Cakes by Steph

Back in June of 2007 I was asked to make a bridal shower cake for my wonderful cousin, Aly.  This cake pic has had a home at the top of the blog since day 1 and I get SO many comments on that cake.  Well now 3 yrs later we are celebrating the soon to be born baby to this wonderful couple!   So of course I was excited to do the baby shower cake!  I went off of the party ware they had purchased ~ see a pic below to compare   Cake is all buttercream except the birds and nest, which are gumpaste.

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I had the honor of making my mom’s wedding cake in early June.  She requested the floating tiers and said she was using pink but otherwise let me do as I wished.  So I ended up getting myself some new cutters to learn peonies and added in the hydrangeas and roses I already knew.  The rest of the cake is buttercream.  The hydrangea blossoms on the side are gumpaste like the top flowers.  These tiers were 8″, 10″ and 12″.

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A friend loved the cake at the top of the blog (brown/green one with the calla lilies) but wanted it in colors to match their party ware.  So this is what we did

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Another cake for my husband’s work… 6″, 8″ and a single layer 10″.  Fondant covered with fondant flowers.

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Two tier cake (6″ – 8″) for a little girl celebrating her 1st Communion.  Gumpaste cross and roses. Buttercream icing with fondant accents.

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Here is the March cake for hubby’s work ~ a little gift for them

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And here is the cake from the baby shower.  Three tier (4″-6″-8″) done in buttercream with fondant accents and a fondant sculpted baby monkey on top.

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All buttercream cake except for zebra accents and bottom border which is fondant.  Flowers are gumpaste.

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This cake was a fall themed one – not quite fall yet but I still love it.  The colors are so pretty.  All of the flowers are gumpaste, cake is buttercream iced.

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This was a birthday cake for my dad – his request of a harley jumping out of the cake with flames   So here you have it!  The harley, flames, letters and skulls are out of gumpate then painted after they dry.

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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…

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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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Its that time of year…so many great accomplishments.  Congrats to all the graduates out there.  Today’s cake is a high school graduate who also is an avid hockey player.  School colors were maroon/white and the hockey colors blue/white.  This cake is a 10″ – 12″ tiered cake.  The grad cap on top is gumpaste (and edible).  Everything is edible   Well except the support dowels

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For some reason this color just makes me smile.  Maybe its the fresh cleanness of its color or how vibrant it is.  But I love it.  This cake has no purpose.  In fact it will likely just end up in the garbage (please don’t *gasp* yet).  The top is actually a fake cake (styrofoam) that I covered for my students in class on Tuesday.  Since no cake goes undecorated I was pondering what to do with it.  I decided to make use of some other bad cake and make it a big one.  The base of this cake is real cake – 10″ of overcooked, kind of burnt cake ickyness!  I had a little timer incident last week which resulted in burning 4 cakes   Bummer…but of course they won’t go wasted.   Meaning they WILL get decorated!

So I made up more teal fondant and here you have it.  Also as part of my goal in doing the cake I wanted to use up some extra icing in my fridge.  I had about 10-12 different tupperwares full of icing in there…all different colors.  It was starting to make me crazy.  So I pulled some out and just slapped them on this cake and iced.  I used yellow green and blue.  The effect was quite neat and you can see a pic of the base iced cake below the finished cake pics in this post.  I want to try this with a full coat of icing on a cake sometime.

Anyway…enough talk – here’s the cake

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I have a LOT of frosting in my fridge right now to use up.  And also a bunch of cake in my freezer as well   But this cake (well the flower shaped one) was in my fridge from a recent cake I made…extra batter   The round tier on this one is fake cake (styrofoam).  The gumpaste flowers I had previously made up.  So I mixed up some green icing and iced this up.  Didn’t take even an hour I think.  My eldest daughter said what I was thinking ” home come there are no roses on the bottom?”  And to answer this question – because I didn’t have any more   I only had this many and I wasn’t up for making more   But I did add pink dots in the grass to bring out the pinks more.

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I had some cupcakes from some leftover cake batter…what to do….  I was a little unsure what to even do with them this time.  I was feeling uninspired.  And of all the horrors, my hubby ate one before I got a chance to decorate it!  He tells me *gasp* he doesn’t really care if there’s frosting on it! :O  I’m not sure what’s wrong with him

In the end I came up with two styles…one more fancy, one fun for the kids.  The black and pink ones have fondant flowers on them…one I did a fondant gerbera daisy (or a variation of one   ).  I don’t normally use fondant for this type of flower but it worked ok.   The rainbow cupcakes I did with my girls in mind as they love rainbows.  Hubby ate one of these as well LOL

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These cake and cupcakes were done for a friend’s daughter who celebrates her birthday this weekend.  The egg is fondant covered with a gum paste bow and the cupcakes have buttercream icing with gum paste eggs.

Click for a larger view…

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Had some extra cupcakes to play with…all of the items are made from gumpaste.  I think my favorites are the daffodils.  I do love daffodils

Click for a larger view…

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My mom commissioned me to make this cake for her boyfriend, George’s, birthday.  The cake itself is a 10″ carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. All icing except the figure – and the ball which is a fondant ball on a wire. My sister Shelly came over to help me out and helped me sculpt the fondant “George” for on top   She did the wacky and wild pants…woo hoo   I made the head which had us cracking up.  We have too much fun doing this.  We asked all of our kids who it looked like and they all told us “George!” so we must have done good.  He loves golfing…so that’s where the design came from.  Below is a pic of him so you can do your own comparison.  Happy Birthday, George!

