Dave's Cake Blog

Dave Shutt's Nikon Camera Cake, December 2004

2004-12-31T13:10:00.000-05:00

This cake was created for my brother-in-law's birthday this year. He's a photographer, and so the idea was to create a cake that not only looked like *a* camera, but *his* camera, a Nikon FM2. Now, it turns out that this particular camera comes in either all black, or black and silver. He has an all-black camera, but my sister and I weren't sure what he had, so I went with the black and silver version because it looks cooler.

This was an extremely involved cake, and probably took 15-20 hours total to make including baking it, finding good reference photos to work from, designing it, constructing it, and decorating. Maybe slightly longer if you include the time I spent shopping for ingredients (I ran out of fondant!) and a box to transport it in.

First of all, as I strive for with all of my cakes, everything is edible (except for 3 wooden dowels inside holding it together.) The interior is constructed entirely of yellow cake (with pudding, for extra firmness) and frosting. The exterior is Wilton fondant (you can make your own fondant, but since almost everyone just peels it off and throws it away, why bother?) I died it black with Americolor's black food coloring, which I bought a couple HUGE bottles of this year at the ICES convention in DC at the Hinkley Hilton. It's about 2 pounds of fondant total, and it takes a lot of food coloring to get it that black.

The first thing I did was decide how big to make the cake. It had to feed about 10 people. I decided to bake two 9-inch-square cakes. For the body, I just cut one layer in half and stacked the halves together with frosting. That ended up being about the right dimensions. Once I did that, I made all the dials for the top of the camera. They're solid fondant, no cake. Most are just rolled out and either cut out with an x-acto knive or with a cookie cutter, but a couple were necessarily shaped by hand. I broke the cake down into as many pieces as possible so I could work on them separately and if I messed one piece up, the whole cake wasn't ruined.

Since I didn't have the actual camera to work from, the secret to getting everything the right size was to get LOTS of photographs of the actual camera I was trying to recreate. My sister sent me one photo, but I had to find photos from all sorts of different angles, and close-ups of certain parts. Thank heaven for Google. In all, I worked from about 8 different photos. You've got to take a ruler and measure everything, and then calculate what size you need for the cake.

The silver is just luster dust mixed with grain alcohol (which is apparently illegal in PA, so my Mom had to pick some up for me in Delaware). Some people use lemon extract, which also has a fairly high alcohol content, but then everything tastes like lemon, so I try not to use it anymore. My coworker Marvin uses vodka, which also works ok. I like grain alcohol because it evaporates so quickly and leaves no taste behind. I painted the silver on by hand. This should be one of the last things you do, because the silver will get all over everything once it's on your fingers. I had to paint over a few silver spots with black, although you could also gently scrub it off with a wet Q-tip.

The numbers and letters on the dials and lenses are painted on by hand with white food coloring and a very small paint brush. The red letters don't show up on the black very well, so I painted them in white first, and then went over them in red once they dried. Word to the wise: you need a very steady hand, so practice painting the letters before you do it on the final piece, because it's hard to fix (although I did a little touching up with black food coloring later.) I actually made 3 different versions of the ASA/ISO dial and just picked the best from among them. All of the dials are held on with Royal icing. Also, since every dial was made from at least 2 separate pieces, they're held together with royal icing, too.

I wasn't at the birthday party (at Grotto Pizza on Main Street in Newark, DE), but I'm told it was a huge success and the cake was very popular. Lisa said people were coming over from other tables to look at it. I've included a photo of the birthday boy "taking a picture" with the cake, although apparently he doesn't know the right button to push! Just wait til he find out there's no film in the cake, either.

Problems: Oh lord. I had a lot of problems with this cake. I had been under the impression that I needed to have it done for Dec 27th, which meant I actually had to have it done on the 24th, because I was going to be at my parents' house for Xmas. So I was a nervous wreck. (For the record, I'm always a nervous wreck when I start on a cake--ask my boyfriend if you don't believe me. But once I get going and I lose myself in the process, I mellow out and everything always comes together in the end) But at some point--I think my mom told me--I discovered that it didn't need to be done until the 29th, which made a WORLD of difference. I ended up using the cake I'd already started as a practice cake to make sure the design would work right and hold together ok.

The biggest structural problem I had was with the lens. When it was just cake, it seemed ok, but I discovered that the cake couldn't support the weight of the fondant as well as I'd've liked, and it started to squish under it's own weight when it was turned on its side. The solution I came up with was to cover it with fondant, then let it sit over night on it's bottom so that the fondant would harden enough to support the structure, and that mostly worked fine. Another solution that I found but didn't implement was to make a jelly roll for the lens, and then slice it to the right length and cover that with fondant. I think that would've worked ok too.

Another huge worry I had was that the cake would fall over during transport. But it turned out fine, and the dowel holding the lens on proved adequate.

One thing I didn't get to do. You can buy gelatin in sheets that look like plastic, and you can cut them with scissors. I had this great idea that I'd put a piece over the lens so that it would look like glass, but I couldn't find my gelatin sheets anywhere, and Fantes was out when I went down there. The cake was still beautiful, but I wish I'd been able to do the lens that way.

Brian's Birthday. (May 2004)

2004-05-31T14:58:00.000-04:00

Last year, Brian wouldn't let me make him a birthday cake. He said he thought *I* made a bigger deal of his birthday than *HE* did. I kept trying, but he insisted and I finally gave in. So this year I had to be slightly sneaky, and when he came over for dinner, I didn't let him know that I remembered that it was his birthday. He seemed genuinely surprised when I revealed the cake. Steve--whom I haven't seen in almost as long as I've seen Brian--came over for dinner, too, at the last minute, which was really nice, so he got to enjoy the cake too.

The cake is a 5-tier yellow cake, the largest tier being 6" round, followed by 4 more, each one an inch smaller than the one directly underneath it. I had to rush down to Fantes during my lunch break this week to get the smaller pan sizes, since the smallest I'd had up until then was only 6". Also, it turns out, there are no batter amounts or baking times listed anywhere for cakes smaller than 6", so I had to pretty much just guess. The batter amounts were easy, actually, since I just filled each one slightly more than half full. I ended up with extra batter, so I made a extra tiers just in case, and these eventually turned into the Noddy Cakelet and the Max & Zoe Cakelet, which I'll add to the list as soon as I can.

