Groom's Cake - Vroom Vroom

One of my good friends Mary got married in September. I offered to make a grooms cake for the reception. Her husband is really into racing so we decided to try to incorporate his car into the cake.

This is an actual picture of his car that I lifted off of Facebook and then used as a model to make the fondant miniature.

I wasn't 100% sure how I was going to make the car. I bought red fondant in case I wanted to mold it out of that, but I wasn't sure how to get the white stripes on the side, so in the end I decided to mold it out of white fondant and paint it. I used AmericColor edible paints.

The inside of the cake is probably my favorite. I bought a checkered cake kit a while back and never knew what to use it for. When I asked what kind of cake they wanted, the bride said she liked white cake and the groom liked chocolate. I thought, I can do BOTH! And added bonus, it looks like a checkered racing flag. #Winning.

This is what the set looks like. (Bonus: hidden Mickey!) Pretty simple.

You fill the outer and inner most circles with one kind of batter...

And then the center ring with the opposite. Once all the rings are filled, you slowly remove the plastic...

Tah-dah! It's a little messy, but not as bad as you would think. Then you bake the cakes normally.

I made the almond butter cream frosting to fill between the layers.

All three layers ready to be frosted!

Then I rolled out some green fondant I bought (I used the Fondarific brand because I think it tastes the best out of all the ones I've tried) and covered the frosted cake.

Next I trimmed off the edges and added a black road, the fondant car, and some mini fondant cones I made.

Here's the cake displayed at their wedding! The ribbon around the bottom was money. It made the cake look 100 times better. It's a simple and easy way to make the edges look smooth.

Here's what the inside looked like. Now I want to go eat some chocolate. Probably going to have to buy my trick-or-treaters some more candy because I don't think what I have is going to last until Halloween!

Wedding Fun!

This weekend was my friend Kim's wedding. It was FANTASTIC. Mary and I were co-maid-of-honors. It was a gorgeous wedding - the weather couldn't have been more perfect. The ceremony was beautiful and the reception was rocking. They had a photo-booth which I highly recommend. In fact, can I have a photo booth just follow me around in my daily life so I can hop in whenever I feel like it? Please?? They played all of my LMFAO songs AND the DJ was awesome enough to play Call Me Maybe!!! A lot of "hands-as-telephones" dance moves were going on. 

I had the tricky job of trying to drink enough to not be nervous during my speech, but not too much as to slur my speech. It's a fine line, but I think I walked it pretty well. 

Sadly there was no single men at this wedding, though I did catch the bouquet! One of the groomsman caught the garter. His girlfriend was standing close by so he put it a safe inch above my knee.

How cute is the garter? The Bride & Groom are big Caps fans.  She got it off Etsy. I feel like I need to make cute things and start my own Etsy shop. Summer project??

All I Want Is You, Will You Be My Bride

The wedding was AWESOME. I laughed, I cried, I danced like a crazy person with my best friends. It was a fabulous time. The weather ended up being beautiful so we even got to take pictures outside! Susan made the wonderful wedding cake. (3 words: Cookie dough frosting) I made the heart cookies again, this time saying "Mr. and Mrs. Edmond." I dyed the dough blue and green to match the wedding colors.

I also made un-dyed cookies that said "I DO" and decorated them to look like wedding dresses. 

Apparently I didn't take pictures of the baked cookies. So hopefully someone will post them on facebook or the photographers got some. I also made mini cupcakes. My friend sent me a link on how to modify a box cake mix to make it taste better. I used the same modifications for the chocolate and the yellow cake and they sure were delicious!! 

Next I made my favorite frosting (made with almond extract YUM) and dyed half green and half blue. Then I whipped out my newly acquired Disco Dust and WENT TO TOWN.

I also put Disco Dust on the sugar cookies I iced to look like wedding dresses. (Pictures to come soon... hopefully). You really can't have enough sparkle!!

Bridal Shower Desserts Part 2

The Message in a Cookie cutter may be one of the best things I ever purchased. It's fitting that the first time I used it was for Sara's bridal shower as she is the one who told me about them.

The set comes with 3 cookie cutter shapes - rectangle, star, and heart. Each cutter has a track you can put letters on to personalize your message. The kit comes with a few words (Happy, Birthday, Congratulations, etc) and a lot of individual letters. You just pick out your message; slide it into the tracks, and walla! Awesome cookie!

I just saw that they have this for Christmas cookies as well. I NEED TO BUY THEM IMMEDIATELY. 

