I've recently started developing an interest/hobby of cake making/decorating. I've learned most of the basics from books I've read or YouTube tutorials I've watched, and I have to say, I think I've come a long way ( though I still have a long way to go).
Let's start at rock bottom, shall we?
This was a cake I made out of the blue one day that turned into a total disaster. There are so many things wrong with this cake that I won't even discuss it. (FYI, it did break apart like this all on it's own.) I would probably be more ashamed if it weren't so hilarious.
Next, I started making birthday cakes for Kevin and Abi from good ol' box mixes and canned frosting. Not amazing, but definitely an improvement from "Grand Canyon Cake" above.
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| WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME I SPELLED "BIRTHDAY" WRONG? |
Then I decided to dabble in fondant and made Sarah this graduation cake.
After that I started to be asked by family members to make cakes for their kids.
Here's the first one I made for my niece, Riley.
That was last year.
This year, after Sarah got engaged, she told me I was making her wedding cake. I thought I'd better get in some practice, espcially with the stacking part, since I'd never done that before.
Here's another cake I made for Riley. I decided to also try sculpting with gum paste.
It looks okay, but the supports were not cut evenly so the back of the top layer was leaning back.
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| Horton |
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| The Lorax |
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| Sneech |
I loved sculpting, but thought that the gum paste dried too quickly and had too many cracks in it for what I was trying to do. My nephew Rowan's birthday was next, and he wanted an "Angry Birds" cake. I decided to sculpt with fondant this time. Here's the result.
The figures turned out so much smoother and the fondant was a lot easier to deal with. The cakes even stacked level this time, though the icing job could use a little work.
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| I could not get over how cute these pigs turned out. Ask Dorthy. |
My niece Savannah's birthday was next.
I sculpted the Hello Kitty out of fondant, made homemade buttercream and tried a basket-weave design on the side.
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| Adorable, right? |
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Then we (my mom and I) made a cake for my grandpa's 75th birthday party.
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| The curly bow was made from gum paste. |
The wedding was getting closer and I still didn't feel comfortable enough to whip up a wedding cake, so I decided to make a small version. It was, in a word, discouraging.
The fondant would not go on smooth, no matter how much I tried to smooth it out. By this time, the wedding was only a week and a half away and I couldn't show up with something like this.
I watched a couple more videos on YouTube and tried putting the fondant on again.
It looked oh, I don't know, a million times better. I was feeling a little more confident after this.
The day before the wedding came and I was busy baking cakes. I had one minor hiccup in the morning when Oakley ate one of the cakes I left out to cool.
She knew she was in trouble and felt pretty bad about it.
Other than that, the cake went together really smoothly and looked nice.
It's far from perfect but Sarah liked it and I guess that's what matters the most.
My most recent cake is one I made for my niece Karina a few days after Sarah and Colton's wedding. I have never piped flowers, ever. So I thought I'd give it a try with Karina's cake. They turned out pretty cute.
I didn't have a rose nail, but found
this video on how to pipe roses using a wood dowel. It took a little practice, but after a few tries I really started to get the hang of it.
I love making cakes and I think it's fun to see my skills improve with every cake I make. Now I just need to learn how to not make a huge mess when I do it.