The colors are reminiscent of the Obnoxious Spring Monday cake I did in April 2001. I've always liked clashing, obnoxious colors, and since I know Dan would dump me if I WORE colors like that, I figured I can at least use them on a cake. And I knew they'd work really well on a tiered cake like this one, where you have a lot of room to spread the colors around and see how they relate across the height of the cake. I made 6 colors total, and made each tier a different color, reserving yellow for the star border (tip #16) around the bottom of each one

Problems: A bigger cake with this design would have needed some sort of structural support to keep it from sinking into itself, but I gambled that a cake this small would survive the 36 hours it needed to without collapsing, and I was right. I did have a problem with one of the layers being slightly uneven, and I was afraid the top 3 tiers would slide off, but I proped up the cake board on one side to level it out and things were fine. Also, the last 3 layers were a little hard to ice because they're so light that the move when you press the spatula against them. I actually ended up icing the top, 2-inch later in my hand and then put it on top of the cake to add the final decorations. The last problem is that I found out the Brian's moving to California! (Swimming pools...movie stars) So this will probably be his last birthday cake for a while.

Noddy Cakelet. (May 2004)

2004-05-28T17:26:00.000-04:00

This is actually one of the backup tiers I baked for Brian's birthday cake. It turned out I didn't need it, and lord knows I had enough extra icing, so I decorated this for Noddy and took it over to her for dessert. I believe it's a 5" round yellow cake.

Problems: No problems here. It's sloppy, but it was supposed to be. I wanted to see how that look worked on a cake. Kinda nice, actually.

Kirby's Baby Shower. (2004)

2004-05-15T17:22:00.000-04:00

The wonderful ladies of the Slide Library commissioned this cake for a baby shower they were throwing for Kirby. They weren't specific about what they wanted, which was kinda nice, because it meant I could do what I wanted. My original plan was to do a stork theme, but I ultimately scrapped that idea when the teddy bear image popped into my head one evening while I was sketching ideas for the cake. Another trip to Fantes ensued, because I only had the big teddy bear pan, not the small one. Thanks, as always, to Jean and Ron at Fantes for their help!

For structural reasons, I went with all yellow cake, which is a lot more solid than chocolate. The bottom later is 8", and the top is 6". I used Earlene Moore's cream cheese butter cream recipe, which has become my icing of choice these days. The bear is covered in chocolate icing, which is basically just the buttercream recipe with cocoa added. I secured the teddy bear to the top of the cake with a bamboo skewer, since it had to survive the car ride to the library. (Thanks for driving, Ancil!)

The teddy bears on the side are just rolled fondant shaped in a press mold. (remember to dust the mold with cornstarch to prevent sticking--especially in this Philadelphia humidity!) I mixed brown food coloring with water and painted them. For the ears, I used a pink edible marker, and the dots on the eyes are black edible marker. I used fondant instead of gum paste for two reasons: 1) it's easier. 2) you can eat the fondant if you really want to. In retrospect, I should've thought about using chocopan, too, but I'm not sure it how much it would harden and retain it's shape. From a taste point of view, Chocopan would be the clear winner.

Problems: I wanted to do something really simple for this cake, because it was a baby cake. So I stuck to yellow and blue (it's a baby boy). It was...okay, i guess. But it really needed something more to bring it together, even with the teddy bears on the sides and top of the cake. Fortunately. I had just finished working on Brian's birthday cake, and I had several other colors already made, including a very nice pink. I added a few dots around the sides, and that seemed to do the trick wonderfully. Also, you can still see some of the guide holes I used to place the yellow stringwork around the egdes. Not a big deal, but it would have been prettier if they weren't so visible.

Lisa's Birthday, Punu Mask Cake. (August 2003)

2003-08-31T14:44:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday, Lisa!

Lisa and her husband spent the last year in Gabon, Africa. They got back to the U.S. earlier today, and rather than just bake the cake back in April (her real birthday) and show her a photograph on the web, I thought I'd wait until they got back and give her a cake in person. Last year's cake, architectural masterpiece that it was, gave me a lot to live up to. To be honest though, I didn't even try. I've known for a while what I wanted to do for this cake, since it would have to serve double duty as a belated birthday cake and a welcome-home cake.

The cake is based on a punu mask (see the last photo to see the cake and the mask that inspired it side-by-side), which has special significance for various reasons. As recently as yesterday afternoon, I still wasn't sure exactly how I was going to pull it off, though. I used a yellow cake, baked in two parts: the base is just a 10" square cake that I actually had in the freezer. (This is the first time I've frozen a cake--about a month ago--and decorated it later. Steve at Fantes said he's successfully frozen a cake for two months, so I figured this one would work fine. And it did) The mask itself was baked in a one of the glass bowls that Dan got me from William Sonoma.

I frosted the base plain white so it wouldn't detract at all from the mask, and I piped a plain shell border around the bottom. Then I put the dome cake on top of that. The mask itself was covered with rolled fondant, which I dyed with a couple drops of ivory food coloring so it would stand out from the white background. I sliced two pieces off of the dome to form the cheek bones. These pieces became the middle piece of hair. I cut various other pieces of cake from the scraps that were left after leveling both cakes. These became the sides of the hair, the eyes, nose, and lips. YOu can see the stages I went through in the 2nd image below. Next I rolled out the ivory fondant, laid it across the dome, and cut off the excess with a sharp knife. Then I gently molded the fondant around the pieces underneath that formed the details of the face.

I used a metal shaping tool gently form the slits in the eyes and the grooves in the hair. I stress the word "gently" because I had to be careful to get the indentations into the fondant without actually poking holes in it. When I was satisfied with the face, I mixed some food coloring (brown, red, burgundy, and black) and painted the appropriate portions of the fondant. The straw tassles at the bottom of the mask are also fondant, dyed lemon yellow and ivory, and formed with a clay gun. I poked holes in the mask with a wooded dowel and then stuck the tassles inside.

Problems: I had amazingly few problems with this cake. It really all came together at the last minute.

Cow Cake. (August 2002)

2002-08-31T17:28:00.000-04:00

Jean at Fantes has a sister who really likes cows. So she asked if I'd make a cow cake and some cow cookies for her (she'd seen the Christmas Cow Cookie I made Ron a while back). I agreed, although I was admittedly a little nervous about doing a cake for Jean--if it didn't turn out well, i'd never be able to go back to Fantes again!

Jean got me the cake pan she wanted me to use; it's one of those pantastic pans, made of white plastic, but you can bake them in the oven. Pretty cool. They work well, and they're much cheaper than the metal wilton pans.

