Terra Cotta Pots, Some Crumbly Cake, and Some Fondant

Well, a couple of weekends ago was my mom's birthday. So, I decided to make her a cake--a flower pot cake. I only told her I was doing her a cake and wanted the design to be a surprise. She was still so excited, though, because in all the years she's done cakes, very rarely has somebody made her a cake.

I've just got one thing to say about what I did. I need to do more work with fondant. Gosh! That stuff was hard to sculpt and mold to the shape of the cake. Oh, and another thing, I need to stop using the box cake mix that is too moist and crumbly. That didn't help out my cause in getting the fondant to stick to the shape of the cake. I will say, however, that I got the color of a terra cotta pot down. That part looked pretty awesome.

Oh, by the way, I did it again by staying up until midnight to finish the cakes. One day, hopefully soon, I'll get to start on the cake sometime in the morning and finish sometime in the afternoon rather than starting late in the afternoon and finishing early in the morning. Yuck.

Update finally (1/25/09)
Pictures! Yea!

An Anniversary Cake_Part 2: The Completion and Delivery

(Sigh of relief) The cake got there safe and sound, was pleasantly commented on, eaten, and eaten some more. Andrew's mom and aunt invited 50 people to the party, but not very many people showed up--about 25 people. So, needless to say, we left with some cake.

So, the beginning. We waited until the last minute...as usual. Yesterday Andrew baked all the cakes while I was at work. Unfortunately, one of the cakes did not come out so well and he had to go get more cake mix, eggs, butter, and then gas. And as we all know, getting gas yesterday (and today) was no easy feat. He was going to get it from Sam's, but there was a line out into the streets. I'm sure it was the same wherever you're reading. However, I digress. It was very yummy to come home to an apartment that smelled of cake. (Hmm......)

When I got home from work, I piddled around a little before my clarinet lesson student came over at 6. After the lesson, around 7:15, we decided we were hungry. Again with the food...can't do anything without it. We ended up going to Sam's (the back way because there still was some gas traffic) to get a hotdog and pizza. Did you know Sam's has a fantastic deal on powdered sugar?!? It's a little over $4 for 7 lbs of sugar! I love Sam's.

Anyway, we got back and started on icing. Those cakes ended up being more trouble than we expected. The butter cake Andrew made was so crumbly, but it was SOOO good! The buttercream icing was lighter than the edge of the cake so it was a little difficult getting the cake itself hidden.

Not only was the cake crumbly, but trying to use icing techniques was difficult, too. Since we are in an apartment, we don't have any raised countertops or high bars to use for eye-level decorating. Then, I remembered what my mom suggested a while back--using bed risers for the table. It is the best idea I was ever told and ever decided to try. The bed raisers worked perfectly to raise the table up so the cake would be closer to eye-level for me. Being 5'9-1/2" it's really hard to bend over a table or short counter to decorate, and sometimes even getting down and standing on my knees makes me a little too tall or maybe we just have small stuff. I really like the table up like that. It makes me want to get some bar stools and leave it like that.


Anyway, nothing else really eventful happened last night other than we stayed up until 1:00, again, trying to finish this cake. (Ugh!) Why do I do that? Why do I wait until the last minute to finish things? Well, it's a time honored tradition of mine to ALWAYS wait until the last minute to finish any project.



This is the awesome rig that Andrew came up with to transport our cakes safely and coolly. (Is that a word?) He went into our spare room to find some cardboard and came up with this. We put an open cooler full of ice under it so the cardboard acted kind of like a refridgerator. To my surprise, the cakes did not move under that cardboard. Usually my truck doesn't have much of a center, a place that doesn't move as much as the rest of the vehicle (just in case you didn't know). I know that one center point is under the cup holders on the dashboard, but that doesn't help out much for anything. But, after all the turns and bumbs in the road and 2-1/2 hours, the cakes arrived in perfect condition.


We used about an hour before the party assembling the cake. Back on the whole eye-level thing, there was nothing there to really help me in that situation. But, I have the best in-laws ever. Andrew's mom saw me kneeling on the floor trying to decorate, and she went to get me a huge stock pot so my lazy suzan could sit on top of it, and it on the table. So, thanks to her, I was able to comfortably sit at the table and decorate.

