Soccer Supa Stars!!

Since my girls kick so much booty on the soccer field, I like to make them cakes that appropriately reflect this fact. After all, they are the reason that I started making cakes in the first place. So, I decided to post some of the soccer cakes that I've done for my girls' parties. Plus, posting these cake pictures one by one is gettin' old. I've got too many pictures for that! Lol.

Let's go in succession here.

#1. This is one of the first soccer cakes I ever made for my daughter. Looking back at this picture.....there are so many things that I could say...but I won't. I can say that I have learned A LOT!

I baked the ball in a soccer ball baking pan. Wilton has their line of different shaped cake pans. I love that they have this but I don't much like the directions that they give for decorating them. I'm not a big fan of the star tip dots so the guide lines on the inside of the baking pans more or less just drive me crazy instead of helping guide....anything! That forces me to go about the decorations on my own. Which is definately apparent from the above picture!! Lol. I covered the ball in white marshmallow fondant, used black gel icing to make the pentagons and I used my long knife to make the indents where the stitching would be. For the cupcakes, I used the infamous grass tip, rolled up some fondant for the mini soccer balls and made the dots with a black edible marker, and wrote all the players names in white chocolate. I have to say that I remember writing each name at least 3 times! I broke so many of those. It was a shame.

#2. This was made after a little more practice. It was simple enough that I didn't have structural issues. It was also one of the few cakes that I used toys on instead of fondant/gumpaste decorations. My only issue with this cake is the messy writing on the side. I think I was getting ready to walk out the door to head to the party when I realized that I wanted to put some writing on the side. The outcome was not pretty!

This was a 9x13, 2 layer vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. The soccer ball is cake as well. I carved a small sphere out of cake and cut out the pentagons and hexagons from a small template that my husband printed out for me. I'm in love with how the ball turned out....especially in comparison to the picture before this! Lol. I used white chocolate to write Storm, and that little think sticking out of the cake behind the ball is supposed to be a lightning bolt. I got the plastic goals and trophy from Party City. The set came with some soccer players too but they were odd looking. Plus this was a girls soccer team cake so I don't think it would have been appreciated.

#3. As I look at this picture now, I think it's slightly leaning to the right. Oops. Might have been the beer in the background! Hell, it didn't fall and that's what matters!!
This cake was for my older daughter's End of Season soccer party last year. Again, vanilla cake and vanilla buttercream frosting. At least my girls are simple in that respect!

 This was actually not supposed to be a 2 tier cake. I think I was going to make something similar to cake #2. Fortunately for the Slammers soccer team, the other order for this weekend was cancelled after I'd baked the cakes already, leaving extra cake (and time) to make a cool cake for them! In the end, I was pretty happy with this cake. I know this post has been a whole lotta me bashing my old cakes but I think I'm over it now. :-)
The soccer ball on top was carved out of cake and covered in fondant pentagons and hexagons ( not as pretty as the previous soccer ball, but I said I was done bashing my cakes so...). The stars were blue, orange and white fondant. The team name was orange chocolate that I melted into letter molds and piped some little steaks on the bottom so that I could stick them into the cake so they stood up securely.
The Mt. Rainier was what I really loved about this cake. I printed out a generic picture of a mountain and put some wax paper over the picture. Then, I used melted white chocolate in a piping bag to outline the mountain and fill in all the white spots, leaving the darker spots open so that you'd be able to see the green frosting behind it. Then I just took the rest of the green frosting and started piping a crap-load of grass everywhere! Can't go wrong with grass on a soccer cake!!

#4. Short and sweet! This cake was for a party my younger daughters team had after winning their first summer tournament ( they went on to win all of their summer tournaments this year!!). Although I would like to say that it didn't take me very long... that would be a lie. The logo was hand made and it took me a while to get all the colors and shapes just right.

I printed out the logo and cut out the different shapes that I needed. Then I just pieced it together and threw it on the top of the cake. Some green chocolate letters and a little border and that bad boy was headed out the door!

#5. I've pretty much given up on trying to put these in chonological order. I'm pretty sure that the next cake was done around the same time at soccer cake #3....maybe....

