My First Big-Girl Cake

A few months ago, I was asked to do a cake for my Aunt Laura's parent's 50th wedding anniversiary. Now, at this point, I had never made a cake larger than a 2-tiered birthday cake....and she needed a cake to feed 150 people!

Talk about a leap of faith, asking your neice to do a cake for you when she has absolutely NO experience....but don't we all have to have people who have faith in us to give us experience opportunities, so we can gain experience? Thank goodness for folks like Aunt Laura...who have much more faith in me than I deserve!!

After some serious time and effort, the cake came together better than I ever could have hoped. I made all of the flowers for the cake myself out of gum paste, which is one of my favorite cake tricks. Its just like sculpting, and turns out SO pretty in the end! On the way to the church delivering the cake, a huge gust of wind blew away some of my lillies, which immediately exploded into gum paste dust on the ground...but luckily I had enough made to get by.

Needless to say, I am SO proud of this cake!!

Me, begging my mom to stop taking pictures. But you know Momma, she never listens!

The sugar flowers were definately the 'icing on the cake' here! I think they turned out so good!

Monkey-ing Around!

Apparently this is the year of the monkeys! In the past few weeks I've gotten to do two cakes for little boys....and the theme of both of them was monkeys!

Both cakes were delicious vanilla cakes with all buttercream decoratiosn....and sad to say, I didn't get a chance to take a picture of any of them while they were being eaten...they got 'gone' too fast!

Learning point: when making icing that is DARK brown, as the fur of the monkeys that I did, it helps to start out with chocolate buttercream as a base! Coloring straight from white buttercream can take a LOT of food coloring. Dark brown teeth are never that attractive...even after eating a slice of cake!

Here's a cute monkey, peeking over the edge of the cake, welcoming Baby Jack! (I promise I took the picture in the right direction....my lack of technological skills is astounding...)

Happy 1st Birthday Max! I just thought this jungle monkey turned out absolutely precious....in a very masculine, boy way of course!!!

These cakes were such fun to make, and the chocolate buttercream tasted delicious as well! I can't wait to move on to my next jungle creature....

Happy caking!

Beth