Race Track Cake

Here's a really fun take on race car cakes!  David, a friend of my family, was throwing a party for a friend who had a Christmas-time birthday, and even as an adult had never really had a birthday party all to himself.  (Something all of us with December birthdays can relate to on some level!) We came up with this unique design using his age as the racetrack:

The top and sides of the cake were iced and then covered with fondant, cut in the shape of the track and checker-flag tiles.  A yellow border was piped on.  We added Matchbox cars to give it an extra nostalgic feel.

To keep the track continuous, I carved out ramps for the road to follow between the 2 and 4.  This cake was pretty large and very challenging but I just LOVE the way it turned out!

Fire Helmet No. 2

I was asked by my friend Natalie to make a Fire Helmet cake for her husband.  It was a challenging cake because it's so important for me to get it right, and try to capture as much detail as accurately as possible.

I'm really happy with the way the eagle turned out this time:

I was able to fix and/or vastly improve on the tough spots from when I first experimented with the Fire Helmet cake (post here).  I'm really happy with the way this cake looked for my friend and her hubby.

Christmas Cakes!

I've really been enjoying making some adorable Christmas cake this season!  Here are photos

This adorable Santa cake is an 8" layer cake frosted in vanilla.  I tinted a small amount peach for his face, cut a red fondant section for his hat, and piped curly beard, mustache and trim around his face.  I gave him pink, rosy cheeks using pink luster dust.  The rosy cheeks really made the cake!  I made this cake to take to a Christmas party my family was invited to earlier this month and it was a hit with everyone.

I have the fortune of being invited to an extremely fun party for just us girls called a "Tree Skirt Party."  For this party, you are required to wear your tree skirt- yes, the one under your Christmas Tree- as part of your outfit.  So many of us find very elegant, and creative ways, to do this.  It is a lovely night and I look forward to it each year.  This year I was asked by the Hostess to make a cake of a lady wearing her tree skirt for the party.  This was my first "doll cake" and it was so fun and much easier than I imagined it would be.  To make it festive yet simple, I made her skirt look like a Santa-hat style tree skirt, and gave a holly & berries border along the bottom.  I added a sparkly red bow to the dolls hair to match her outfit.

The Classic Yule Log is a type of cake I have wanted to do for a long time.  I used a very traditional recipe:  a chocolate sponge with coffee flavored mascarpone filling with a fudge icing.  The outer icing was smoothed to give a bark appearance, and I made some holly & berry accents and little mushrooms out of fondant.  This cake is one of my all-time favorites, and it was hard for me to part with it.  I just love the perfect balance of tradition bordering on cheesy.

Gender Reveal Cake

I was asked by my friend Lori to do a gender reveal cake for her brother and his wife.  I have so much fun with gender reveal cakes, I think mostly because you get to be in on a really big, happy secret.  I made this cake all white, so that when they cut into it there would be no mistaking it was blue inside!

I piped a personal message on top using the baby's nickname.

I really love the effect of an all-white cake with just a simple tinted filling.