Jungle Boogie

We were asked about making a jungle-themed cake for a little boy's first birthday. The theme was so cute that Joanne couldn't wait to get started. She started with a lion to go on top of the cake and sit next to a palm tree. Then, she added an elephant on the bottom tier and a crocodile swimming in the water, next to the cake.

The cakes are both the moist chocolate cake with dark chocolate mousse filling and vanilla buttercream.



Here is the elephant!

And what jungle would be complete without a monkey??

This cake is what Flynn's mother called the "smash cake" - a separate cake for the birthday boy to have his way with. Apparently, it was quite the show, here's what we heard:

"It was so sweet when he went to eat it...he very carefully ate one eye at a time then stuck a finger in a corner and tasted the cake. He slowly worked his way up to grabbing a whole fistful of cake and shoving it into his mouth. Not sure who enjoyed it more...Flynn or everyone watching him!!!"

Here's hoping it was a wild party, happy birthday, Flynn!

Black and White Elegance

This order came in for a woman who was celebrating her 40th birthday. Her friends were throwing her a surprise birthday party and the theme was vampires. The cake is the moist chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and almond buttercream.

There is a small, six inch cake and a dozen cupcakes. They are covered in white fondant with black flowers and silver dragées as accents.



The vampire theme came out when the cake was sliced and the buttercream was dyed red!]

The cupcakes were decorated to match the cake and are also chocolate.

Wedding Bells

Sorry about the radio silence for the past month - it is a very crazy time of year!

We've been busy with work, Joanne's schooling, some friends and family events (we both had birthdays in the last 6 weeks!) and, of course, cakes!

Here is a wedding cake we made for a bride and groom who just arrived in Canada from Germany to have a small wedding with the bride's family (who is from Nova Scotia) before heading back to Europe. They were already married in Germany but wanted to come to Canada and have a ceremony here, too.

The order was put in just a couple of weeks before the big day and the cake had to travel from Halifax to Sydney, Cape Breton!

It was a reasonably small wedding, so the top tier is Styrofoam. The middle tier is vanilla cake with strawberry mousse filling and vanilla buttercream, while the base is the moist chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and the same buttercream.

This picture is from the kitchen as I finished placing the satin ribbon we were given (to match the Maid of Honour). Then, the cake board was cleaned up and it was boxed for its travel to Cape Breton!

Here's what we heard: "Everything went really well and the cake travelled perfectly. Everyone loved it and said it was delicious! My sister and I, both being pregnant, had a few too many pieces but it was so worth it!!"

As soon as we have pictures of the cake at the wedding, we'll post them. Congratulations to the happy couple!

Everyone loves a companion. Especially when they're a cube!

This cake was likely among our biggest challenges, but boy did it pay off!

A few weeks ago, we were contacted about making a "Weighted Companion Cube." I had no idea what this was, but Sachin got excited; this entered the geek domain, one in which he is at home with his Green Lantern Tshirts and deluxe collector's Stormtrooper helmet.

So, initially, I thought this was a computer, or a video game console and innocently went about explaining it as such when asked which cake I was working on.

*obnoxious buzzer sound to indicate I'm wrong*

Turns out, the Companion Cube is not a real thing.. well, it's real, but it's an object from within a video game, called Portal. And it looks like this:

Okay, so it doesn't go on someone's head - I just thought it was funny.

Anyways, Sachin helped by laying on the cake layers, the raspberries, the pressure. "Honey, you have to get this one right. You have to be accurate and make it perfect or else they'll know."

So, first steps first, make it delicious. The cake was a moist chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream and fresh raspberries.

Yum! There were four layers of cake, piled high onto each other and two layers of fresh raspberries in between. It was a 6" cake and we had to make it into a cube, which was a challenge in itself.

