Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Big Life Events


I've gotten into the habit of a once-a-quarter mass picture upload on this cake blog.  Unfortunately, I've just not had the time to upload the pictures and stories in a timely manner!  Fortunately, that's because I've been finishing my PhD, graduating, starting a new job, and trying to grow up...which are perfectly respectable reasons to not blog, right?  Gotta love big life steps.

So, the first pictures are nothing I could ever come up with on my own, but thanks to the wonderful tutorials and sharing of Sharon Zambito and her Turkey Cake Balls, I totally got into the Thanksgiving season.  Trust me, this is the best turkey you'll ever eat!  Seriously, aren't they the cutest things you've ever seen??


  Please don't eat me....

 Army of turkey birds.  These were so much fun to make, and they all had such character!  I have to admit I spent about 30 minutes arranging them in groups because some seemed more friendly towards each other than the rest...mostly, they looked incredibly concerned about the whole affair.


Another big event happened in the life of my family...My wonderful mom turned the bug 5-0!  Though you'd never know it, she hit the landmark birthday.  Instead of throwing her a big party (lets be realistic, we'd never be able to pull the wool over her eyes) we surprised her with a cake at the Farm Bureau Christmas Party.  My grandmother asked me to make this cake for her to surprise her, congratulate her, and wish her happy birthday months prior to the event....and then Dad asked for the same thing 2 weeks before the big night.  Great minds think alike, and thanks to Meme's planning ahead, I had it covered for Dad!



The decorations for the party were silver-snowflakes-poinsettias-blue, so I had kind of a hard time coming up with decoration ideas.   This is what I ended up with.  Mom loved it, which was the important part!  The top of the cake was supposed to say... "Congratulations and Happy Birthday Farm Bureau Vice Chair!"... but as you can see, I completely ran out of space!



Still, I really liked how the poinsettias turned out!  Its tough to make frosting ever 'real' red or 'real' black...these started out a little pink, but dried much darker.


Celebratory cake also made an appearance as a "thank you" to our interim choral director at ESUMC!  Nancy was a wonderful blessing to us during the past few months, and not only led us in song, but led us in worship.  Our church and our choir was blessed by her, and I was happy to do a cake for her!


Chocolate buttercream, chocolate cake, and a chocolate ganache topping...yum.  Don't let this picture deceive you, this cake is 16 inches wide, 8 inches tall, and heavy.  And delicious.


The next big event I got to be a part of was the wedding of Adam and Carrie Carter!  I had the pleasure of meeting Carrie at church, on a rafting trip with young adult ministries.  A wonderful, intelligent, dear-hearted person I've been blessed to know, I was so happy to be a part of the big day!  A deep plum-purple was her main color, so we pulled that in on a ivory cake using the design from the invitations as a guide for the piping work.  White gum-paste calla lilies set the cake off beautifully!  I loved how this cake came together!


Note to self:  piping a pattern in a dark frosting color...just a little bit more pressure not to mess up!  That purple is not easily covered up.


The calla lilies were supposed to be deep purple in the base, fading out to white.  Unfortunately, I just couldn't get the color right...they kept turning black, or splotchy, ugh!  Executive decision...white instead.  Lovely end result, but I've got to go back and figure out how to do that shading color, its been bothering me.





Time for the beautiful bride and groom to eat cake...

 


 Oh, Adam.  Cake in the face.  Those two little boys watching were precious!  The cake under the decorations was white almond sour cream pound cake with buttercream filling and then chocolate chip cake with peanut butter buttercream.  Gosh was that delicious!


 Now, this was an adventure.  My dear sweet friend Jessica Sutton Leggett said that her hubby-to-be didn't want a grooms cake...he wanted a groom's cookie!  We finagled it a little, and made a groom's cookie cake!  Each layer of this cookie cake was sliced like a pizza, and then we also had a bunch of little cookie-icing-cookie sandwiches for folks to take home.  While this isn't the most beautiful thing I've ever done, I tell you what, it was some kind of good.  There wasn't a speck left...I had enough cookie for 120 servings, and with only 60 people there, all there was left at the end was a clean plate!



Last but not least, another big event...Hope's 13th birthday!  They were having a black-light party (the fact that this had to be explained to me must mean I'm getting old) but wanted cake with some bright neon frosting that would glow in the black light.  This is just about as neon as I could get and still be edible!

So.  Here's to a summer FULL of cake, and here's to trying to stay on top of things.

Bake!

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