The cake is yellow, and I used Earlene Moore's buttercream recipe, which has a little cream cheese in it. I used vanilla instead of butavan, tho. (in case you were wondering, it's pronounced byoo-ta-van. she talked about it some at the ICES convention in Nashville last month. it's a strong butterscotch flavor, and she uses it in EVERYTHING, she said.) The black icing is the same recipe, but I added some Valrhona cocoa until it was chocolatey enough. Delish. (it doesn't get better than Valrhona cocoa, people.) And then I added black food coloring to make it dark enough to use for the outlining and for the spots.

The cow bell, the udder, and the hooves were all molded from candy coating directly in the cake pan itself. Adds a little color and a different visual texture, which i think is nice). The grass was done with a 233 tip and leaf green coloring.

Problems: No problems at all, really. I was really happy with this cake. And so was Jean, btw. She even gave me a kiss! :)

Tracy's Birthday. (July 2002)

2002-07-31T17:33:00.000-04:00

I think Tracy has bought more cakes from me than anyone else, with the possible exception of Ancil. So when she started reminding me two months ago that her birthday was July 1, ("Twenty four days left until my birthday, David." "Twenty three days left until my birthday, David." "Twenty two--" you get the idea.) I decided to make her a birthday cake too. I knew she loved Tweety Bird, so it was pretty easy to decide what to make for her.

The cake went pretty easy. It was a chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing. I made the cake in the Wilton Tweety pan, bought at Fantes. (Where else?)

Problems: My only problem was the heat. July in Philadelphia is like August in Hell. I had to get the air conditioner out of the basement so I could bake without actually collapsing into a heat coma. And the icing started melting by the time I actually got it to the library to give to Tracy, but in all everything turned out great.

Brian's Birthday. (May 2002)

2002-05-31T17:43:00.000-04:00

This is the 2nd birthday cake I've done for Brian. I thought of the 2 things Brian seems to love most in this world--light blue and basketball--and used them to create a cake. It's a yellow cake in 4 layers. The bottom is 8", the next layer up is 6"x3", and the top 2 layers each are half of the Wilton ball pan. I sliced the bottom of the ball so it would sit flat on the cake, but I think I sliced a little too much off. Still, you can tell it's supposed ot be a basketball, right?

I did the basketball surface was in thousands of individually piped #3 dots. This is proof positive that I am stark raving mad. I flattened by hand after the icing dried slightly, in order to give it that realistic basketball look. (see last photo) It took forever and my hand was all cramped by the time I was done, but I was really happy with the way it turned out. Aren't you? Still, next time I'm just going to use #16 stars instead of #3 dots. My hand *still* hurts.

Addendum: May 2004: Brian just told me that he actually *lived* off this cake for 5 days, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Problems: no real problems. like i said, i sliced a little too much off the bottom of the basketball, but i still think the cake turned out pretty, well. And Brian certainly seemed to like it, which is what really matters.

Lisa's Birthday UVA Rotunda Cake. (April 2002)

2002-05-01T19:20:00.000-04:00

Lisa is getting her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UVA, so for her birthday cake this year, I decided to bake her a cake in the shape of the Rotunda there that Thomas Jefferson designed.

Thursday, 4/11/02

Panic sets in. I'm very worried all of a sudden about my ability to complete this cake. Or at least as planned. All of the layers are baked, and I assembeled them last night. I used wooden dowels and made a 2nd tier so that it wouldn't collapse under its own weight. I also covered it in fondant. My original intention was to color some of the fondant brick red, but ultimately I decided it would be a better idea to do the whole cake in white and then paint it with food coloring, because I'd be able to get a consistent color be able to pay more attention to detail.

Now, as I look at it, I wonder how I'm ever going to be able to make it look right. I spent a couple more hours yesterday looking up some architectural details in the library.. There are certain views of the rotunda which don't seem to exist in photographs. Finally, I found what I was looking for in a book in Azzolina's library. I was pretty sure that there were 3 levels of exterior windows, but all the photographs and drawings I came across only showed two. But it turns out that there *are* three.

-------

Saturday Night, 4/13/02 (Lisa's Birthday).

Well, it's 20 minutes to midnight and I'm clearly not going to finish this cake tonight. I have already called Lisa to let her know that there's a cake coming, but that I got in a little bit over my head, and it may not be done in time, but that she'd definitely have it tomorrow.

Tonight I finalized the location of the windows and sketched them in pencil on the fondant. I also created the front steps and the triangular porch-roof from fondant and gumpaste. They are drying now.

That was actually one of my major holdups--this Bakel's brand gumpaste is taking forEVER to dry, so I can't assemble the pieces. I even tried baking them to see if that would speed the process along. It didn't. Don't bake gumpaste, people.

I also finalized the color of the brick: 2-3 drops super red, 1 drop chocolate brown. I painted the right side and most of the front. I'll do the windows out of royal icing tomorrow morning.

The other big thing I have to do is all the details on the dome, specifically the band of white right where the dome starts, and then the steps about halfway up the dome. I'm planning on doing those out of fondant, possibly by extruding them with a clay gun. We'll see how that works tomorrow. I can't do much else until the gumpaste and fondant dry, so I'm going to bed.

Sunday, 4/14/02

The Cake is done. Everything seemed to come together at the last minute. The parthenon was assembled sepately with gumpaste and fondant and then attached to the cake. I painted the windows a light shade of blue, as though they're refecting the sky, and then did the windows themselves out of royal icing. The triangular piece over the middle row of windows is cut out from fondant, and lined with royal. I ended up not putting the steps on the dome, partly because of the time it would have taken, and partly because I wasn't sure the best way to go about it.

I am SO glad to be done with this cake, and it turned out so much better than I'd expected, even yesterday.

Problems: Don't even get me started!

Mike's Happy Potter Birthday Cake. (March 2002)

2002-03-31T19:33:00.000-05:00

This cake turned out far better than I had any right to expect it to. I baked this cake and did a crumb coating the day before, but I really didn't have time to do the decorating until about 3 hours before Mike's party because my family was visiting. Fortunately, I had at least cut out the animal shapes the day before from a thinly rolled sheet of fondant. I never would have finished in time if the fondant hadn't had time to harden some overnight. I colored them by painting them with watered-down food coloring, and then drew in the details with a non-toxic black marker. Everything else is just buttercream icing.

For those of you who don't know what this cake is, even after looking at the picture, it's a Harry Potter cake. Each of the 4 quadrants of the cake is the shield of one of the 4 houses at Hogwarts: Gryffindor (the lion), Slytherin (the snake), Hufflepuff (the badger), and Ravenclaw (the eagle). I was afraid Mike wouldn't recognize it, but he did. He saved the animals too (they're on a plate on top of his fridge), although the Slytherin snake broke.