Everybody loved the way the cake looked and loved the way it tasted. Come on, butter cake with buttercream icing...butter, butter, and more butter.......how can you go wrong?? It just makes me think of Paula Dean--butter, ya'll! (Not making fun of Paula Dean, all you Paula fans, just joking around. )

I'm just glad that's over, the cake that is. The party was amazing and fun. I love being with family, and since they are my family now, it makes it even more special to be apart of their celebrations. I just hope more people get along so well with their in-laws like I do. I love them so much!

Here's some pictures from the road trip through Scottsboro and Fort Payne, AL and pictures from the party.

This is from the bridge going over the Tennessee River in Scottsboro.

The view from going up the mountain in Scottsboro.

This hand is kind of scary for a nail salon. Looks like a cartoon witch's hand.


"And my home's in Alabama!" Yeah, the group Alabama is from Fort Payne, AL. And they love it. There's even life-sized bronze statues of them in the downtown area. I didn't get my camera out fast enough to take a picture of it.


The finished cake at the party.


I think I did pretty good with this picture.


My new family, well, only part of them.

An Anniversary Cake_Part 1: The pre-decorating

For this weekend, Andrew and I volunteered to make his grandparents a 50th wedding anniversary cake. So, I am attempting roses...on the cake...for the first time. (Just picture a scared look on my face, right about now.) I've done roses before, but in the decorating icing (regular "buttercream," without the butter), and not on a cake. They were pretty good and stayed firm for several days. But sometimes I'm not too clever on some things and I think this was one of them.... I'm trying them with very, very, greasy, buttery, buttercream icing. This is not your ordinary buttercream icing that you get on a cake from a grocery bakery, this is melt in your mouth and your hand, buttery, sweet, creamy (and cream colored) icing--which tastes best on a red-velvet cake....hmmm, yummy.


I've already started on the roses, actually started on Wednesday, and I'm keeping them in the freezer. This is partly because it's so humid down here in Alabama this week that the icing thaws out in just a few minutes....or is that because we have a crappy freezer? It could be both. Either way, I hope we can make it to Rome, GA from Huntsville, AL without any disasters. Oh, by the way, we're taking the air conditioned vehicle.

A Busy Weekend

I hope for other posts, I can come up with better names than that. But, seriously, this weekend was busy. We did three separate gigs--cupcakes for a co-worker's birthday at my job, birthday cake for my nephew's 16th birthday, and a birthday cake for a girl in my husband's and my Sunday School class. Wow, pretty much a Friday, Saturday, Sunday kind of delivery schedule.

For people's birthdays at my day job, the secretary girl gets some form of cupcake/pastry for that person's birthday. So, this time it was her birthday and I volunteered to make the cupcakes. Well, I told her after a previous birthday, that I would do it because she got some Wal-Mart cupcakes. Now, don't get me wrong, if you like Wal-Mart cupcakes, then I'm all for it. However, I am spoiled and think Wal-Mart cakes taste like they were made by a press on a conveyor belt. When I eat one all I can think about is somebody pulling a lever down, a big metal press coming down onto the conveyor belt, then lifting up to reveal a "cake." I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody who works for a department/grocery store bakery. I'm not meaning to, it's just my opinion. Anyway, back to my cupcakes. I had no idea what to do for this girl's birthday cupcakes and I was suppose to deliver the next day. Yeah...nothing like waiting until the last minute to finish a project. I started out making a swirly flower design with a couple of leaves around it on pastel pink, white, pastel'ish yellow-iced cupcakes. This looked horrible and very messy to me. Then, I tried a generic flower design (on a plate) and didn't like it either. So, I scraped off the icing from the cupcakes I did the swirly flowers on. Then, re-iced them in the pink I had left over. At this point, I was back at yellow, white, and pink. I arranged them in a circle and asked my hubby to come and tell me what he thought I should do. He said that they looked kind of like a sunflower. I went with that to sprinkle some left over crushed oreos from the construction cake on a yellow one, arrange the white ones as a stem with a few leaves, and the pink ones as random flowers with a few leaves. This did not work out either and I was getting more and more frustrated by the minute. I left it alone for a while and decided to take the "leaves" off and eat the one with the oreos on it. Eating seems to always help me calm down, and a hot shower helped, too. Andrew and I started taking the leaves off and realized that they were too soft and green spots were left on the background color. So, being the wonderful husband as he is, Andrew said he would go get some chocolate to make green happy birthday letters from so we could try to hide the green spots. The letters ended up being a lot smaller and a lot darker than was planned. But, thankfully, when I came home for lunch the day, and minutes before, I was to bring the cupcakes to work, it dawned on me to mix up some colored sugar to match the green spots. It worked perfectly, the green sugar blended nicely with the random spots and made them disappear. The letters were still a little dark, so I sprinkled some of the sugar on them. The pink ones with the green sugar didn't look all that great to me, so I set them aside as the "ugly extra ones." Turned out that everybody loved the cupcakes and the "ugly extra ones" were the first to go. Go figure... Out of 18 cupcakes and 9 co-workers (including the birthday girl) I took home 3 cupcakes. Needless to say they're gone, too.

