This cake is headed to space.

At least my space on blogspot. Ha. This birthday cake is for my pseduo-brother, who is a science teacher. Since his party is today--the first day of spring/the vernal equinox--I wanted to do something that kind of had to do with that. At first I was going to have a flower going from seed to full bloom but I'm not going to lie, it was a little girlie. After my trip to Houston and the Johnson Space Center in February, I've had NASA and astronauts on the brain. Hopefully he likes this flask gone NASA as much as I do.
It's a white cake layered with vanilla swiss buttercream, then covered with white fondant. I think there are 9 layers total. Oh, AND it's my first sculpted cake. I have to admit, it took a little longer than I expected.

mmm, chocolate...

i had some leftover chocolate cake batter from the palette cake below, so i decided to practice making chocolate ganache (YUM!) to fill and ice a smaller cake. i did that and then dusted it with cocoa powder. you might be wondering why i wrote "...love..." on the top. well, for 2 reasons actually. first, i love chocolate. more than a lot of other things. second, i made it for my husband because the entire time i was decorating it, our two kids were screaming because they didn't want to go to bed--and he was dealing with them. that's why i love him. :)

a palette of a cake.

I made this cake for my younger cousin's birthday...she is preparing to go to college to study art. She had to take her SATs today, and as far as I am concerned, there's nothing better than an overdose of sugar to combat post-test stress. Well...I'd probably prefer a large bottle of something else, but hey, she's only going to be 17. This cake is just 2 layers--one dark chocolate and one vanilla. It's filled with buttercream and covered with white fondant. The paint is just colored icing that I applied with a paintbrush and mixed around to make it look like paint. Yummy paint, but paint.

shout out to ali spagnola!

so this week i was looking around on the internet for ideas for my son's 1st birthday party (zoo theme. it's gonna be awesome.) and i happened upon a really cool website/blog created by the artist ali spagnola. you should check out her site, but the idea of it is that if you send her an email she'll create a piece of art for you-for free. so she's been doing this for a whole lot of people, and some have sent her things for a "trade" of sorts...reading this, i decide that we should trade a cake for a painting.
we've been emailing for the last couple of days and this is the deal. i get this painting:



and she gets a cake of her choice whenever she wants. but i'm working on another cake for this weekend and had some leftovers, so i made her this as a little "thanks":




unfortunately it's not really in "okay to go in the mail" form, but i thought she might enjoy it.

you all should go check out her site and throw her some support. she's just another artist doing what she loves. only she's way cooler than me. just sayin'....

http://alispagnola.blogspot.com

oh, and when i open up my bakery, she's SO doing the art for the building.

Steak night at the Wad-Mart.

Otherwise known as Wadding Meats, the Wad-Mart is a local must-have for the people of Home, PA. They offer catering, fresh meats, and butchering services. And on the nights that Dan Meyer has to cook, their pizza is sure to be seen on our table. Jim Wadding (owner and chief meat-man) is celebrating his 60th birthday, and my parents just left to take him my contribution to the celebration: two cakes in the likeness of t-bone steaks. I couldn't bear to do anything but red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. Then the steaks were covered in fondant and painted with food coloring. Before you know it I'll be asked to make camouflage cakes with whitetail deer on them. I don't know if I can go there.

A castle cake for Princess Clara

This week was a birthday party for my favorite little 5-year-old girl. She decided on a "princess castle" theme for her birthday party, so of course I had to make a pink castle cake!! This was a 3 tier cake--one was strawberry with buttercream filling, two were white cake with buttercream and raspberry sauce filling. Each tier was covered in fondant, which I painted pink to give it more of a "castle" effect, then I added a fondant tower, decorations and a sculpted fondant dragon and princess. Happy Birthday Clara!!