Problems: You know, I really didn't have any *problems*, but I plenty of anxiety. I was just sure the animals would come out a disaster, and the shield designs would just look like random blobs of colored icing, and I was sure I'd drop the cake before I got it to Mike's, or that I wouldn't arrive until after the party was over, but everything turned out well. Oh, I didn't have time to whip up another batch of icing to decorate the sides of the cake, so I just used up what I had left from the shields, and I think I had *just* enough to finish.

Mom's Birthday Blue Willow Cake. (April 2002)

2002-03-31T19:29:00.000-05:00

We all really like Blue Willow china, and we have lots of it, so I made a blue willow cake for mom. It's covered in fondant. The design itself was drawn on a separate circle of fondant in pencil, then painted over in blue food coloring.

Welcome Abby! (March 2002)

2002-03-30T19:46:00.000-05:00

I made this cake for my new 1st-cousin-once-removed, Abby when Christy brought her up to Philadelphia. The cake was inspired by one my grandparents had for their 40th Anniversary.

Double Birthday Split Personality Cake. (March 2002)

2002-03-28T19:49:00.000-05:00

Katherine asked me to do a cake for a double birthday party she was having at her house for 2 of her friends, a guy and a girl. She remembered the cake I did for my own 30th birthday and thought it might be nice to do a cake that was half black leather, and then half frilly flowery. (Apparently when she mentioned her idea to one of her other friends, s/he asked, "Which half is for which person?")

The black leather cake is very time consuming under normal circumstances, but fortunately I had made lots of extra metal studs and spikes and chains for the first cake, not knowing exactly how many I'd need. The chain is made of gumpaste. The black leather and the other silver things are fondant, the flowers are royal icing, and the rest is buttercream. I told Katherine ahead of time that everything was edible, but that the chain would taste terrible. So she told this to everyone at the party and they all immediately grabbed a piece to taste it. She said I was right; it tasted like plaster. Told ya so. :)

Problems: In the second picture, you can see where the black leather ripped a little right where it meets the flowery half. And the daisy lost a petal (they're very delicate). I was also a little worried about exactly what do to for the flower design, and I went with a basketweave in the end and that turned out well.

Sydney's First Birthday (February 2002)

2002-02-28T19:51:00.000-05:00

Nancy asked me to do a cake for her daughter's first birthday. I was kinda nervous about screwing it up, because not only do I work with Nancy, but I share an office with her. So I was thinking about doing something pretty but simple, like a Wilton character pan, maybe Tweety Bird or a rocking horse, but Nancy had her mind set on a turtle, so I figured ok, I'll give it my best shot. Then, a day or so later, Nancy thought maybe she'd want cupcakes instead of a cake. She wasn't sure whether this was going to be for Sydney's daycare center on Friday, or for the family gathering the next day. In the end, she decided to go with both. Her main instruction was to incorporate bright colors (no problem there, for those of you who know me!)

For the cupcakes, I had all these ideas and couldn't decide which one to do, so I ended up doing all of them. Or most of them, anyway. I made 2 each of a lady bug, a bumble bee, a cloudy blue sky, green grass, a watermelon, wild flowers, and a lady's face. They all turned out great, I think, and Nancy was very happy with them. From the pix below, you can see that the kids were too. :)

The turtle cake wasn't anywhere near as difficult as I was afraid it would be. I found a photo of a turtle cake on the web and tried to copy the design the best I could. I baked the shell in two parts. Most of the shell was chocolate cake baked in a glass bowl, and then to add some cake, I stacked it on top of a 9" round yellow layer. I baked the chocolate cake at 325 degrees instead of 350 because I was afraid otherwise the sides of the cake would be burned by the time the center was done cooking. The head is made of pieces of the remaining yellow layer, cut into circles and stacked up to make a dome shape. The feet and tail are just globs of icing. I love the colors of this cake, too, and Nancy said it matches one of the rooms of her house, which is pretty cool.

Problems: I had no major problems, beyond the initial sheer panic of whether I'd be able to actually do the turtle or not. I had a slightly difficult time getting the turtle's head to behave properly, but it worked out in the end. Even Dan liked it.

Thanks to Nancy for all the photos!

My Thirtieth Birthday Cake. (January 2002)

2002-01-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

Who better to make my own birthday cake than me?? My mom told me she's not getting/baking me a cake this year, and that probably nobody ever would again, now that I make cakes so much. Fortunately, I had already started working on my cake. Now I should tell you, the black leather/chain/spike/stud theme of this cake isn't really related to my birthday in any way. I've just had the idea for this cake for a long time, and this seemed as good a time as any to actually make it.

The black leather is just fondant, dyed black. (I use the Wilton, pre-made fondant that comes in a box. I made my own once, but buying it is SO much easier!) The spikes and studs are white fondant, painted silver. And the chain is gumpaste, also painted silver. I don't think you can tell in the photo, but I used a wheel to put in stitch marks all around the leather. It looks very real.

Ancil and Fenghua came over after work so they could see it in all its black leather glory before it got eaten. They loved it.

Mike & Joe came over the night of my birthday and together the 4 of us devoured over half of the cake (mostly Joe and Dan). They loved it too. I really have to say, I was *very* happy with this cake. I think it might even beat out the Obnoxious Spring Monday Cake as my personal favorite. When my dad saw it, he asked if it were a day planner. No joke. A day planner. I just told him that yes, it was a day planner. Sigh. :)

Problems: The only problem I encountered had to do with the fact that i used piping gel to attach the extra pieces of leather, the spikes, and the studs to the cake. They kept sliding down the cake. Eventually, they held ok, but next time I'm just going to use royal icing. I used piping gel because it's clear, so if a little bit gushed out the side, no big deal. I guess I could have just dyed the royal icing black.

Book Talk 20th Anniversary Cake. (January 2002)

2002-01-08T19:56:00.000-05:00

This cake was for the 20th Anniversary of the Library book club, called Book Talk. I was honored that they chose me to make their cake. It's the largest cake I've ever done. And talk about pressure--both my former and current bosses were going to be there!

