Catching Up On Cakes

It's been a while since I've posted pictures of the cakes I've been making, so I figured now was as good a time as any to catch up on that. 

The cake I made for my cousin Christina when she graduated from Bishop Carroll last month

The plan had been to have "2010" on the cake in cookie pops surrounded by stars, but it was particularly humid that weekend and a 2 and a 0 fell victim to the humidity and broke when we went to assemble the cake at the party.  We made do and used just the stars, but I was sad that the true vision for the cake never became a reality :(

Christina is attending K-State in the fall and really wanted something with a KSU theme, so I made these cupcakes

The Powercats were made with royal icing.  I was pretty happy with how they turned out.

 

My cousin Matthew was promoted from 8th grade to high school that same weekend, so this it the cake I made for him.

The following weekend was my grandpa's birthday, so this is the cake I made for the family dinner we had to celebrate his special day.

I did a cake decorating demo for a mother's group I'm in and had cupcakes available for everyone to decorate after I did the demo.  I can't say I'm a very good instructor, but I think everyone had fun, which is what really matters, right?  This is one of the cupcakes we made.  The idea came from the book "Hello, Cupcake" which is full of cute ideas that I'm anxious to try out.

A couple days after the cake demo a friend was helping hostess a baby shower and she commissioned me to make a cake for it.  The circle in the middle and the feet are fondant.  I tried to make them out of royal icing, which I thought looked nicer since it was completely smooth, but that darn Kansas humidity struck again and it just wouldn't dry enough for me to peel it off the wax paper without cracking.  After an emergency trip to Walmart at 10:30pm in the hopes of being able to get fondant (luckily they had it, otherwise I would have been trying out a recipe from scratch) the problem was solved.

Cupcakes for the shower

I thought these little sugar decorations were so cute!  Yeah, the blues didn't really match, but I had spent $3.50 on them, so they were going to be used!

I'm currently taking the Wilton course III cake class, and we're learning to use fondant and make tiered cakes.  We learned how to make fondant roses this past week, which is sooooo much easier than buttercream.  I'm pretty thrilled with them, so you have get to look as some pictures of my first fondant rose.

Like I said, I'm pretty excited :)

(And pretty nerdy, but  I'm assuming you already knew that.)

And finally, this is the first cake we made in course III.  I think fondant is pretty easy to work with so far, but the Wilton brand fondant doesn't taste very good.  There's a recipe for marshmallow fondant that I want to try that is supposedly much tastier (and less expensive - bonus!).  Hopefully I'll have time to try that out for class this week.

Melanie was admiring my cake while I was taking pictures of it, asking whose birthday it was.  She was a bit confused when I said it wasn't anybody's birthday, so she decided it was for my other birthday.  When I asked her if she'd like her picture taken with the cake she was more than happy to comply.