Teardrops on My Guitar

So a few years ago, I made a build-a-bunny birthday cake for Kiah.  Yay for repeat customers!  She's a little older now (this was back in April or May of 2015) and her interests have changed a bit.  Now she is into Taylor Swift.  So her mom asked me to make her a guitar cake.

I bought a guitar pan in order to make it easier to make the correct shape.  It came out very nicely.

I started by adding the "wood" of the guitar.

Next I added the bridge, the neck, and the sound hole, along with the sides of the guitar.  The darker parts are made with chocolate frosting.  I think I used a tip to get the sides to look so nice and clean.  The tip was the perfect size and it looks really good!

Then I started adding some details to make it look a little fancier.

Including Taylor Swift's signature!

Next I added the strings.

And the frets.

But the guitar needs a little color.

So I added a flower.

And we have a beautiful, autographed guitar.

And then we load it into the box and it's ready to go!  it almost looks like you could play it.

So even though it's more than a year late, Happy Birthday Kiah!

The Doctor Will See You Now

So, I'm about a year and a half behind on my cake blog.  It's not that I haven't been making cakes, I just haven't been posting them.  I also lost my computer (it died an untimely death), so that has made it difficult to keep up with the blog.

So, I'm going to try and do a bunch of posts in the next few weeks.  I also finally figured out how to get the pictures from my Ipad onto my Surface, so hopefully that will no longer present a problem.

My niece, Chloe, turned 2 in December of 2014.  We didn't celebrate her birthday until January of 2015 (that sounds so much better).  At the time, she was a huge fan of Doc McStuffins.  It was so cute when she said Doc McStuffins!  So, I decided to make her some doctor cupcakes.

We started out with the chocolate cupcakes.

And then added pink frosting.  Pink and purple are Doc McStuffin's colors.

Next I made some bandaids out of fondant.  I basically just cut some rectangles, added some lines with a knife and made the holes with a small tip.

I also made some doctor bags, a stethoscope, and Doc Chloe out of greyish blue fondant.

Doc and the stethoscope went on one cupcake and Chloe went on another.

In Doc McStuffins, the bandaids have hearts on them.  So I added those.

And then the bags and the bandaids went on the cupcakes.

Close up shot.

 I also made some reflex hammers.

I tried to get a picture of Chloe in her new shirt with the cupcakes, but she was so busy looking at them, she wouldn't look at the camera.

 This was the best I could do.

Chloe loved her cupcakes.  Some of the adults felt that the bandaids were a tad bit too realistic and therefore not so appealing to eat . . . . .

 I can't believe that this was already a year and a half ago!  That girl is growing up too fast!

Leslie's Lil' Pumpkin Patch

This was my third cake in three weeks.  I had survived to the final round!

I made Leslie's wedding cake, so it was really fun to be able to make her baby shower cake as well.  The shower was in the fall and the theme was pumpkin patch.  And when you are making a cake full of pumpkins, what better flavor to use than pumpkin?

I decided to make cake pops for the pumpkins.  I used this recipe from Pop Sugar for pumpkin cake and it turned out really tasty.  I used their cream cheese frosting recipe as well.

I have a baby cakes machine, but this time I did the traditional cake pop procedure - mixing the frosting with the cake.  I formed the balls and put them in the freezer for a short time.  I melted some orange candy melts, stuck the shortened lollipop sticks in the candy, and then stuck them in the cake pops.  I put them back in the freezer to make sure the sticks would stay in the pops when I dipped them in the candy.

I dipped them in the orange candy melts put them in styrofoam cups to dry.  Cake pops are hard - I can never get them to look smooth!

For the cake, I wanted to make part of of it pumpkin and part yellow cake.  I wasn't sure if everyone would want pumpkin cake, so I need to have more than one option.

I got this nifty little tool at Hobby Lobby.  You put it in the pan, then pour in the batter on each side.  Then you quickly remove the divider.

The pumpkin batter was a lot more dense than the yellow batter, so I put that in first and kind of smooshed the divider up against it.  It was a little more difficult to do than I thought because the divider wouldn't stand up on it's own.  But it did the job!

Now, the yellow cake did bake over the pumpkin part just a tad.

But as you can see, it was just on the top.  When I cut it in half, it looks great!

I filled the yellow cake part with raspberry whipped cream filling and the pumpkin part with cream cheese frosting.

Then I covered the whole thing with green buttercream frosting.  I didn't worry about making it look smooth on the top because I was going to add grass piping.

I piped the grass and added the pumpkins.

Of course they look a little boring and plain.  So I added some leaves and vines to make them look more like pumpkins.  This is also a great way to cover up errors and bumps on your cake pops.

Now I needed to make the baby inside the pumpkin.  I made one really large cake pop and covered it with orange fondant.  Then I made a smaller, round, ivory ball for the head.

It didn't look that great - you can see where I had trouble with the fondant.  But I knew I was going to add details to it, so I didn't worry about it.

Next I made some fondant hands.  Basically you just roll a little ball of fondant and then smoosh it down into a circle.  Then using your fondant sculpting tools, you make the fingers.

I used a round cutter to cut out some cake for the hat.  I covered that in orange fondant as well and made the brown stem.  You can also see where I've pinched the nose on the baby's face.

I added the ears and the hat.  I used a toothpick dipped in black food coloring for the face details.  I also used pink petal dust for the cheeks.  I didn't put the baby on the cake until I got to the shower.  Then I piped some green leaves and vines to add a little more color and to cover up those ugly spots on the fondant.

I got this really cool mold or impression mat that makes fondant look like wood.  You roll out your fondant, then you roll it over the mat.  Viola!

A few days before, I used it to make the sign,

and the fence.  I let them dry for as long as possible.

Then I carefully brought them to the shower and added them to the cake.  The fence really adds a lot - I think it came out really well.

So glad little Avery is here and healthy and that I could make her baby shower cake!