	The final cake, in its final resting place, at the library. I was SO glad to have it finally out of my hands.
	The layers, baked and wrapped in plastic until they're ready to be iced
	Making white chocolate roses. The circles on the mat will become petals. The semi-pyramid looking things are the base that will hold the petals.
	Me, putting the roses together. It took forEVER.
	Me, holding up a finished rose. Note that I cheated on this one and only put 3 outer petals instead of 5.
	The royal icing stars, drying on bamboo skewers on waxed paper. Traced over a pencil drawing of the stars.
	The stars, icing is dry, freshly painted with edible gold paint.
	The gold stars, complete. The big one is for the center of the cake. The others go around it. In the end, I only used 5 stars total, but I took the extras with me just in case.
	Some of the roses, drying on a platter.
	The bottom layer, sliced in half and filled with light-purple buttercream icing. Mmmmmmmm. Purple.
	Bottom layer, filled and crumb coated.
	a closeup of the finished cake.
	The finished cake (except for the gold stars) from the top.
	I didn't have any boxes big enough to carry this cake, so Dan built one for me! :) Thanks, Dan!

a b/w photograph from the Penn Current. Caption read: "helping celebrate are four of the founding members: Lee Pugh (standing center front) from the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library; (standing next to Pugh going left to right) Julie Vick from Career Services; Jean Farrington, wife of former Engineering School Dean Greg Farrington; and (seated, far right) Jane Bryan, formerly from the Library."

Welcome

2001-12-31T13:08:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my Cake Blog. I'll be updating it as I create new cakes, plus I have a lot of older cakes I have to transfer over to this new blog format.

Vampire Cake. (October 2001)

2001-10-31T20:00:00.000-05:00

Dan bought me the Wilton "Smiling Skull" pan as a gift. He left it in the oven for me to find. I was totally surprised. I love Dan. With the pan come instructions on how to decorate a cake as a vampire, too. So I thought it would be a great idea to make one for the little party at Joe and Mike's place for the season premiere of "Buffy." Unfortunately, I ended up not having time to bake it, because I was working on the Goodnight Moon cake, but I thought I'd make it for the season premiere of "Charmed" instead. Better late than never.

The cake fit nicely on a 14" board. It was actually a fairly simple cake to decorate. It's mostly just purple stars covering the face. i had to build the nose manually, by building up stars on top of each other in the shape of a nose. For the hair, rather than set aside a separate amount of icing to dye black, I just mixed together all my leftover icing and added black food coloring until it was dark enough.

Problems: So I made a cake mix, poured it into the pan, put it in the oven, and suddenly realized I hadn't put the eggs in!! So I quickly took it back out, poured the mix back into my mixer, and added the eggs. It seemed to turn out just fine in the end.

Superman Cake. (October 2001)

2001-10-20T19:59:00.000-04:00

Another season premiere cake. This one is for the series premiere of Smallville, about the life of the young Clark Kent. I used the Wilton Handsome Man pan, which I got on ebay awhile back and I've been dying to try it out. I used a chocolate cake mix and buttercream icing. Usually, I just use vanilla in the icing, but this time I put 2/3 vanilla and 1/3 almond, which made for a very nice combination. As a rule, I tend to avoid almond in food I make for other people, mainly out of habit because my mother is (or at least used to be) allergic to them.

I decorated this largely during the commercial breaks of "Angel". Note that for a change I didn't use tip 16 stars to cover the surface. I went for the smooth look instead, and things turned out fairly well. It was kind of a rush job because I wanted to get to bed on time for a change. (I didn't, by the way.) One trick I've learned to save on the amount of icing I make is that when I need black icing (in this case for the hair & eyebrows), I wait til the end and mix the other leftover icing together and add black food coloring until it's black enough to use.

Problems: As you can see, this is not the world's handsomest depiction of Superman. He almost looks a little more like Bizarro, except the S on his chest is facing the right way. I've never been good with drawing faces, and apparently drawing with icing doesn't improve things any. Also, it's not a problem, but it almost was: this cake is pretty long from head to toe--about 16". I'm glad I still had a couple 16" rounds & boxes left or I don't know what I would have done.

Goodnight Moon Cake. (October 2001)

2001-10-15T20:02:00.000-04:00

Well, one thing I have got to say about this cake, if nothing else, it was a huge success. I made it for a baby shower for a friend of my mother. Everyone gave books as gifts, and they wanted a cake shaped like a book. I decided to make a cake with a design from Goodnight Moon, one of my favorite books as a child. It took a while to decide on exactly what design to use, but in the end I chose the cover, minus a few details. The thing I'm proudest of on this cake is the colors. They're so true to the original. Also, the cow. I was *SO* scared I wasn't going to be able to draw a cow in icing, but it turned out great. I got a lot of compliments from people at the shower.

Problems: I wasn't overly happy with the lettering on this cake. Kind of messy. I wish I'd taken a little more time to practice a bit before putting it on the cake, but I was rushed to meet a deadline, and it certainly turned out well enough in the end. Also, the cake kind of...well...fell apart when I was transferring it from the cooling rack to the cake board. My fault, really. I should have just flipped it back into the pan, and then from the pan onto the board instead of skipping the middleman. But some icing held it back together again, and my mom said nobody noticed. Since then, I've always used the pan to get the cake onto the board. As far as decorating it goes, I wish I hadn't outlined the folds in the curtains in black. I thought I would like the effect, but i think it looks kinda bad, unlike the black outlines on the other half of the cake, which look just right.

Beth and David's Birthday Cake. (September 2001)

2001-10-01T20:04:00.000-04:00

I did this for Lee's twins.

Rugrats Cake. (September 2001)

2001-09-29T20:05:00.000-04:00

Apparently Tracy liked the doll cake so much that she asked me to do a Rug Rats cake for her daughter, too. This one is chocolate inside. I did it with the Wilton Rugrats pan. For a while, I was listening to the radio, but it was just too bizarre and surreal hearing the terrible news come in from New York a couple days after the terrorist attacks while I baked and decorated this brightly colored birthday cake, so I turned off NPR and put on a CD that Azzolina lent me instead. The cake didn't rise as high as I would have liked, but it seemed to turn out ok in the end, and after it was decorated, it was beautiful. Tracy liked it too. :)

Problems: No problems, other than trying to find space in my fridge to fit a 16" cake box.

Tracy's Niece's Doll Cake. (August 2001)

2001-08-31T20:06:00.000-04:00

I did this one for Tracy's niece. It was my first attempt at a doll cake. I used Wilton's Wonder mold pan, which is nice because it has a heating core built in. I just piped the icing onto the plastic doll and then smoothed it with a finger dipped in corn starch. That worked, but I'm somewhat convinced that the cornstarch is to blame for the color running (see next paragraph). In all, a very nice cake.

Problems: I had a problem with the icing color running, presumably because of the humidity. That's been a major pain for me this summer. Clearly, man was intended to bake only in the winter months. (Dan would certainly agree, because his room is right above the kitchen, so when I bake, the heat just shoots right up there and makes him cranky.) I didn't really find a solution other than to keep the cake refrigerated. I couldn't do much with royal icing, either, due to the moisture in the air. I had wanted to do a butterfly and some flowers, but I just haven't been able to do anything successfully with royal this summer. I also have a problem with this cake, as with the teddy bear cake, in that it's too tall to fit in any of the boxes I have. I don't own a cake carrier, but I've never even seen any that are tall enough for this cake. Maybe I'll ask Mariella about it this Saturday on my weekly Fantes run.

