Cupcakes and Cookies

It's been weeks since I've posted. I don't like it when this happens because I don't even know where to begin... I finally recovered from my wisdom teeth removal. yay! It took longer than I expected. Glad that's over. Good thing I only had some cupcakes to do the weekend following...

These are Pinkalicious cupcakes if you weren't aware. I sure wasn't. Some book the kids are reading these days :) 

 This is the awesome cupcake carrier my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. I finally had a chance to use it and I am completely in love. I've used it lots since. Obviously it works well for cupcakes, but I took out the red trays and put cookies in there. Wonderful.

Speaking of those cookies, I made those around the time I made these cupcakes. 

 I love doing baby shower cookies, but I've learned I'm not very creative... stripes and dots. How else to decorate!? Especially for boys... But I really like the colors. Unfortunately I had to color more after I outlined them so I didn't quite match the original colors. Bummer.

 I had fun with the pictures... until I got to the carriages and they were still drying so this is the pic they got :)

 Then I stuff them all on one plate for the shower. There were over 50 cookies.

I made these for a lady at the Chamber of Commerce. I'm an Ambassador and we have bi-monthly meetings. This lady had a baby in December and we're just having time to celebrate (after her maternity leave, etc)! So we did a little shower at our meeting. I brought these cookies and no one believed I had made them! I work for Panera, so they all thought they were Panera cookies.... Oh no. Panera doesn't make 'em like this!! It was funny because the ambassadors really don't know how I'm obsessed with baking!

Well that covered a little bit of what I've been doing in March. I'll start another post so this one doesn't get too long.

Catch up and Questions

Goodness, I've been meaning to post this for over a week now. But between trips to the beach with my sisters and mom and trips to the hospital because of my husband's kidney stone, I haven't managed to. I still don't have much time at the moment. I feel like I have tons to do all the time. But no need to get into that... I'll just focus on writing this.

The past 2 weeks I did cupcakes!! First was for a little girl at our church. She is absolutely adorable!! She turned two in December.

I had a lot of fun taking pictures of these, if you can't tell. I'd love to put them in cute frames and whatnot like I see on others' blogs, but I don't know how to. So if anyone does, please share!!

These are vanilla with cream cheese icing. I was very happy with how the cc icing turned out. And I love these big cupcake liners!! If you can't tell, they're taller than the normal ones. 

The next batch were actually the same as these but with buttercream icing.

Some were chocolate this time, obviously. Can you tell how ugly the icing is?! It's really noticeable right after you see the cream cheese ones. The buttercream had so many air bubbles. I know that seems like an obvious cause, but I make buttercream all the time and basically do the same thing everytime and sometimes it's worse than others. This time I did use salted butter (sorry, but it was on sale and the unsalted was gone and butter is expensive these days!!) but I never would have thought it would make that big of a difference. Any ideas?

This is why the post is titled "Catch up and Questions"  I have a few questions to throw out there for anyone who might be able to help. Please help me solve the air bubble issue. Next: I baked several chocolate cakes tonight using the same recipe I've always used. Recently I've had problems with my chocolate cake sticking to the pan! So frustrating. I'm going to have to rebake some of the cakes because they were ruined. Even if I put wax paper in the pan, they'll stick some to the paper. WHY?! Could it be because I'm doubling the recipe? Is it possible to use too much non-stick spray?? I must figure this out.

I saw some Magic Line square cake pans for sale online... I have a set already and I love them. But I have learned since I've been baking and since I always make layered cakes, that it's nice to have at least 2 of each cake pan. It saves time; I can bake cakes twice as fast. They would've come in handy tonight since I had to bake 2 - 6", 4 - 8" and 2 - 10". So I'm debating whether to get them or not. They'd be nice to have and I think they're worth the price, but I have no idea where I would store them. I've already out-grown our renovated pantry and am constantly trying to rearrange things so it's not cluttered. Hmmm.... decisions, decisions.

Alright, last request for feedback. I just filled out my form for the cake competition, wrote the check, and sealed and stamped the envelope. The competition is a month from today and I know it'll be here before I know it. The theme is Grandma's Closet so if you have any ideas or suggestions at all, please share!! I know I've asked before, but it's out there again. Think, think, think :)

Well I don't think it took me too long to write this. I really wish I could figure out how to frame my pictures up all snazzy and what not, but I need to stay focused. More to do before I go to bed. I've got a few cakes this weekend and have intentions of using some of my Christmas goodies!!! I'm so excited. Hopefully I'll have a chance to post pics this weekend. 

Night!

Wedding Showers

Since my first post was all about the wedding of friends of mine I thought I'd share the shower cakes and cupcakes I made for the bride in the past few months. 

As you can see from the wedding, the bride loves colorful colors!! And she used gerebera daisies so you will see that was my inspiration.  I made these cupcakes for a shower at her work. This was the first time I've ever made gerbera daisies. I don't have a cutter so I used a regular daisy cutter. I used two and layered them to make more petals. Then I used a toothpick to make the indentions in the petals. Then set them in a few bowls covered with aluminum foil to create the shape I wanted. But for most of them I just formed the aluminum foil because I only had 4 small bowls! 

For cupcake wrappers, I made them myself! I saw a great template on one of blogs I follow: The Sweet Adventures of SugarBelle.  I followed it back to this site: Skip To My Lou. I just used regular stock paper and voila!

Can you tell I was really happy with these?! I still like them :)

Then for the church shower, I had some leftover daisies so I made a few more. I really like them :) The shower was only about a week later than the first. 

