Cakes by Steph

My youngest daughter is celebrating her 5th birthday tomorrow!  She loves purple and she loves horses and she loves littlest pet shop toys!  We’ll be having a small party with family in a week but we wanted a little cake to celebrate her actual birthday.  This is a buttercream iced cake with fondant flowers and pet shop cut out.

This cake was a labor of love for my mom and my little sister, Kelsey.   My mom graduated in May with her Master’s degree and my sister graduated from high school in June.  So proud of both of them!   Their party was this weekend and I had seen a cake done in this structure last year some time.  I loved how fun it looked so I sweet talked my older sister into helping me and we planned out the design last week.  Then spent over 4 hrs decorating it together.  The top two tiers on this cake are fake cake because they didn’t need quite that much cake for the party – however this type of cake can be done with all real cake.  Its all a matter of physics people   All of the tiers are 8″ squares, covered in fondant.

They loved the end result so that made us happy as can be!   Hope you enjoy it too…

Originally this cake (which is for my husband’s work for July birthdays) was supposed to incorporate the gumpaste hibiscus (see previous post).  However it wasn’t until I started assembling the cake I realized that they were WAY too big and I do mean WAY too big.  Kind of shot my plans for the whole thing (and ruined the idea that this cake would go together quickly!).  So back to square one…cake already fondant covered and stacked…and I had to find a new game plan.  I wanted it tropical so I stuck with the hibiscus idea – this is what resulted.  I’m pretty pleased with the end result considering I was still tired from the previous day and I spent a good part of the day putzing trying to figure out how to do this.  So here it is…

I recently got a new veining set for making hibiscus flowers from gumpaste.  I’m so excited about these and the veiner worked so well.  Really makes it turn out great.  Not that they still aren’t time consuming.  Each of these flowers probably took a good 10-15 minutes as each part of it is hand made – even the tiny dots and pistol.  I made 4 total flowers and 8 centers – I’ll get to finishing those some other time   But here is my first try at a real hibiscus…

This baby shower cake was to be based on the bedding that was picked out (see pic below).  The butterflies are gumpaste and the rest is done in fondant.

This bridal shower cake called for hydrangeas – and with a new toy I ordered I was able to create some with gumpaste.  Cake is fondant covered.

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