  It was still way too heavy but turned out pretty good for my first attempt.  (see pics below).  I have since progressed.

Now that I have tried Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, I thought what do I do for my husbands’ birthday?  Well, he likes the stock market and so I was looking into making a cake using a real stock ticker tape running his favorite stocks and found a really cool website to make the stock ticker, but I am not an electrical engineer and ran out of time so gave up on this attempt. Maybe next time.  So I decided to make the New York Stock Exchange building instead... another easy attempt (lol).  My son also requested daddy's cake has a baseball diamond (so had to incorporate other aspects of New York).  I make the columns out of modeling choc0late which I have never tried before and it was a lot of fun.  I had to become creative with the tools I used in order to make the details since I had not done this before.  Also I made the Bull outside of the financial district also of modeling chocolate, added the street sign, Battery Tunnel, New York subway sign and of course a lake (just to try piping gel).  Overall it took a lot of time, but was fun to make!

My next venture was to make cakes for Teacher appreciation week for my sons’ class.  See the attached pictures.  These were covered in homemade fondant and daisy cutouts.  I added a small heart cake at the top just to show his appreciation for them.  They truly enjoyed them!

I have started to take the Wilton classes as up to this point I have been self taught and thought it would be good to pick up a few extra tips.  See the following pictures of my attempts at these cakes.