This was my first attempt at modeling chocolate ( the chilli peppers) and it didn't turn out like I thought it would have or should have. I mixed some red Candy Melts with some light corn syrup. And when I say "some", I mean "Too flipping much!" I cannot take responsibility for this failure....it's the recipes fault! The modeling chocolate was too soft and it didn't take much handling to compromise the shape of the chilli pepper as I was trying to mold it. I could have tried to fix the recipe but I didn't have time for that nonsense. I will try again with the modeling chocolate soon. I think there are some cakes that I would like to use it for :)

I'm pretty sure that is all of the soccer cakes I have pictures of. Unfortunately, I can think of at least 3 cakes that I never got photos of ( good job!). Oh well.

I do have a couple of basketball cakes that I'm going to have to post soon.

See you then!!

Cheers~ 

The Princess and the Frog Cakes

I love love love The Princess and the Frog movie, so when an acquaintance of mine asked me to do a Princess Tiana cake, I was super excited! I had done a Bratz doll cake before and I wanted to try another doll cake with lots of fondant work on the dress. I wanted it to be fru-fru and detailed since I wasn't experienced enough to do all that nonsence when I did the first doll cake. As soon as she said "The Princess and the Frog", all these ideas came bellowing into my head for the design.

She'd decided that she wanted strawberry cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. This is one time when I didn't mind when she told me to just "..do what you do!" when it came time for her opinion on the design. I already knew what I wanted to do anyway! Lol. Although sometimes plans don't really go the way you expect them to.......

Originally I'd planned on making a 10'' base cake decorated to look like the bottom of a carousel music box and have Princess Tiana standing on top of that cake. If I could make her turn around like she was dancing that would have been the coolest thing EVER! Delusions of gradeur I'm afraid.

Problem # 1. A 10'' base cake plus the full batch that would go to make the Princess dress would be too much cake.

Ok, I'll make the base cake an 8'' round instead and stack the princess dress cake on top of that. It'll be fine..

WRONG-O!!

Problem #2- The bottom of the dress cake is 8'' around. That'll just make for one tall doll cake!

Well crap! Ok, I"ll do the princess cake and then put Frog Prince cupcakes all around.

YEAH RIGHT!

Problem #3- I am NOT making a bunch of little Frog Princes to decorate those cupcakes. I've got too much to do!

Well, it looks like we're going to have two different cakes here. One Princess Tiana cake and one Frog Prince cake. They can just hang out next to eachother! And that's what I did. I baked an 8'' round cake for the Frog Prince.

Decorating was fun!! I got to make a little frog sculpture with his little crown. And lilly pads and vines and flowers and all that jazz! For the princess dress, I printed out a picture of Princess Tiana and used that as my inspiration. I bought a real Princess Tiana doll to put in the middle of the dress. I just wrapped the legs up in some plastic wrap before I plunged it into the dress cake! I made layer after layer of different colored fondant to make sure that I got the effect that I wanted. I did have to peel some off when I realized that I was making her waist bigger with all that fondant! Lol. I couldn't resist adding the gold shimmer dust!

AND then there was the Frog Prince! Purple and green seem to be the common colors for the Princess and the Frog cakes that I googled.....so let's go with that. Can't beat purple buttercream! I love purple and green together anyway. I also decided to write her name in green frosting like and pipe some vines coming off of a couple letters. There would be vines all over this cake anyway, with a large lilly pad on top harboring the wonderful Frog Prince! I threw on a couple of left over flowers that my girls helped make for Tiana's dress.

As much as I wanted to, putting the crown on that frog's head was not an option at this point. I had about run out of energy. Did I mention, most of the cakes that I did during the summer were done on the weekend....when we had soccer tournaments to attend??! This was no exception. Duties of a soccer family. The pick-up was right after the tournaments Championship game ( my daughter's team won! Yay Madi!).
In the end, I was super happy with how these cakes turned out. My husband said that the princess cake was the best cake I'd ever done! Well thanks, honey! :)

I'm still working on posting a bunch of pre-blog cakes that I really enjoyed working on.

Thank you to Shay for letting me create Angelina's cake! Hope I get to out-do myself next year :)
Until next time, Cheers!

Biker Boys and Baby bottoms...what a great combo!

Those two really don't go together at all! Lol. But, those are two of the cakes that I did this weekend. I actually did 3 cakes this weekend, but I didn't take any pictures of the 3rd one because..... well there really isn't a good reason. I was just slippin on my game. Darn shame. It was an experiment and turned out really nice. You'll just have to take my word for it! Lol. I plan on doing another one ( but even better) in the near future so I promise I'll share THAT one!