Wednesday Review: Wedding Cake Art and Design: A Professional Approach

To continue with the wedding theme this week, I am reviewing Wedding Cake Art and Design: A Professional Approach by Toba Garrett. Like the subtitle says, Garrett focuses a lot of the book's content on the professional cake designer: the steps to take when working with a client, how to write up a contract etc.

What I like:

·         Chapter 1: Designing the Cake lays a great foundation of cake knowledge. It covers color, texture, theme, shape, and décor.

·         Chapters 2-11 showcase different theme ideas like romantic, textured, seasonal, and floral designs.

·         Each chapter opens up with a hypothetical couple - a little background on who they are, what kind of cake theme and taste they're looking for and how the cake designer developed that into 2-3 sketches. Then Garrett shows you how to make each of the cakes.

·         SO MANY RECIPES. TWELVE different kinds of cake! They all sound delicious. There are also recipes for marzipan, gum paste, a ton of buttercreams, royal icing, ganache, pastillage (I don't even know what this is), curd, and jam! oh my gosh I am really hungry all of a sudden.

·         At the end of the recipe chapter it tells you the best pairings of cake, filling, icing, and fondant.

·         Also includes templates you can xerox.

What I don't like:

·         All the cakes use Fondant. Granted, it's not the only thing they use. As I said before there are about a bajillion different icing recipes in the back of the book. And frequently multiple kinds are used in the decorations, but it'd be nice to see a cake without fondant as well.

·         Chapter 12 is all about setting up a cake design business. Whether it's best to work from home or rent office space, what equipment you will need to buy, what you need to do legally to establish a business, how to network. Etc. Not very useful for me.

I think my favorite part of this book is the recipes. I need to see if I can make modified versions of the cakes because obviously I won't need a whole wedding cake (unless somebody wants me to make theirs??) I think I'll try one for a holiday or birthday coming up soon. There was a really cool fall looking one so maybe for Thanksgiving! 

Weddings on the Mind

Two of my best friends - Sara & Scotty - are getting married next week. I cannot WAIT for the wedding! For the reception a bunch of people are pitching in to make desserts. I may have gone a little crazy in the baking section of Michael's last night. Since I have weddings on my mind I thought I'd go back to the first (and only other) wedding I've been in. My friend Meaghan got married in August of 2010. For her bridal shower my sister Chelsea came up to help me decorate sugar cookies.

I bought the Wilton wedding cookie cutter set. I've used them a few times now and decided that the cake and the dress are the easiest to decorate. The bells are the worst - so I don't use them anymore. 

The icing I made for these was just powdered sugar and water mixed together. It doesn't harden like when you use meringue powder, so you can't stack them. For the flowers I added more powdered sugar so it was more of a paste consistency and then I shaped them like play-dough. It's a little tedious decorating them, but if you have somebody to help can be a lot of fun! 

Wedding Shoes!

Today's blog post comes from one of my best friends Kim. We used to work together and would have knitting/Lost watching parties in our cubicles during lunch. I'm so excited to have her as my first guest blogger!! (Kim is getting married in May and was telling me about these awesome shoes, so I asked her to write about them for me)

The closer to the Big Day I get, the more I realize how every little detail really matters.  I realized I needed wedding shoes ASAP for for my first dress fitting in a few days, so I immediately got to work searching on Google and Pinterest for the perfect pair.  I realized quickly that I needed shoes that sparkled - I particularly liked the look of a sparkly heal.  After some price comparisons, I started to realize this may not be that realistic - at prices ranging from $300 - $1,000 for what I was looking for I was starting to lean towards something much simpler. 

  

I purchased a pair of shoes off Amazon that were white satin to match my dress and had a low heal.  I got them, and loved them, but I couldn't get over their lack of sparkle.  After some research on types of glue and some inspiration from a coworker's custom made shoes, I headed to Michaels for E6000 glue, beading tweezers, and Swarovski crystals in multiple sizes.

 400 stones, 6 hours, and a few terrible headaches later, one shoe is complete, and it is PERFECT!!

 Some tips to make life a little easier:

1) From my research, E6000 glue is definitely the best glue for the job, but the fumes can actually be harmful (hence the headaches).  Make sure you work in a well ventilated room with open windows, and a mask if you have one handy.

2) You need crystals in multiple sizes (I used 3) to get a close fit and add some texture to the shoe.  The smaller crystals work best around the edges to get an even line.

3) Spread the glue using a toothpick or something similar (I used the thin set of tweezers and cleaned them after).  Spread the glue in a THIN layer in small areas.  The glue is very thick and can harden quickly.  If you spread the layer too thick the glue will come around the edges of the crystals and can become a big mess.

4) Be patient!  It can take a lot of time and I definitely made a lot of mistakes I needed to fix, but the finished product was well worth it!