Unicorn Cake

I still need to catch you up with all of the cakes I've made! And this one was really a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.

It's the UNICORN CAKE!

It was for my friend's little girl's first birthday. This kid is getting spoiled with all of the cakes her mom dreams up for me to make her.

Mom, my fondant expert took care of making the horns and the ears. She used fondant and then colored it with gold food coloring. She made them a few days in advance to give it time to harden.

I got to the baking. The cake was vanilla, but it had to be unicorn-y, so I added color to each layer. This was the first time I was doing this, but you can't go wrong with that Wilton color. It makes the colors vibrant and doesn't water down the batter.

And then I had a bunch of frosting in all the different colors to make the unicorn's mane. The key here is really making it all random, harder than it seems for me, but I got the hang of it.

We assembled the cake when we went to drop it off. It was HEAVY! The bottom layer had the same colors, but was covered in gold sprinkles. I drew on the eyes with a paintbrush and some black food color, and we put in the ears and horn and piped in some more flowers to bring it all together.

And you just can't beat the look of those colors all together in one cake. I love how bright and fun it looks together.

Another cake challenge thrown down, and another cake challenge conquered.

Tropical Stitch Cake

After seeing my cakes online, one of my friends contacted me to make a birthday cake for her niece. She loves Stitch, and she wanted to incorporate that with a tropical theme.

My friend gave me the idea for some hibiscus flowers on the cake. Mom, my flower expert, had never made these before. But with some practice and some tutorials, she made some pretty cute flowers.

Mom also made some daisies as accent pieces.

And we even added the name on the cake board with a little fondant.

Now you can't tell from outside, but this is a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. Amazing how a little food color can fool you. We added the Stitch toy to the top of the cake along with the flowers, and it looked pretty good.

Another cake making challenge was presented to us. And I'd consider this one another cake success!

Ruffle cake

Gotta catch you up on all of the things I've been doing lately, and I haven't stopped baking!

I love making cakes for my friend's little girl, she scours everywhere for ideas, and then with Mom's help I make them happen. For her daughter's baptism, she wanted a 2 tiered cake with ruffles and roses!

I've decided that when it comes to Sweet Angels Cupcakes (mom & my baking name), Mom is the fondant/flower expert, and I'm all about the piping and buttercream. So mom created a bunch of pink roses from fondant for the top of the cake.

This was a vanilla cake with vanilla butter cream. I piped all of the ruffles on the lower tier. And we added a ribbon to bring the 2 tiers together.

The biggest part of these 2 tier cakes is the assembly, bur we put it together at the restaurant and it looked (and tasted, from what they told me) amazing!

Just love how this cake came out. Even better than I thought it would.

Pokemon Cake

Mom and I are getting better at this whole cake decorating thing. This cake only took us a few hours (some others have kept us up all night!)

Our friend's son is all about Pokemon and Pikachu right now, so we made him a Pikachu cake! It's a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. The real fun was the decorating. We traced a Pokemon, colored him with edible markers and put him on the cake.

Can I tell you how awesome the edible markers are? It made it so easy to give Pikachu his face. I don't know why I hadn't bought them before.

Another cake in the done column. Each cake we make has a new set of challenges and a new technique or two to try out. This one was definitely fun, especially since I got to color.

If you could get a cake with a character on it, who would you pick?

Cake time: Oreo cake and Chocolate Raspberry Cake

It's been a while since I've done some baking, but it was time for cake. I can't take all of the credit, mom did some of the baking too.

First was my brother, Angel's, birthday. Mom made him an "Oreo" cake. And it had a racecar theme, since he loves him some Nascar. And yes, the race track was made out of crushed up oreos.

 

Once you cut into the cake, you could really see why it was an "Oreo" cake. There were two layers of chocolate cake, and in between a layer of vanilla. It looked like a big oreo cookie. And the best part was the oreo buttercream that Mom put in between the layers. I love cookies and cream, and it was like that, but in frosting form.

It was a very yummy cake.

I couldn't let Mom do all the baking, and I also made a cake this week. I made a chocolate raspberry cake for the office.

 

It was chocolate cake filled with raspberry jam, and topped with fluffy white frosting. I used some cake crumbs on the side of the cake (this is a lot harder than it seems!), and then decorated the top with some more raspberry jam. The cake was moist and delicious.

Making cake was a nice change from making cupcakes all the time. I love cupcakes, but sometimes you just want a big fat slice of cake.

Do you like cake or cupcakes better?

Spider web cake

I was back to baking last week when I got an order to make a cake for a Spiderman obsessed 6 year old. He loves sweet, sweet desserts (the joys of being 6!), so his Mom asked for a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. He loves Spidey, so I made a web cake for him, in Spidey red with dark blue webbing and letters.

Now, making red frosting is no easy feat. I highly recommend getting the Wilton Icing Colors No Taste Red. Since you have to add so much, you want to make sure it's the no taste color, so the flavor of your frosting really comes through.

After I made the red frosting I did a crumb coat, then another coat of frosting on the cake. Then I started on the web. I free-handed the web design.

I also did my first successful attempt at writing on a cake. I'm still kind of in shock that the letters came out so well.

The cake was great for this little Spidey fan. His mom was so excited to take it home to show him.

I heard that everyone loved the taste of the cake and the birthday boy loved the Spidey theme.

Arabian nights and a whole lotta cake

Last week was time to party at the office, we had a surprise retirement party for our co-worker, Elena, who was retiring after 14 years with the company.

Once the girls in the department and I found out about the retirement, we knew we had to send off Elena in style (and make it a surprise, of course). We all got down to business to plan an Arabian nights themed party, since it's one Elena's favorites.