I started covering the cake in fondant and after getting the first layer of pink on and then adding the darker shade of grey, it was getting quite late. Sachin had to force me to go to bed, because I would have spent all night on it. The bad part was, however, that it just didn't look right. The pink lines were wide and uneven and I just wasn't happy with it.

I woke up early the next morning - on due date - and knew what I had to do: I was going to peel off the fondant, re-ice the cake and start over. This was just piling a bit more stress onto an already stressful order, but I really needed to get this cake looking just right.

And in the end, I was happy with it. What was even better, was that Sachin gave it the thumbs up, calling it a "kick-ass Companion Cube cake!"

The next big test was to get it to the client's house and get the thumbs up from him. I knew he wanted it to be perfect: he had ordered this for his girlfriend and had clearly put a lot of love and thought into making her birthday party perfect - the cake was an important factor in this.

Luckily, he loved it, saying it looked even better than the Companion Cube cake photo he had sent me when he initially put in the order! Very. Cool.

"The cake that you made was a huge hit. Not only was everyone really
impressed with how perfect it was in its appearance, but it was also
delicious to boot! Thank you so much. You helped make a good birthday
party great!

I will send you photos of the night, also we will be sure to link to
your blog on facebook.

Thanks again,

you are a real artist."

Now that felt really good. But then, to make it even better, I got this:

"Thank you so much for making the absolute most perfect birthday cake I've ever had. It was amazing looking and probably the most delicious thing I've eaten in a long time. All of my friends were so impressed by it. I'm really glad you could make one of my most favourite video games into a delicious dessert.

In this cake, the cake was not a lie, it was just delicious.

THANK YOU!"

How can you not feel like a million bucks when you find out something you made elicited this?

Happy birthday!

Barnyard Animals!

The other order we got to make for the weekend was a barnyard inspired cake for a little girl's second birthday. It turned out to be a funny "it's a small world" occurence when the cake was ordered by the birthday girl's mother and I then found out that her husband and I went to high school together! Funny :)

It was so much fun making this cake because putting together the little animals was so much fun. One comment we received was that they brought artist Nick Park to mind, which I take as a huge compliment. I cannot take all of the credit, however, because most of the animals were made by a girlfriend who came over for a lesson on how to use and work with fondant. She was a natural!

Anyways, the cake is a vanilla cake with chocolate frosting.

We were thrilled when just a few hours later, we heard back from Emma's mother:

"Just a quick little message to let you know the cake was delicious as well as gorgeous. Everyone loved it. I passed out your business cards to people who came.Will definitely contact you in January for our other daughters 4th birthday - she's wanting a Handy Manny cake.Thanks again!"

Now, all we have to do is figure out what a Handy Manny is.

Simple and Elegant

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Sachin and I spend a lovely weekend with two cakes to make and decorate on Friday night, a busy day Saturday and the rest of the long weekend spent with me nursing a cold. Phooey.

Yet, before the cold hit me, I was able to churn out two cakes, that's right, TWO cakes in one evening!

It seems that as I make more cakes, they are taking less time to make as initially. So, instead of spending eight hours on a cake, I can spend four and be just as happy with it. Sweet!

So, this is the second cake we made for the weekend. It's a vanilla cake with almond buttercream. Yum!

It was to celebrate two birthdays: a 66th for "Poppa" and a 12th for his grand-daughter, Alex. So, here came the challenge: making a cake appropriate for both a man in his 60s and a young pre-teen girl. What to do... KISS! Keep it simple, stupid.

So, I went with a clean, white base and added pretty ribbons alon the bottom in light blue and chocolate brown (easily one of my favourite colour combos). This was the finished product:

There was also the question of personalizing the cake to suit both birthday celebrants. I didn't want the cake to look too busy, though, so I cut out little medallions of sorts from blue fondant and hand-painted their names in brown dye on them, along with their ages.

They went with the cake and the client was able to place them wherever she wished.

