Birthday Cakes and Tasting Appointment Tonight

I know what you're thinking:

"Two posts in one day?!? Is this girl crazy or something?" Well, as I was writing this one, I remembered that I forgot to post one about the pies. Interesting wording, huh? Anyway, here's a very rare, second post for the day.

I’m so excited about tonight. A friend of mine is ordering a cake—a free cake, but it’s an order nonetheless—and is coming over for a taste test. It’ll be my first time making cake and icing for a customer to try and see which one they like. It was supposed to have happened last night, but the weather was horrible over here. Tornados, straight-line winds, and torrential down-pours lasted until about 9 or 10 o’clock last night, and a tornado watch was in effect until 2:00 AM this morning.

Anyway, her birthday was last week, but she didn’t get a cake. I felt so bad about going to her birthday shin-dig and not bringing a cake. Especially since she knows about Andrew’s and my business dream and has been spreading the word around. So, she called on Wednesday to order and tell me what she wants. She’s ordering a chocolate cake with butter cream or regular sugar icing. The icing is what she really wanted to taste test because I told her in the real cake world, there is a difference and that I prefer the real butter cream icing over the other on a chocolate cake. I didn’t tell her this, I’ll wait until tonight, but I’m also going to give her a choice of chocolate cake. I found some Chocolate Fudge cake mix when I went shopping and knew I just had to try it….umm….I mean my friend just had to try it. So, I got that and some devil’s food. [Thinking about what I just typed] I’ve always said it, but it’s really funny to type that flavor of cake. I guess because chocolate is “sinful,” it’s called devil’s food. Sorry for the tangent thought.

I had been thinking of how to make the cakes and also make her a sample of it without having to eat two whole cakes and buy another mix of the one she liked. It worked out perfectly that we are tasting tonight instead of last night so I can just make both cakes like I normally would, but reserve a little bit and put it in a ramekin for her own tiny cake. I was quite proud of myself for thinking of that. Then, whatever cake she likes the least will probably turn into cake pops like what Bakerella makes. I love those little things! And plus Andrew made some recently and they were SOOOO delicious. And, the cake pops will go with me sometime Saturday to our church where the “youts” are having a car wash.

The second birthday cake is for Andrew’s best man. His birthday was almost two weeks ago. Yes, we’re a little behind, but remember why we are---

I just love this house. The kitchen may be small, but it’s still a lot bigger than the apartment.

And, I love the investment we made in a steel worktop table from Sam’s. It’s one of the best $80’ish we’ve spent on a kitchen item. I got to find out just how much I loved it when I made fried apple pies. Those batches went SOOO much smoother at the house with room to work with than the apartment.

Well, I’ve already made this post a lot longer than what I had planned. So, I’ll post with updates soon—really this time. I know sometimes my soon means months, but seriously, I’m going to do better.

A wrap up of this year--part 1.

Well, I am back. And I'm sorry for not posting for a really long time. Full-time day jobs seem to always get in the way. lol. Anyway, a lot has gone on since October and have a got a ton of pictures for you. I won't put it all in one post to save you some reading time. So, without further ado, here you go.

First off, this one was before my Mom's birthday flower pots. Here's a "chocolate bar" cake. A girl in our youth's Sunday School class that Andrew and I teach was having a birthday and she was talking about just wanting a huge chocolate bar for her birthday. It was actually a huge conversation and "you just had to be there" to get it. The cake is chocolate with chocolate fondant. It was fairly easy to make. There wasn't really any crazy stuff happening with this cake. Thank goodness.



These cupcakes were AWESOME. I loved them, anyway. I had made them mostly for work for some halloween goodies. They were regular white/vanilla cupcakes with a peanut butter frosting, chocolate molds with orange colored chocolate webbing, and a halloween pumpkin and fall leaves sprinkles for decoration. The difficulty with these were the chocolate molds. They just kept breaking and especially during handling and the kitchen was warm--all just not good conditions for setting up chocolate. So, I just ended up putting them all in halloween type cupcake cups and they turned out just fine. Everybody at work loved them, too.





Here's the last cake for this post--my first topsy turvey cake. I'll have to dedicate a whole post just for this cake. This was also for the family that we did the construction cake back in August. The girl liked soccer, music, shopping, and, since she was turning 15, driving. So, we incorporated all those themes into this cake with her favorite colors green, pink, and brown. The brown was the chocolate cake. Then, for the frosting/icing in the middle we used a cookies and creme frosting.




More to come later.

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!

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.