We reserved a conference room and transformed it into our own Arabian nights-style "tent". We draped chiffon ribbons from the lights to give the illusion of a tent over the table.

Luckily, the room is already brightly colored, but we helped that with brightly colored tablecloths and plates and napkins. We added little lanterns with electronic candles (since real candles aren't allowed). We also added to the ambiance by dressing up, the guys wore turbans and the girls wore belly dancing belts.

I, of course, made the cake for the party. But I had to make a slightly bigger cake than normal. I made a round cake and a 1/4 sheet cake too. I was baking for days. Mom helped me with the cake decoration, and we added a few gems to the cake to make them go with the Arabian nights theme.

The cake itself wasn't really an "Arabian nights"-type flavor though. I asked around, and Elena really liked guayaba, so I had to make a guayaba filled cake with cream cheese frosting. I got rave reviews on the cake, even from my taste tester, Abuela, who's not really big into sweets.

It was a great fun send off for Elena. It was bittersweet to see Elena leaving us, but we know that now she'll be living the good life of the retiree, while we're all still stuck at the office.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ On this day of remembrance, I just wanted to say that we will never forget those lost and we wil always remember 9/11/01.

Quadrito square cake

I was baking again this weekend. It was another co-worker's birthday, so I made him a cake. I decided on a cake this time, instead of my usual cupcakes, to go along with his nickname "Quadrito" (which means little square), so square cake it was.

I borrowed my Mom's square cake pan and made a Funfetti cake with classic vanilla buttercream. I had to mix it up a little, so I used some chocolate buttercream as a filling in between the cake layers. Here's a tip, to get your frosting to look uniform on the outside and not show your filling on the outside, pipe or just spread on a little of the outside frosting on the edges of your cake, then spread on the filling inside of the frosting "edges." When you frost the rest of the cake with the outside frosting you won't be able to see what the delicious filling is.

See, you can't even tell there's yummy chocolate on the inside. Now this vanilla buttercream was just too plain, so I decided to try out the "sprinkle stencil" technique.

I printed and cut out a "Q" on a piece of paper and placed it on the frosted cake. Now came the messy part, I put sprinkles on the top of the cake, all over the top of the cake. I pressed them in so they would really stick. Then I removed the paper Q to reveal the buttercream Q. Success! (Well except for cleaning up sprinkles for a half an hour...)

The cake was a hit. Quadrito was totally shocked and suprised by his homemade birthday cake, and best of all it was delicious. Sometimes the simplest cakes are the yummiest.

What's your favorite cake flavor?

Another day, another birthday

Since June won't let me have just one birthday in a weekend, it was also my godmother, Matiti's birthday on Saturday, the day after mine. Her daughter, Gisela, had a little lunch for her, her sisters, and us, her sister's daugthers.

the birthday girl, Matiti, Patiti and Grandma

Gisela made a different menu than the usual latin fare, she made chicken pot pies. They were so delicious. I wish my stomach was feeling better so I would've been able to eat more of it.

She also had a yummy salad with strawberries and some cornbread (which I forgot to take a picture of).

Mom made the birthday cake and decorated it with cute little roses. The inside was a yellow cake soaked in coconut rum and then filled with pineapple marmalade.I didn't have a piece, but have had this cake before and it's so yummy.

Everyone had a great time celebrating with Matiti, and we all loved the menu. Grandma is still raving about the pot pies. I may have to get that recipe from Gisela and try it out.

Chocolate cake

Another week means another birthday and another cake to make. I'd been promising a chocolate cake for a while now, so I chocolate overloaded on this one.

On this weekend's episode of The Pioneer Woman she made a chocolate birthday cake. I love her recipes and this one looked pretty easy, so I thought about making the cake and the frosting. I realized I didn't have time to make the cake from scratch, so I used a cake mix, but I did make the frosting. It couldn't be easier, just cream, chocolate and a little vanilla. The hardest part about making the
frosting was waiting for it to be cold enough to whip. But once it was firm, it whipped up in no time.

the ganache before cooling

The only problem I had with this frosting was that I wasn't able to pipe with it. When it was cold it was too hard to get out of the bag, and when it was room temp it was just too runny. But I solved that problem by adding chocolate chips around the edges and dark chocolate hershey's kisses on the top of the cake.

I didn't think I had put enough frosting between the cake layers, but luckily I did. I made 3 layers out of the cake mix to make the cake a little different and to have more frosting throughout. Needless the say this cake was a hit and it was gobbled up before I knew it.

One of these days I'll actually make the cake from scratch. Maybe when it's not so hectic for me, like it has been this month.

Happy Forking Birthday cake

I made a cake for a couple of my co-workers birthdays, which we are celebrating on Monday. One of our systems at work is called "Fork," so I decided to make them a Fork birthday cake (it's an inside joke).

I started out baking the cake. Just plain yellow cake, everyone likes that!

As the cake was baking, I whipped up a batch of frosting.

I dyed the frosting blue (since the cake is for guys, I thought pink or lilac would be too girly) and frosted the cake.

I drew out a fork and drew it on the cake with grey frosting. I didn't have black coloring to make the grey, so I mixed yellow, red and blue in equal parts to get the grey. I think it looks pretty good, considering I drew it myself.

Next came the nerve wracking part, the lettering. Considering this was my first time lettering on a cake, I think it came out ok. The letters are all different sizes, and don't exactly go in a straight line, but at least it's legible.

After the lettering, making the border was a piece of cake (no pun intended!).

My first not-in-class cake! I think it came out pretty good. I wonder whose birthday is next, so I can start the design ideas for that cake.

What do you think of my cake?