Getting Picture Happy

We received an order to make a birthday cake for a young photographer. There were going to be 20-30 guests, so we made a big cake: two 10" cakes, sliced into two layers each to be piled up high onto each other. We went with the moist chocolate cake and vanilla cake with chocolate hazelnut buttercream. There is one layer of vanilla, then a layer of chocolate, then another layer of vanilla and finally the top layer is chocolate. We covered it in the birthday girl's favourite colours: blue and purple. And, we added some fun little stars shooting out from the cake.

Because she is a photographer, we found out what kind of camera she uses and made some Rice Crispies squares to sculpt it. Once we got the shape approximately where we wanted it, we covered it in buttercream and covered it in fondant. Added the lenses and some details and voila! A yummi camera.

In the lense, I hand-painted "Happy 22nd" with some black food dye and placed her name on the cake.

We've already heard back and the cake was a hit! And, since she is a photographer, she took this fantastic photo of the inside of the cake:

Now if only she could be there everytime we make a cake to take such amazing photos!

Faith took our wedding photos, too. Check out her site: www.faithbowyer.com

Happy Birthday, Faith!

Car Cake V2.0

This weekend was fun: we made another car cake!

This is a chocolate cake with dark chocolate buttercream.

It's a 9" square cake covered in blue fondant with a street-like border. On top is a Nova Scotia license plate with the birthday boy's name and age and a couple toy versions of his favourite antique car.


We heard back from the client today and they've already asked about making another cake order. Great news!

Stencils!

During our trip to Ontario, this past July, we picked up some nifty stencils for cake decorating. Being mid-September, you can imagine how impatient Joanne has been to use them. Well, the opportunity finally came!

We received an order for an elegant cake for a client's birthday. The colour scheme was to be black and white with bright pink details.

Joanne decided to cover a cake in clean, white fondant and to use a scroll stencil with royal icing dyed black on the sides of the cake. This is was the result!

The top of the cake features the birthday girl's initials in a hand-painted monogram and the border is made of beads made of black fondant.

Then, we had to add the pink touches!


Joanne decided to go with some calla lilies and a rose. It was her first time making a fondant rose, but it was fun! Here is a close-up.

It was definitely fun to play around with flowers, so there will definitely be more of those in the future! And, given the chance, we definitely hope to be able to work with stencils again; they are so elegant, yet, kind of funky.

Channeling Hope

Tuesday, September 14th was a fantastic fundraiser for the Stephen Lewis Foundation who helps to raise money against HIV/AIDS in Africa. The event was held to celebrate Kristin Roe who bravely swam across the English Channel.

I was really touched and thrilled to be asked to put something together for the event. I wanted to incorporate water, because of the swim, and the red ribbon, in support of a cure for HIV/AIDS.

The event was held at Pier 21, in Halifax.

This was the result!The cake is vanilla with vanilla icing while the three dozen cupcakes are one in vanilla and two in moist chocolate, both topped with blue swirls of vanilla buttercream and a red fondant ribbon.

You can still make a donation, go to their website!

Harry Potter Cake

Last week, Joanne was given the chance to make a cake she'd wanted to do for a while: she got to make a Harry Potter cake! Having read all of the books and watched all of the movies multiple times, it was actually difficult to choose which elements of the Harry Potter world to incorporate into the cake.

In the end, she decided it would be fun to make a couple of Hogwarts textbooks and add a couple of little details for fun. The clients were francophone, so we went with two topics which had "transparent" titles; words that are the same in French and English. So, potions and dragons it was!


It was a fun day of firsts for us: first time using our new four inch deep square pans - which were cut into rectangles - and Joanne's first time using food dyes and water to hand paint on a cake.


The books are accompanied by a small sorting hat, a golden snitch and a wand made from chocolate fondant.


Joanne added the birthday girl's initials on one of the books, as the author, which she promptly noticed and excitedly ran to tell her mother about. We later heard it was a hit with the other kids at the party.

The cakes were both moist chocolate with a dark chocolate buttercream.