George…

And his fondant likeness…

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My little sister turned 18 last week and we celebrated her birthday party this weekend!  She is all about fashion, design and shopping (and her cell phone   ).  This cake was all about her.  My older sister and I designed and created this together – another fine S&S creation   Some details…

The purse and the shopping bag are cake, covered in fondant.  The tissue in the gift bag is gumpaste.  The handles on the purse are fondant as are all the decor – except the piping…which Shelly painstakingly piped for THREE hours!  She has a cramped hand now   But she did a great job!  Meanwhile I put together the gift bag and dress model.  The model is all fondant that I sculpted and then made a fondant dress for.  It is embellished with some piping.  We finished off the “Louis Vuitton” handbag with both tan and gold painted embellishments (including a zipper pull that Shelly embossed with a LV logo.  Its all about the details, folks   The shoe and cell phone I made a few days earlier from gumpaste.  They are painted with luster dust to shimmer.

In the end it took us just about all day to do this cake….lots of putzy time (and kids interrupting) went into this!  But well worth it.

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This was a 1st birthday cake – winter themed.  The lamb was requested because the little girls nick name involves the word Lamb   I had so much fun sculpting these little lambs out of fondant.   All I could think about as I made them was that saying “Mares eat oats and does eat oats, but little lambs eat ivy.  A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?”  When I was a kid we went camping in northern WI (Hayward) and they had a few animals at the camp ground – one of them a lamb called Lambsydivy (not sure how they spelled it though!)…  Lambsydivy = lambs eat ivy    For some reason I’ve never forgotten about that lamb.

But enough about my lamb filled childhood   – we need the rest of the cake details!  There are 2 cakes, sizes 8″ and 10″.  Both pink butter cream icing with royal icing snowflakes I piped out, then painted with a pearl luster dust when dry. Below the cake pics are a few close ups of one of the lambs.

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“Welcome to the place, where words come alive … let’s build a word – WORD WORLD!”

Any of you with PBS loving small children will understand this creation   My “baby” turns 4 today and she loves this show.  On one of the shows they create a C-A-K-E!  Mine is different colors but more girly In one episode they build the cake:

All of the figures are from fondant/gumpaste – including the C-A-N-D-L-E. Chocolate cake as she requested and I threw in a peanut butter & chocolate filling. Yum!

And these are the actual characters from the show:

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Here’s a little frog I made for a cake I’m decorating tomorrow.  He’s made of a fondant/gum paste blend.

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Here are some flowers I was playing around with.  I received these tiger lily cutters for my birthday and I then purchased a lily veiner (to make the authentic lines/viens in the petals).  So this was my first lily with it.  My pistol is a bit large but I’ll work on that   I made teh stamens too as I didn’t have any premade.  It is dusted with a darker pink that doesn’t show up that great especially in the pic…I just had pink gumpaste on hand so I used that.  The calla lilies were made after a friend asked about them and got me inspired to try them again   So here they are.  Still not sure I’m sold on the stems but not sure what to do for them.

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This is an 11×15 sheet cake with fondant flowers around it, palm trees made with fondant on 1/2″ dowels and the figures are fondant/gumpaste.  Cake is iced with buttercream icing.

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This is the cake I made for my hubby and I to celebrate our b-days (his is the 21st, mine is today the 23rd).  We are both big Nintendo and Mario fans but he’s even a bigger game player than I am.  This was really fun to make and if I hadn’t had a sick child I would have made a few more fondant characters to go along with it.  Fortunately I created the top pipe/flower part yesterday.  Cake is covered in fondant and fondant figures.  The pipe and flower head are made from rice krispie treats and covered in fondant.   He doesn’t know what I’m making for the cake so it will be a surprise for when he gets home today

Another view…Closeup view of the decor…coins and brick blocks

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This cake was a S&S creation for my sister’s (the other “S” in S&S) church for an auction to raise money for a missions trip to Honduras.  The butterfly (as noted in my previous post) is an evenus coronata butterfly from Honduras and the flower on this cake is a hibiscus-like flower found there as well.

We kept this clean and simple ~ gumpaste flower and perched butterfly, fondant covered cake and ribbon around the base with a simple bow on front.  I love the how the colors came out together!  And I hope that the cake gets a high bid at the auction to raise them a lot of money.

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This butterfly I made for a “coming soon” cake   Its my attempt at a replica of evenus coronata ~ a butterfly native to Honduras.  Pic of actual butterfly is below. The colors are pretty accurate to in person though the base color is a touch more of a teal.  Butterfly is all edible except the anteanne which are fake flower stamens   It is made with gumpaste and then hand painted with food colors then dusted with a pearl dust.  It looks kind of crooked in the pic but its really not in person   Just how it comes out at the angle I took it at I think.  The body doesn’t look so funny in person

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I made this cake for my friend Ellen from an online mommy group I belong to (mom’s in WI).  We threw a surprise baby shower for her and I of course volunteered for cake   Here’s what I came up with!  The baby girl sandals on top are made of gumpaste and painted with a pearl luster dust.  Flowers are made of gumpaste and the cake is iced in buttercream …the “clothes” are fondant cut outs.

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I had an extra hunk of cake leftover from my calculator cake (below) so I decided to decorate it for fun.  This cake is only about 4.5″x4.5″ and about 2″ tall.  Fondant covered and ribbon around the base.  These are some gumpaste roses I made previously.

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