Chocolate Layer Cake. (August 2001)

2001-08-21T20:07:00.000-04:00

I think this is a beautiful cake, and I definitely plan on making it again. Recipe is from Maida Heatter. I had to go out and buy yet another 9" pan at Fantes to be able to make it right. (I only had 3 before). The icing is really interesting, and delicious, but expensive because it calls for nearly two pounds of chocolate (both semi-sweet and milk-chocolate). Basically it's just that and 2 cups of sour cream, so it has a slight tanginess which works well. The cake has both almond and vanilla flavor.

Problems: Ok, now I SWEAR I followed her timing instructions correctly, but the cake still ended up a little over cooked and dry, although not as bad as the on I made for Mom's birthday back in March. That was my only real complaint about this cake. And it didn't stop the building staff at the library from devouring it, which is what's most important.

Another Teddy Bear Cake. (July 2001)

2001-07-31T20:21:00.000-04:00

I did this for Joe's daughter. The idea was to make it look like her favorite toy, named "Bear". You can judge for yourself how good a job I did from the pix below. One nice thing is that the leg didn't fall off of this one as it did with the first bear I did. Thank GOD, because I'm super paranoid about cakes I bake for other people. They've really got to be perfect.

Problems:Not a one. Everything went very smoothly. The only problem is with the size of the cake--there are no boxes that will hold it!! Joe ended up taking it away in a large UPS carrier that Jerry lent me for the occasion.

The Last Day in my nice office. (July 2001)

2001-07-27T20:22:00.000-04:00

Well, I was recently moved out of my very nice office, which was supposed to be my permanent office, so I was *not* happy about it, but I decided to make the best of things and have a small party on my last day before moving upto the 3rd floor of the library. This is the cake I made. It wasn't really planned out. It's a yellow cake I got the recipe from Cooks Illustrated, and I just threw the colors and design together at the last minute. The letters are just royal icing runouts, same as on the birthday cake I made for my mom (above). The symbol in the middle has no special meaning, and is just filling otherwise empty space.

July 4th Cake. (July 2001)

2001-07-04T20:23:00.000-04:00

My first fondant cake. It turned out quite well, considering.

Caramel Cake. (June 2001)

2001-06-25T20:24:00.000-04:00

When Stephen returned from Mississippi he told me that everywhere he went they served caramel cake, which he loved. I had never heard of caramel cake before, but i was certainly intrigued. So I tracked down a recipe (on the web, actually, because I couldn't find one in any of my books) and made it last night.

This is actually a pretty nice cake, and one of the few recently that I've made from scratch. The batter makes 3 9-inch round layers, so I ended up having to run down to Fante's to get another cake pan. (The pan is actually much better than the ones I've been using, which are from Ikea. I think I'll just buy 2 more next time I'm in South Philly).

The caramel is extremely sweet, but the cake itself is much less so, and it has ground almonds in it to boot, which add a slightly bitter quality which really balances out the caramel quite nicely.

Problems: Since I was using 2 different types of pans, the layer I baked in the ikea pan didn't rise as much and wasn't level, so i had to shave some off the top to keep the cake flat because I was afraid the layers would slide off the caramel if everything wasn't straight. When I went to ice the cake, the caramel was running everywhere because it's so hot in my kitchen, so I popped it in the fridge overnight and that solved the problem just fine.

Father's Day Cake. (June 2001)

2001-06-23T20:25:00.000-04:00

Teddy Bear Cake. (June 2001)

2001-06-16T20:25:00.000-04:00

I have been wanting to make this cake for the longest time, and I finally broke down this weekend and bought the pan at Fantes. I managed to contain my enthusiasm for 2 more days, and then I made the cake. I ended up finishing at 3:00 in the morning. Ugh. I stored the bear in the fridge overnight, uncovered. I trusted the icing to keep the cake moist, and it didn't let me down. I somehow transported the cake to work the next day via the bus, and put a paper bag carefully over the cake to prevent curious people on the bus from poking it.

The cake itself is a yellow cake mix and a pound cake mix combined. (The bear pan holds 6 2/3 cups, and a normal mix only makes about 5 cups.) I was afraid the combination wouldn't taste very good, but it turned out to be just fine. The fur is chocolate buttercream, and the eyes and nose are the same, but with black food coloring.

Problems: Yes, I had a few problems with this cake. One of them should be obvious from the photo--his leg started to fall off. (Adela amputated the leg at work the next day and ate it. I'm told it was scrump-diddly-umtious. That's my word, not hers.) I tried plastering it back on with icing, but it didn't hold, and I didn't want to stick a toothpick in it to hold it in place because I was afraid I'd forget to tell people it was in there and then someone would accidentally eat the toothpick. So I did my best to cover the gap with icing. The head started to fall off too, and it was attached rather precariously, but it ended up surviving.

I also had a problem at first being consistent with the length of the "fur", but I got better at that as I went along. It's also hard putting fur on the bottom parts of the bear. I'm going to get an angled coupler and try that next time. The only other problem I had was figuring out how to transport it safely. I'm going to look for a cake carrier that will hold extra-tall cakes.

Adela's Cake. (May 2001)

2001-05-31T20:27:00.000-04:00

When Adela was a young girl, in the mid-1980s, she had a birthday cake shaped like the then-popular character named Strawberry Shortcake. She'd mentioned it a couple times in passing, and I thought it would be a neat idea to make it and surprise her with it. I tracked the pan down on Ebay and quickly outbid everyone else. The instructions that come with the cake are fairly simple, and other than the time-consuming process of putting on all those icing stars, it was a breeze to make. And fun to boot. I was worried at first about the strawberries on her hat, but everything turned out just fine.

When she saw it, let's just say she was surprised. She took a polaroid of the cake to send to her mother. Lots of people who saw it in her office kept waiting for her to cut it, but she took it home to show her housemates, and they devoured it together over the weekend.

Adela does not "do" photos, so I have none of her with her cake. Alas!

Mother's Day. (May 2001)

2001-05-19T20:27:00.000-04:00

This is the first time I've make the exact same cake twice. It was interesting, because Brian's cake ended up serving as a practice cake for the mother's day cake. One change I made was that I put a little corn syrup in the white and in the yellow icing, which made it a little more forgiving when I made the ribbon. Also, the little balls that form the border are slightly smaller on the mother's day cake (I used a #7 tip this time), and I actually liked the look of it a little better for that reason. Oh, and I finally got the right shade of yellow. I used Egg Yellow instead of Lemon Yellow food coloring.