This cake looks simple enough right? Well I had planned it to be a topsy turvy cake with fondant. Oh goodness gracious.... I did it all. And it looked awful!! I was really upset. But I decided I'd rather it look nice and simple than crappy and "topsy". Then I was nervous about the flowers falling off the cake. So this simple cake took aaaallll day. People have no idea what I go through when I make a cake, haha!

I decided to add the border after I did the flowers... it would've been better to do first, but I'm glad I added it anyway.

I love these colors!

These are at the shower, with the added "A" to the top. That is the initial of the couple's last name. I loved the decor also! It made the cake look so much better than my plan white background.

Tiered Cake, Groom's Cake, and Cupcakes!

Hello!! I have wanted to start a blog for some time to be able to share my journey in cake decorating! The good and the bad. I shouldn't (although I might fail) share my flaws and frustration of cake decorating with everyone. I don't want them to notice. I want others to be able to see my cakes and think I did them with no problems at all. But I love cakes. And I want to talk about them all the time! Hopefully through the blog, I'll have an audience that is interested, that understands, and that could possibly help me when I encounter tough situations.


I thought this would be a good time to start my blog. I did a wedding this past weekend. Not my first, but I'm gradually moving up to bigger weddings. The first two were a challenge but simple compared to this wedding and the others I have coming up. What made this wedding such a step up was that I was to make 350 cupcakes, a small tiered cake, and the groom's cake. When it got closer to the actual wedding date, it hit me. Woah. That's a lot!! But I hate turning down cakes! I can do it :) Somehow...


So about two weeks before the wedding I start making a schedule for how I am going to accomplish all of this. I also tried to figure up how long it would take me to do roughly 30 batches of cupcakes etc. By the way, I do have a "real" job. Not to imply that this cake thing is not real work!! The point is, I did not have all day, every day to work on these cakes.  This is what I worked out:


Monday - Make fondant bows for cake, start making icing (I ended up making about 10 batches total)

Tuesday - Make more icing, pre-mix dry ingredients for cakes

Wednesday - Bake two 4", two 6", two 8", two 12"x18", two 9"x13"

Thursday - Bake 350 cupcakes, ice tiered cake
Friday - Ice all cupcakes, decorate groom's cake, work on tiered cake

Saturday - finish up any decorations for cakes


I think the schedule helped. I will say it did not all go as planned, but it all worked out. And here they are:

 Boy did this cake give me a harder time than planned! As you can see, there is cake in the icing. Incredibly frustrating! When I did my crumb coat, some that I scraped off had gotten crumbs in it and that was the icing I had to finish off with. I didn't realize it had crumbs in it until I was covering it again. And I didn't want to make more icing! But it was a gray jersey I was going from, so the speckled looked worked. That was a bummer... but then I started the red! Bluh... I hope all cake decorators don't shun me for this, but I bought red icing. I wanted it to be true red icing and not a kinda goofy-colored red, weird tasting, strange consistency icing. I just need more practice doing it on my own, which I do usually but this was a large quantity. Anyway, it all seemed fine when I dirty iced it. Then I put it in the fridge to harden... Hours later I come back to it. I don't know if it's because I did the gray first... but when I got to the red, it hadn't hardened... so when I was covering it again, all of the icing, including the first layer, was just moving around, crumb and all. And it didn't smooth out well. Oh gosh, I was so frustrated with this red icing!! I needed time away from this cake. After I had simmered down, I am pretty happy with it. Not perfect by all means, and learned the hard way on a few things, but I'm still happy with it. But did anyone notice that one sleeve is longer than the other?? See, these are things I shouldn't share, say, at the wedding with the guests... haha! (Don't worry, I didn't)

Yes, this is the inside of my fridge. It just "chilled" there right after I finished it and before we headed to the church.

One of the three cupcake stands, made by the bride's father. He did a great job!

See where I got the colors from?? Although the bride didn't give me the purple napkin so that's why there are no purple cupcakes. But six colors were enough for me anyway.

The tiered cake was tough too. Icing a cake frustrates me sometimes. Annoying because it's so basic. It all turned out though, again, with a few lessons learned the hard way again. And I did notice the tiers were not all the same height... after they were iced and ready to stack...

See, why I wanted to start the blog? For some reason, I have this tendency to want to point out all the tough parts and mistakes... I don't know why. Maybe because I put so much into it, I just want to talk about the story. I guess my stories just tend to have a lot of "oops". It's the learning process!!

Oh, and I had a cake for Sunday! I had planned to bake the cake amongst the baking for the wedding. Yeah, that didn't happen. So after the wedding (which I attended) I get to baking (around 4:30/5pm). It's a block cake. An  8x8x8 cube. I have one 8x8 square pan. I need four layers... Anyone catching on? So they're all done baking around 9. And yes, I should have done them earlier so they could've settled, but there was no time. I did experience air bubbles because of this, but I knew it was a possibility. I know better! But this is how it went this time. By 3 am, I finish! Hooray!

It was for a little boy's first birthday. That's his smash cake to the left. Yup, had to bake that too. This was my first cube/square cake. It was good practice! It's tough getting that shape. But the customer and her family liked it and that's (mostly) what matters!! I took a nice nap Sunday too. Still working on cleaning my kitchen that I had so wonderfully cleaned the weekend before...

It's looking a lot better than that! 

Well thanks for reading my blog! I know this was a loooong entry. I doubt they will all be like this. This just happened to be a eventful week full of cake! I will do my best to post whenever there's a cake, which hopefully will be often :)

Lydia