On to Saturday, it was my nephew's 16th birthday. He hasn't gotten his license, yet. But, I think he'd be a good driver. Well....hopefully. Anyway, I asked him if he wanted me to do a cake for him, and of course he said yes. But, to my surprise, he just asked for, as he put it, "one of your famous butterfinger cakes." I thought he'd want like a decorated cake or a car cake or something like that, but he wanted a butterfinger cake. If you don't know what a butterfinger cake is, it's just a german chocolate cake with sweetened condense milk poured over it (while it's still hot) and a cool-whip and crushed butterfinger candy bar topping. It's more of a leave-in-the-pan cake. So, that was easy, especially compared to the cupcakes I did the day before. I did just that and wrote "Happy 16th Kyle" in cool-whip and melted chocolate. Oh my goodness, there were 13 people there and I made an 11x15 cake. It was huge. By the time I got the cool-whip and butterfingers on there the cake was about 3" maybe 3.5" tall. When the party was over, 3/4ths of the cake was gone! Andrew had a sugar rush and tummy ache on the way home, but my nephew ate more than anybody...I can only imagine his pains. He said while he was eating it, it would be worth it. I was glad he liked it, he had been craving one for a while and was very satisfied.

The last cake we did was for a girl in our Sunday School class. She wanted a huge chocolate bar from somebody else in the class, so I decided to make a chocolate bar cake. I tried a chocolate cake recipe for the first time, which turned out pretty good. Then, Andrew made some of his marshmellow fondant and I made some molding chocolate to make the fondant a chocolate flavor. I also used some of the molding chocolate under the fondant layer on the cake to make the indentions like a candy bar. The cake turned out pretty good. I probably could have used more indentions than I did, but again, I was finishing this cake at the last minute. Literally, I skipped first service to finish the cake in time for the Sunday School during the second service. Oh, by the way, she didn't come to Sunday School. lol. I think she was major tired from her soccer game the day before. It's ok. I gave her what was left that night. She is so sweet though. I didn't want her to feel bad about that. I just wanted her to enjoy her birthday cake.

First Paid Cake

First off, I guess I should describe who we are. My husband, Andrew, and I, Lee, are recent college graduates and are still newly weds. I graduated from UAH in May of 2007 with a degree in Communications (the technical track) and minored in music. We got married May 3, 2008, then the next weekend Andrew graduated with a degree in Communications (rhetorical track) and Philosophy and *sort of* minored in Theatre. I've been making cakes for several years now, but just for roommates, family, and Andrew. Andrew is just starting out, but he is very talented for a beginner. Still, we are both pretty green and have a lot to learn. I wanted to do cakes for most of my life because I grew up watching my mom bake and decorate cakes for years. She would make cakes all the time while word of mouth spread like wild fire about her talent. Then, she got a full time job and had to slow down, and eventually the calls dwindled and quit. Sadly, not too much longer after that her hands developed arthritis and she was no longer able to hold and squeeze an icing bag as well as she used to. She still made some cakes with as soft of icing that would hold up on a cake, but it still wasn't the same before the arthritis settled in. That's where I come in. Granted, at this time I was living two hours away in Huntsville going to UAH. So, I didn't quite take her place at home, but I've been making a name for myself up here.

