Turkey Day!

Made a delicious chocolate cake for Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey Day Everyone!

Thanks to my friend Mikey's Mom for sending me her DELICIOUS double chocolate cake recipe. This one turned out amazing!

Pepe's Birthday Cake!

All I can say about this cake is....Pepe?
Last summer, we threw a party at my place for my friend Pepe's birthday, which happens to land on July 4th. We enjoyed some food, drinks and awesome fireworks from the roof of my parking garage.

SO, for Pepe's cake, it was easy to decide what it would be. Pepe drives an ORANGE (sunburnt) care, so every time some of our friends see a sunburnt orange car, we post a "Pepe?" photo.

Needless to say, there are many albums that have "Pepe?" cars in them on Facebook.

The cake pan I used was awesome. It was shaped like a car and it actually cooked evenly throughout the whole cake. The chocolate cake mix I used tasted great as well.

After the cake was cool and out of the cake pan, it was time to frost and decorate! We colored the fondant (orange of course) and laid it over the cake. Then we made little decals to place on the cake so everyone would know it was Pepe's car and not any other sunburnt orange car.

Hope you enjoyed your cake Pepe! And I hope you had a wonderful birthday.

Little Bro's 21st Birthday!

My little brother Gage had his 21st Birthday on May 26th and I was lucky enough to go home to Utah before my summer tour started. It was great to hang out with my family, but best of all, great to spend a whole day baking and decorating a cake with my wonderful Mom!

We rolled out a TON of fondant and started dying it four different colors. This cake was going to be COLORFUL! My Mom was very good at making sure all the tones were perfect, thanks Ma!

We made a 10" cake and a 7" yellow butter cake. The butter cake turned out very dense and super moist. We covered those cakes in homemade buttercream frosting (Mom's recipe) which ended up making this cake super delicious!

We took all of our awesome colors and laid them out in pieces to create a camouflage look. My brother is a hunter and loves to take his truck off-road so I wanted to add some special personal touches to his birthday cake.

All of the pieces were together and the fondant was ready to roll (pun intended). We laid it on the cake and smoothed it all out. It was looking awesome! We added some personal touches and it was ready for the party!

Ta da! The little trucks and pine trees added some fun details and the camouflage turned out pretty cool too (I think!) After we got it all done, we brushed it off and put the candles on. Everyone came over to my Mom's for the party and LOVED the cake! I hope you enjoyed it little bro. Happy Birthday!

Cake for the Queen!

It's birthday month and I made a pretty queen cake for my friend Chris! We like to call him the 'QDQ' so I thought he could only have a cake good enough for a queen!

So I made 3 chocolate cakes and covered them with vanilla icing. This cake was HEAVY! But it ended up tasting amazing and looking pretty cute! Enjoy the pictures below

Happy Birthday Chris! I hope you loved your cake!

Delta Lambda Phi Neophyte Ceremony Cake

On May 8, my fraternity held a neophyte induction ceremony for the theta pledge class. This was very exciting because it was the neophyte ceremony for our first pledge class and I was really proud of all of the work they've put into this semester. So what better way to award my little pledges than with a CAKE!

I made a french vanilla cake with buttercreme frosting. This was my first covered square cake and I think it turned out great! Here is the finished product:

The cake before icing and fondant

Ta da! I painted on the lettering and dyed the fondant that nice deep green color

Congrats to my new neophyte brothers! I'm really proud of you guys and I hope you liked the cake!

I'm posting this as I make the cake for my friend Chris' birthday, so look out for another cake post soon!

Phoenix Pride 2010 Cake

My second cake was made for a small get together at my place over Pride weekend this month. Instead of coloring the fondant this time, I wanted to paint it, which actually turned out to be pretty fun! I also did something interesting my Mom told me about and colored the batter to make the inside of the cake very colorful. I must say, this turned out to be a pretty gay cake (and in a good way!)

The cake ended up tasting FANTASTIC (white cake with buttercream frosting) and it was moist and colorful. All-in-all I was very happy with how it turned out!

Special thanks to the boys of Las Cruces for helping me with the paint job!!

The batter getting a "dye job"

The Pride Themed paint worked perfect on the white fondant

The insides turned out great and it obviously tasted great too!

So I hope everyone enjoyed their Pride weekend in Phoenix as much as I did! Enjoy the cake!

Making my first cake

My first blog post about my first attempt at decorating a cake...I'm not going to lie, it's a little nerve racking...

But here we go! So I guess I will tell you about me..I'm a journalism student at ASU and I spend most of my money and even my parent's money on food. I love food! But what I love most of all is seeing creations by pastry artists who turn simple baked goods into works of art. I love watching Ace of Cakes and Food Network's Challenge episodes so I was excited when my boyfriend's birthday came around last February...the idea popped into my head that maybe I could do something like that.

So I turned to the internet to research. I stumbled upon a little cooking website that helped me make my own fondant. It even gave me some very helpful tips on everything from coloring the fondant to layering cakes. It's been my number one resource for the start of my new hobby.

So before I even started my BF's Bday cake, I had to test to waters to see if I could even do this. I made a tester cake to affirm my learning and research and here's how it turned out:

So from what I've learned up to that point, I thought it was pretty good! I was relieved that I was successful in making a cake and covering it with fondant. Now it's time to move on to the birthday cake.

I prepared 3 batches of fondant (overkill) and went to the ABC Cake Store in Phoenix and found some fun tools and trinkets to help me out as well as fondant dye. Now it was time to make the cake!

I made two 10" cakes and two 7" red velvet cakes to layer it out. I think you're supposed to just make one cake and layer it between with frosting, but I liked stacking the two cakes together. I thought it was stronger (support wise) and more dense when it was cut open.

I took my cool white fondant, worked it to room temp. and dyed it an electric blue color. The dye made the fondant so vivid, but it took forever to color. My arms were TIRED! After that we rolled out the fondant on my Crisco covered counter and rolled it on the cake. I was pretty happy with how the base cakes turned out! Now it was time to stack them.

The stacking wasn't TOO difficult. It was just a matter of getting the layers directly stacked over each other and *hopefully* supported enough to hold each other up! With a few wooden dowels and the help of Chris M., the cake was perfectly stacked and supported. WHEW!

Now it was time to decorate. Brandon (the boyfriend) didn't give me many color options to chose from, so I did the best I could. During my Google Image Search escapades, I found a really cool cake decorated with some sort of modern circles all over it. I used that as my inspiration for the birthday cake and went from there.

Here is the final result of my first decorated cake:

So there you have it! My very first decorated cake, EVER! Everyone pretty much loved the cake and it was devoured the next day at his birthday party. I have more cakes to come, so hopefully you enjoyed the first of many blog posts!

Special thanks to my birthday cake crew for helping out with this one!