The first cake was a 2 tier cake with a Bike Boy theme. The birthday boy was turning 5 and loves riding his bicycle around the neighborhood, so mom was throwing him a bike riding party. Seems pretty appropriate that you would need a bicycle cake! There were a couple of firsts with this cake. This is the first bicycle themed cake that I've done AND this is the first 2 tier cake that I've done in the Neopolitan flavor. This means 3 layers per tier. I'm a 2-layer-per-tier gal myself. Lol. Thank you Farinaz ( the birthday boy's sweet momma) for putting me to work! :-) Anywho, if you've ever had Neopolitan Ice cream.... same thing, but in cake. Delicious, if I do say so myself.

I had a couple of concerns about building this cake. Since I'm a 2-layer-gal, I hadn't stacked a 3 layer cake and was worried that it would be wobbly or one of the layers of cake would collapse ( this has happened to me before!) so I tried to make sure that I put the most dense flavor at the bottom. Sorry Chocolate Cake layer, you drew the short straw. I settled on layering chocolate, then strawberry , then vanilla.

She wanted to be able to remove the top tier from the bottom and save it for later so I didn't stick a dowel down the center like I normally would with a stacked cake. And for some unknown reason Joanne's did NOT have 6'' cake separator plates. Having that plate could have aleviated a whole lotta heart stress during transport. If I would have had a heart attack on the way to Farinaz' house, I surely would be blaming Joanne's!! I put in 5 or 6 plastic dowels so that it would stand level...... though I must have cut one too short cause it was still leaning a little. It would survive. It just needed to make it there to be pretty for the party the next morning and then it was coming off anyway.

The bicycles on the side of the cake were thorns in my sides too! I take that back. It wasn't necessarily the bicycles themselves. They were beautiful. They just wouldn't serve the function that Farinaz needed them to. I was a little slow on the draw and didn't realize until after I'd set the bikes I make out of chocolate onto the cake and the chocolate had hardened. Great going, YemaYa. Now I gotta play Mrs. Fix-it and take the bikes off, carefully, smooth the frosting again and make some new bikes. The chocolate bikes would have made it difficult to pull the top tier off and not mess anything up.....and I just plain didn't like the way they looked. The next option was fondant bikes. This is when I realized that an extruder sure would come in handy. Or one of those plastic play-dough toys that you use to make hair for your dolls! I didn't have either so I just used my hands and rolled the fondant out. Sigh.

Here is the finished product! Ignore the Kickstart in the back of the fridge! Lol.

Everything else went pretty smooth!!
On to the next one!

The Baby Bottom cake was pretty easy. This is the 3rd baby bottom cake that I've done so I didn't have any structural issues or anything like that. The trouble I had with this cake was the theme....or lack thereof.
My good friend Lay loved the previous baby bottom cakes and simply wanted one just like that. Am I so wrong to want each cake to be unique??! Lol. Some times you have baby showers with a baby animal theme, or an animal print theme or specific colors. The descriptor-  It's a boy. So that's what I'm working with here! On one hand, I love having free design reign. It usually makes for a very intricate cake as I like trying techniques or ideas that I've never done before. On the other hand, some navigational beacons would be nice. Oh well. I ended up doing a design I'd been thinking about doing for something baby related.

I woke up that morning feeling really good about this design. I was thinking that teal would be a good color for it. I wasn't sure about the contrasting color though. That would take a little longer. I started working with the teal first since I knew I wouldn't change my mind on that color. I'd decided to do a teal blanket (over the baby bottom) with a yellow border and a teal button border at the base of the cake with teal and yellow polka dots. Once I got that done I took a step back and I realized that I didn't like it at all. Not one bit. How in the world was I going to fix this aweful color mishap!? Grrrrrrrrr. I wasn't sure so I took a break.

Oooh, Oooh, Oooh!! I got it! ( insert bouncing and hand-clapping here). Teal and brown and teddy bears! I had to remove the yellow border on the fondant blanket and make a brown one. Then I cut out some brown polka dots and replaced the yellow ones and filled my teddy bear chocolate mold with some milk chocolate. I had to re-smooth a bunch of spots in the frosting but I liked the color combo MUCH better. I also added two chocolate bears along the borders on either side of the words. 

Yay me! :-)

Needless to say, I was a little busy this weekend. I am only one person and I have a tendency to over-book myself, then scramble to get things done, then get yelled at by my husband for over- booking. It's a vicious cycle.

Fortunately, I am really happy with how the cakes turned out and  my customers are too so it was all worth it.

Thank you Farinaz and Lay Lay (for Beyounca's shower) for letting me create your cakes. Cheers ladies~