I made this pretty, rustic birthday cake this weekend. It was a great chance to try out some new rose petal cutters I got – I definitely approve, and I can’t wait to use them again soon!
A Super Superhero Cake
I made this “super” cake for a very special eight-year-old. Spiderman, Batman and Superman – the big three are here!
The logos are hand painted, and, like the rest of the cake (of course!), fully edible. There is one little post holding up the 3D eight, but otherwise, you can chow down on all of it. Good thing, because apparently that’s what the birthday boy went for first – he ate the Batman logo and all the letters of his name!
There’s a colourful surprise inside this cake, too. Each tier is four layers of chocolate cake with buttercream in between, so I made the icing between the bottom layers blue, the middle layers yellow, and the top layers red. I didn’t get a picture of the cut cake to show the filling, unfortunately, but I’m told it tasted great (and that’s the most important thing!)
Chai Latte Rustic Wedding Cake
I made this lovely rustic wedding cake this weekend.
The couple was debating between lemon or chai for the flavour, but knew they wanted a rustic style. After tasting some samples, the chai won out, so the end result was this chai latte cake with a complementary chai buttercream. The spices in the icing gave it the nice light-brown tinge, and I decorated it simply with whole versions of the same spices – cinnamon sticks, nutmeg, cardamom pods and anise seeds (okay, there’s no anise seed it in, but they’re so pretty I put them on there anyway. Shh! Don’t tell). I left off the ginger and the cloves – I thought ginger root wasn’t maybe so pretty, and I didn’t want the bitty whole cloves to get stuck in someone’s slice!
Congratulations to the happy couple – I really enjoyed making this cake for you!
A Dino-riffic Birthday!
I made a cake this weekend for the 2nd birthday of my very dear friend’s son. He’s a big fan of the show Dinosaur Train (which I hadn’t even heard of since I don’t have kids of my own!), so we modelled this cake after the two main characters on the show.
I baked and filled the cake at home in Toronto, but my friends live back in our hometown so I actually finished this cake at my parents’ house. That meant I had to bring all of my cake stuff, but the trade off was I had some help. My sister is artsy too, so she actually made Tiny the Pteranodon while I made Buddy the T-Rex! Go team!
We had to make sure Tiny had eyelashes, since that’s how you know cartoon characters are girls! Buddy, of course, got a set of ferocious teeth.
They were a cute pair to make. The birthday boy really liked it, too, so that’s the most important thing! 🙂
(I also made his 1st birthday Piggies in the Mud cake and his baby shower cake, which I apparently haven’t posted yet – oops! I’ll have to get around to posting that one soon! Can’t wait to celebrate with you again next year!)
Birthday Book Cake
This is a pretty special cake today – as such, I’ve indulged with a few more photos than usual, so I hope you’ll enjoy them – after all, isn’t cake all about indulgence? (Wait, what am I talking about? Cake is essential, not an indulgence. Let’s all remember that.) 🙂
This cake is for the mom of one of my dearest friends, and mom herself is pretty dear to me too! I actually lived with them for a few months while I was in school, and they took me in as one of their own. I’ve always felt so welcomed and loved by their wonderful family, so I was happy to make this cake for them!
The birthday girl is an avid book lover, especially when those books are in her native Armenian language, so I wanted to reflect those loves in her birthday cake. I even learned how to write “Happy Birthday” in Armenian!
All three cakes are chocolate, but each tier has a different flavour of buttercream. The top is vanilla buttercream, the middle is strawberry buttercream, and the bottom is caramel buttercream (my new favourite – made with homemade caramel!).
If you’re concerned about the amount of food colour I had to use to get the books such bright colours, not to worry – the colour is actually painted on the outside. The top and bottom books were covered in light blue fondant and the middle with a light brown, then I used thinned gel colour to paint them the desired colours. The cake board uses the same technique – it’s just white fondant that I scored with a tool, then painted brown. I was quite happy with how they turned out – I think the middle leather-look book is my favourite, but I liked the blue ones too – I think the top one looks like a linen cover!
For those who can’t read Armenian, this says “Happy 65th Birthday Dearest Arsho”. I actually can’t read it either – I Googled it! I confirmed the translation with my friend before writing and changed it to the proper dialect. Everyone at the party was surprised that I could write in Armenian, though, so I guess I got it right! 🙂
The cake is actually bigger than it looks – each tier is a 9×13″ cake. It took a lot of work, but it was fun and definitely worth it! Here it is with a bouquet of flowers so you can see the scale:
Now, for the final picture, I’m actually including a picture of the cake after it was broken. This isn’t something I would normally do, but this time I take it as a compliment – during the party, apparently someone thought it was an actual stack of books and tried to open the top one, smooshing the corner! Ooops – but oh well, like I said, I thought it was pretty good that they actually thought they were real! 🙂 Now you can see the colour of the light blue fondant underneath, so there’s an extra advantage too – but FYI, if you ever get a book cake like this for a party, you might want to either hire someone to guard it, or put up a sign saying that it’s cake! 🙂
Well, I hope you all enjoyed this post – I certainly enjoyed making this cake! 🙂
If you want to see some other book cakes I’ve made, check out this Twilight Breaking Dawn cake and this one I made for celebrated Toronto author Terry Fallis (his first book, The Best Laid Plans, has been made into a mini series by CBC, too, so he’s extra famous now! You rock, Terry!)
Happy Valentine’s Day with Strawberry Ombre Rosettes!
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Whether you’ve got a valentine to snuggle up to today or not, cake is always a good thing to snuggle. …Well, maybe don’t actually snuggle it – that sounds sticky. But it’s certainly a good thing to eat!
I tried out my pretty new cake stand for the first time today, and actually used my proper camera instead of just taking a quick snap on my phone. Looks good enough to eat, doesn’t it? 🙂
It’s a chocolate cake with strawberry ombre buttercream. There’s no food colouring in the icing, either – that’s all the natural strawberry puree! I cooked the puree to reduce it by about half, which gave it the darker colour and a much more intense strawberry flavour. The inside is all the darkest shade of pink, too, so it will be very strawberry-y! I blended in vanilla for the middle row of rosettes, and the top is pure vanilla.
Have a sweet day, everyone! 🙂
Pink Bear Baby Shower Cake
Here’s a baby shower cake I did back in the fall (I’m trying to post more regularly this year!). The client initially wanted little booties on top, but after they saw the little bears on my blog from some other baby shower cakes I did, they decided to go for a bear too! That made me happy, because I like making the little bears – they’re cute. 🙂 At least I think so!
Perfectly Purple Ombre Petals
In continuing the theme of buttercream cakes, here is another I did recently!
This technique is called petal effect, and the term for the graduated colour is “ombre”. Sounds fancy, huh? 🙂
What do you think? Do you prefer this petal effect, or the piped rosette cake I posted last week? They were both fun to do!
A Sweet Rosette Birthday
I made this pretty rosette cake for a recent birthday. The piped buttercream rosettes were actually quite quick to do, but I love how they turned out. So did the birthday girl, actually – so much so that her mom ordered another exactly the same a week later! (Not that you need an excuse to have two birthday cakes, but one was for the party with her friends and the next was for the family. I guess the only trouble with birthday parties is they sometimes don’t leave much leftover cake!)
The purple accent flower and writing disc are made out of thin gumpaste and easily removable before cutting – the rest is all buttercream!
Here’s an image of the “naked” cake pre-toppers, so you can see the sides. It fit two rows of rosettes perfectly!
A Pretty Birthday Cake
Today’s cake is a simple, pretty birthday cake. Birthday girl Jelissa’s favourite colours are lavender, pink and green, so I created this cake to check all the boxes!