That's mom with her cake in her kitchen in the last photo.

Problems: Well, somehow the flaps from the cakebox chopped off part of the bottom border of the cake when I closed the box, so I'll have to be more careful next time. Also, the cake seemed slightly lopsided. It looked level to me before I started icing it, but I never did actually slice the top off the cake to make it perfectly level, so I'll have to do that next time, too, no matter how level it looks. I used the right amount of batter this time, so I didn't have the problem with the cake rising too high and taking too long to cook.

Carrot Cake. (May 2001)

2001-05-16T20:26:00.000-04:00

This was a time-consuming but fun cake to make. I wish I could take credit for the idea, but it came from a great book Dan gave me called "Wacky Cakes & Kooky Cookies" by Gerhard Jenne. It took 2-3 days total, but I could have done it in one if I'd stayed home from work and put my mind to it. I made the marzipan from scratch, which is something nobody in their right mind would normally do because it's so easy--although a little more expensive--just to buy it off the shelf. Then, the next day I made the carrots. I added some orange food coloring and also some orange extract, which does wonders for the marzipan IMHO. I made the eye sockets and mouths with plastic marzipan/gum paste tools I bought at Fantes when i took my gum paste class. Then, the day after that (yesterday) I made the eyes out of white and black royal icing. The "hair" is green royal icing.

The cake itself is my sister's secret carrot cake recipe, which by all accounts is stupendously delicious. This is the first time I baked it in a 12x18 sheet pan, and I was glad to see that the recipe made *just* enough batter for the pan. The frosting is just sugar, butter, cream cheese, and vanilla.

I took the cake into work on May 31. It was very popular. People who never even say hello to me came up to me and said, "Dave! Great cake!" which is always nice. :)

Problems: Amazingly enough, I didn't really have any problems with this cake. This is the first time I'd baked it on a 12x18 pan, so I think I overcooked it by about 60 seconds or so, but on the whole it turned out pretty great.

The Mary Cake. (May 2001)

2001-05-13T20:29:00.000-04:00

I made this cake, as you might guess, for Mary. I hadn't really seen her since my sister's wedding 2 years ago, so we invited her over for dinner. At the last minute, I decided to make a cake for her. She arrived as I was decorating it, and the door bell is so loud that I jerked my arm in fright and totally messed up part of the basketweaving on the side of the cake. But it still tasted good. Since she arrived a little early, she ended up helping me put the flowers on.

The cake itself is marbled yellow and chocolate. I covered it with white buttercream flavored with a almond extract. All the flowers are royal icing. I just used some of the ones I made a while back from my stockpile. The 3 of us ate about a third of the cake for dessert, and I sent the rest home with Mary for her family.

Problems: Two problems, neither one of them very big. I *always* use vanilla, but Greta brought this batch of almond icing to class once that smelled so good that I've been thinking about it for the last 2 weeks, so I used almond this time. I put a tablespoon in for the full pound of icing, and it was just a little overwhelming. So next time I'll cut back a little, maybe to 2 tsp. The other problem was with the design. The top looks a little...motley, but I just wanted some variety of color and texture. I didn't make the flowers especially for the cake, so I just had to make due with what I had. It was still pretty tasty.

Brian's Birthday. (May 2001)

2001-05-13T20:28:00.000-04:00

Brian emailed me last week and mentioned that it was his birthday. So of course I rushed right home and made him a cake. Now, when I showed it to people, they all said, "don't you think it's a little bit feminine for a guy's cake?" Well, no, I didn't think so at all, but once they mentioned it I started worrying about it, and even warned Brian in advance, but he ended up loving the cake. I can't take credit for the design (it's a Wilton design), but I take full credit for actually making the cake.

The frosting is peach colored. The little balls that form the border were made with a #8 tip, and then I dipped my finger in cornstarch to flatten down the little peak of icing that forms as you pull the tip away, in order to make them more spherical.

You can see Brian posing with his cake in the last picture

Problems: It was hard to get the right shade of yellow for the ribbon. But basically, I had no real problems making this cake. Oh, wait, yes I did. I almost forgot. This cake was baked in 2 6-inch pans. Since these are smaller pans than normal, I had some extra batter. So I just dumped it in the pans too, so that the cake would rise higher. Well, it rose right past the top of the pans, and it took quite a while to cook I think I must have baked it 35 minutes before all was said and done. It took forever for the middle of the cake to cook. I was really afraid I was going to have to scrap it and start over.

Obnoxious Spring Monday Cake. (April 2001)

2001-05-01T20:30:00.000-04:00

Well, i started this one thinking it would be my sister's birthday cake, but I ultimately decided that I didn't have the time to do what I wanted for her cake (You'll see what I mean next week when I finally make her cake), so I decided to make a nice Spring cake I could take into the office on monday. And i decided, for some reason, to make it as obnoxiously colored as possible. You can see below that i succeeded. I baked the cake in the late afternoon, and I started decorating it right after dinner, finishing around 2 in the morning, keeping in mind that I watched Malcolm in the Middle and The X-Files during that time period, too.

Once I decided on the color scheme, I iced the cake (Marvin said he really liked the chartruse because it reminded him of the 60s), and then I made all the flowers. The daisies are by far my favorite, and they added to that "60's feel" Marvin liked so much. (i want to do a cake with all daisies one of these days. Debbie taught us a much easier--and prettier--way of making them than the way the Wilton book describes) But the apple blossoms are nice too. While they dried, I did all the border work. I did the blue shell border on the bottom and top with a #199 tip instead of a #21. It worked ok, but I think it would look better on a more formal-looking cake, so I'll probably go back to the #21 next time I do something like this. The yellow ruffle turned out well, but I wish I'd done some stringwork or something along the top of it to hide the rough edge. I'll remember for next time. I made the flowers as I watched the aforementioned television programs (You can't beat FOX on a Sunday night).

