Monday, June 23, 2014

Cakes, Cakes, and More Cakes

The month of June has been insane for cakes. I made seven cakes in the last two weeks and I have three more orders to fill this week. Whoa! Here are a couple of the cakes I worked on this month...

The staff at my school decided to get together to have a little potluck celebration for our City Year team. They were having their last day at our school and we had to celebrate just how awesome they had been. Naturally, I made a cake for the potluck.


Trying to match that font was really tricky. My hand just isn't that steady when I'm cutting out fondant.
One of the other cakes I made was for the last staff breakfast of the year. I had been working on making fondant daisies for another cake and I had a large one that just didn't seem to be right. So I stuck it on the staff cake to spruce it up a bit. Then, I wasn't sure what message to write on the cake. "Deuces!" seemed a little too short. 

Have a Great Summer did the trick.
This past weekend, my friend's parents were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. My friend and her brother were throwing their parents  a surprise party. She sent me a picture from their wedding and asked if I could use the daisies in her mom's bouquet (& the fact that the bridesmaid dresses had been sky blue) for inspiration. I had some trouble getting my daisies to hold up well and having pointy ends that didn't match the bouquet. So, I started over and cut long, rounded petals that I could overlap. It was a long process, but they were really cute. These are the flowers I ended up with:




My kitchen has been very busy and it looks as though that trend is going to continue for at least the next two weeks. Keep those orders coming, folks!

**Don't forget that if you're in the Boston area and need some cake you can:

1.) send me an email (thecakebeast@gmail.com
or 
2.) use the contact form on the right sidebar to tell me what you need!

By the way, did you remember to stop by and "like" my Facebook page?

And don't forget to follow me on Twitter!







Sunday, April 20, 2014

Rainbow Cake

My kids know that I like to make cakes. They also know that I take a lot of special orders. My daughter Lucy started a trend two years ago where she would google cake ideas and show me what she wanted. That's how I ended up learning to use fondant trying to make the "funky girl birthday cake" she had googled. It wasn't quite like the original, but it was a good try:
Fondant bows can be quite tricky when you've never used fondant before!



This year, Sophie informed me that she wanted a rainbow cake. Her exact words were: "Mama, here's the cake I want. It has 6 different colored layers and I really like the petal frosting on the outside. If you don't know how to do it, there's a YouTube tutorial online I can show you."

Um...okay, Soph. Challenge accepted. It just so happens that even though I probably have about 50 cake pans, I only have 1 round one in the size I wanted to make those layers. That made for a really fun routine of dyeing 6 bowls of batter, throwing one into the oven, waiting 16 minutes, popping it on a cooling rack, and throwing in the next one. And repeat - a bunch of times. There's 96 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.

I dutifully watched Sophie's tutorial on the petal technique while I was waiting for cakes to cool. I leveled the layers, slapped on some frosting in between, and crumb-coated the whole thing. It was a monster.

Once everything had set in the fridge, I proceeded to make more of a mess by coloring six bowls of buttercream. (Remind me to encourage my kids to stick to a monochromatic theme from now on.)

The petal technique wasn't too terrible. I know I'll be able to tweak it if I ever do it again to make the rows straighter and watch for gaps. But, for a first time, it wasn't too bad. I was a little panicked after the first two rows that it looked pretty awful but, once the cake was covered, I liked it.

Wait, this isn't how you cut your cakes? (I was having a mini heart attack that Sensei's sword was going to knock the whole cake over...)
I was pleased with how the frosting on the outside matched up with the layers on the inside - the crumb coating prevented me from being able to tell how it was lining up.
Now, that's what I call a slice of cake! (I gave each kid two layers, because those slices were bigger than their heads.)
The finished product
It was a lot of work, and my kitchen was filled with messy bowls of rainbow colors, but Sophie LOVED her rainbow cake. (And it was a big hit with the 6 & 7 year old set!)



**Don't forget that if you're in the Boston area and need some cake you can:

1.) send me an email (thecakebeast@gmail.com
or 
2.) use the contact form on the right sidebar to tell me what you need!

By the way, did you remember to stop by and "like" my Facebook page?

And don't forget to follow me on Twitter!