Fast forwarding to today:
Today was the day that Andrew and I delivered our first paid cake. It sure was exciting. The cake was pretty awesome if I can say so myself. This is what it looked like with all the parts. (Yes, I said parts.)

We were commissioned to make a construction cake for little boy's 4th birthday party tonight. The boy's parents asked us to make a sheet cake and possibly put some small construction toys on there. But, they wanted us to go with any other ideas we had. The only specification they wanted was to put "Happy 4th Birthday Brandon" somewhere on there. And, since I am a fan of the "Cake Wrecks" blog, I made absolutely sure that I had everything spelled and worded right. ("Cake Wrecks" is an awesome blog!) The parents were so gracious as to give us about a 3 week heads up on this event. I hope that we have a lot of customers to do that. So, when we left our meeting with the parents, Andrew and I started brain storming immediately. He had the idea to use the crane to hoist "the last piece of the cake." We got the construction set from Toys R' Us about a week ago. Let me say, that was a steal. It was on sale for $19.99 and was the last one in the store. We got it home and played with it like we were little kids. The crane has an infrared remote control, the boom moves 360 degrees, and the hook lowers and raises. Oh, and it makes noise. Isn't that so nice of us to give a 4-year-old a toy that moves, makes engine noises, horn noises, and lights up?? Here's a video of it.



However, getting to the cool and exciting part of delivering the finished cake takes a lot of planning, thinking, sculpting, arguing, etc. Working with my husband is fun. It's one of the ultimate experiences of working as a team. You know, besides having kids. Oh, did I mention we're newly weds? That is making a big difference in our team work. We're still trying to figure each other out and how to work with each other. We argued a little yesterday trying to figure out how the cake was going to look. I then made the executive decision that I needed food before I could make any decisions. (It was around 7, I got off of work at 5, and had not eaten since 12'ish.) So, we went to Arby's. Food is such a wonderful thing. After we were nourished, we were laughing and cutting up as we normally do. We went to Lowe's to get a piece of ply wood for the cake and some other stuff. We then, came across some construction tape. Anyway, that's all the stuff we needed. As soon as we got home, we started on the cake and didn't go to bed until after 1:00 A.M. I was made to go to bed because my writing was looking kind of wobbly, but we got it finished the next morning.

The real feat was to deliver the cake. Andrew has an Isuzu Rodeo, but no air conditioning and I have a small Toyota Tacoma with air conditioning. Obviously we had to take the Rodeo because there was enough room with the seats folded up and everything. So, guess who had to look after the cake? Yep, me. I rode in the back, held all the trucks, and made sure nothing catastrophic happened to the cake. With all the arguing and decorating stress, the delivery was worse. I found out that is the most nerve wracking out of everything else. You've got a wonderful masterpiece that is completely in the will of the temperature of the car, the mercy of the driver and other drivers on the road, and not to mention the mercy of the road with all the bumps and turns.

We got to their house safe and sound. The mother of the boy loved the cake. I can't wait to hear about the boy's reaction. She told us that if she had gone to Wal-mart or anywhere else to get a cake, she would just get a "cake." But, we gave her an "interactive cake." So, there begins our business.
"Rocket City Cakes. We don't just make cakes, we make interactive cakes."

Ok, it's cheesy and not very cleaver in the word department. But we're going to keep the "interactive cakes" part. Wow, that's pretty bad for a communications major to say.

I hope you've enjoyed my first entry and first blog, ever. I promise my other blogs won't be as long.

Here's some more pictures of the cake.

**Update: Tuesday, Sept. 2

The little boy loved the cake, and so did the rest of the family. The mother was going to bring the rest of it to a bon fire she and her husband were hosting for the youth at our church the next night, but her kids wouldn't let her. They said it was too good and had half of it eaten already! I'm glad they liked it.