All the hours of work payed off, and when I brought the cake in to work, it was by far the most popular i've made to date. I left it in Adela's office for people to help themselves. People really seemed to like it. One person asked me where I bought it, and when I told him I'd made it, his eyes nearly popped out of his head and he asked if I did commissions. (The answer is YES!! Please pay me to make cakes, people! I desperately need the money to pay for all the decorating supplies I've been buying!) It *is* quite striking, just because of its colors if not the design. Adela actually made people wait an hour or two before she let anyone cut into it so people could appreciate it as they walked by. In the end, neither Ancil nor David Azzolina got any because it was gone by the time they came back for a piece. I felt really bad, so I'll make a bigger cake for next week, possibly with the gumpaste flowers Debbie is teaching us now.

problems: a few things I'd change. First, I whipped the chartreuse icing too fast in my kitchenaid, and it was filled with lots of air bubbles, which were a huge pain when I was trying to smooth the icing. Also, I stuck the daisies on with a little blob of soft chartreuse buttercream. The next morning, the green had seeped through the petals (see the 2nd picture). Now, as it turned out, it was a neat effect, but it certainly wasn't expected, so it's something to be aware of in the future. I probably should have used royal icing or white buttercream instead. Last, I put the yellow ruffle on before I did the bottom shell border, which made it impossible to put the shells on neatly. You can't tell from the photos, but trust me, it could have looked a lot better.

Mom's birthday cake. (March 2001)

2001-03-31T20:31:00.000-05:00

I totally screwed this one up when I baked it. I actually made it from scratch, went out of the room for a couple minutes too long, and the cake was dry as a bone when i pulled it out of the oven. I was extremely upset at the time, and I came very close to putting my fist right through it, but I didn't have the time to bake another one and still get it decorated before my mom arrived, so it had to do. :(

The sides were done as basketweaving with a #5 tip, which, as my mom pointed out, looks an awful lot like wicker. (see photo #4 to see what I mean) The roses on top are royal icing. The letters are runouts I did with royal icing on waxed paper (see the last photo) and then stuck on the cake using icing as glue. Everything else is buttercream.

Problems: Well, the biggest problem was that i baked it too long. This was the driest cake I have ever tasted. I nearly cried when I realized it. Also, The roses are a little too upright for my taste. At the time, I was having problems making them open a little wider, but I have since discovered what I was doing wrong: I was holding the icing bag at 6:00 instead of at 4:30. When I started doing the roses at 4:30, it made all the difference in the world. Then, of course, there was the problem with the icing getting soft again as I did the wicker basketweave. I had the same problem when I made Noddy's cake (above) with the icing getting soft and changing shades of white toward the end. I even tried sticking it in the freezer for a few minutes, but it wasn't very long before the icing returned to that super-soft consistency. I asked Debbie about it finally, and she suggested I keep filling the bag up with icing, which sounds like a good idea to me. I'll try that next time around.

Noddy's "Welcome" Cake (March 2001)

2001-03-21T20:32:00.000-05:00

This is a cake I made for Noddy's housewarming party. It's a yellow cake covered with buttercream icing. This cake is important for 2 reasons. One, it's the first time I've done lettering, and you can see that except for the oversized "O" in "WELCOME", it turned out quite well. I actually started lettering from the center and then moved outward to make sure I'd have enough room. Two, although I've done basketweaving before, I've never done it with a number 5 decorating tip. (Debbie had suggested it in class, so I gave it a try, and wow does it look good!) It took about an hour and a half to get that part done, and we were actually a few minutes late getting to the party because i was still finishing it up.

Despite the problem with the basketweave (see problems below), I think the cake was beautiful in its simplicity, and I got several compliments at the party! Dan and I didn't stay at the party long enough to get to dessert, but the next day, Jeanne stopped by my office and said that everyone had been very impressed with the cake, which made me feel good.

Problems: I had very few problems with this cake. Basically, I just should have started a little sooner, but I had no idea the basketweaving would take so long. Also, the "O" in "WELCOME" was a little big, but not so big that it was a big deal. Oh! An interesting thing happened as i finished the basketweaving. As I approached the end, I noticed that the icing wasn't the same shade of white I'd started with. It had also gotten considerably softer. (You can see what I mean in the 5th photo) I'm guessing this has to do with the warmth from my hands melting the icing, but I'll have to ask Debbie to be sure. It's kind of annoying because it's quite noticeable, but overall I was happy with the way it turned out.

Rose Cake (March 2001)

2001-03-18T20:35:00.000-05:00

I didn't use a cake mix for this one--I made it totally from scratch. I didn't make it for any special occasion, as far as I can remember, except I had just learned how to make roses and I was eager to practice them. I just took it into work the next day for everyone to eat. It disappeared quickly--especially once Azzolina discovered it. :) I originally wanted to make it look like a basket of roses, but I think I ran out of stiff icing, so I had to make due with the few roses I'd managed to squeeze out. Also, note in the last photo how happy Stephanie and Shiva are to be eating my cake, so you know it's gotta be tasty!

Problems: Not many problems. Basically, I should have planned out how many roses I was going to need for the top, but this wasn't a planned cake to begin with. I just spontaneously decided to make a cake to use the roses I'd just learned to make. (Roses were the whole reason I took the beginning cake class. I mean it.)

The Clown Cake (March 2001)

2001-03-15T20:34:00.000-05:00

An important thing to understand about this one is that it was a practice cake. I was practicing several techniques on this cake, which is why it has kind of a motley look to it. I decorated it at Fantes, and then had to bring it back on the bus. By the time I got it home, the clowns had slumped down quite a bit from all the bumping around on the bus until they looked drunk. You can see in the 3rd photo below that the cake itself collapsed a bit, too, but it still tasted good. I painted food coloing directly into the pastry bag to make the multi-colored outfits. The heads are just store-bought plastic clown heads, nothing special.

Laurie and Aella made a clown cake much more interesting (in a morbid and disturbing way) than mine. They fashioned a make-shift knife, dipped it into blood-red food coloring, and plunged it into the clown as though he'd been brutally stabbed. (possibly by the 2nd clown.) There was also a pool of red food coloring next to him. They said they'd send photos when they get them back, so I'll share them with you when I get them.

Problems: Not much to say here. Like I said, this was really just a practice cake. My only real problems were the settling the cake did on the bus ride home.

The First Cake (February 2001)

2001-02-28T20:35:00.000-05:00

Although I've decorated hundreds, maybe thousands of cookies in my life, I don't think I'd ever decorated a cake before I took this class. I took at at Fantes. It was 3 sessions, and cost only $30 total. It was taught by Debbie Lang, who is a *fantastic* teacher. I highly recommend this class to just about anyone who has any interest in decorating. For me, it's just fun, but there are several people in the class who are also have a business of some sort.

We all had to bring an iced cake for the 2nd class and then we decorated them there at Fantes with the techniques we were learning. This was mine. At the time, it was the most beautiful cake I had ever seen. I couldn't believe I'd created it myself. In retrospect, it's not all that good, I suppose, but i was very proud of it at the time.