Meet Your Caker

I’m trying to keep up with a schedule of posting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It makes me feel slightly forced to come up with something at times, but mostly I just have to make sure I take the time on those days to post something. I didn’t post anything yesterday, so here is yesterday’s post, and yes, it is kind of thrown together. I was intending to do a post like this, but with more planning, not that that ever makes much of a difference to me. I always start typing and then go off on tangents and stuff doesn’t usually write out the same way I had originally planned it. That’s the way it goes though, I’m cool with it.


This post is mainly about pictures. My wife Taylor and I enjoy decorating cakes. She is a fan of the Cake Boss TV program, which I have never seen a complete episode of, and she has taken decorating classes. She introduced me to cake decorating. I enjoy creativity so I got on board with the cake decorating pretty easily, plus I enjoy doing things with her.

First is a cake she was making for the kids she works with at school. This was last May, or thereabouts. The kids requested a school playground theme for the cake.
 

The cake was made out of regular cake, then frosted with homemade butter cream frosting, and topped with homemade fondant (fancy name for rolled icing made from marshmallow and powdered sugar, lots of it). The "skate park," "sand under the swings," and "school bus" are made from crisped rice cereal treats. I don't remember if it was the brand name or not. The swing and soccer net posts are those round cookies from Pepperidge Farm.  The tire swing is a Hostess chocolate donut. The other swing was crafted from fondant. The swing chains and the soccer net are Twizzlers. The soccer ball is a carved marshmallow painted with melted chocolate, the same melted chocolate used to paint the "asphalt" and the markings on the bus. The children are toys and not edible, not for humans. This was a large cake.

We were going to do our own wedding cake, but it was a busy time and we settled on making cupcakes. Over this last weekend we decided to make a cake just for fun. Taylor had a cake in mind from one of her cake books. Here is our rendition of it:

These island pictures were taken with my cell phone camera, so the image quality isn't quite as good. I need a new camera. Taylor used a real camera to get some pictures, but she is at work right now and I don't know where that camera is. For now, these pictures will suffice. We used regular cake from store bought mixes again, but this time used a different frosting recipe. I liked this frosting better since it didn't have whole sticks of butter in it. Crisco was used instead, so not much better, health-wise, but it tasted cleaner.

The bottom layer of cake was a 12" flat square, then we used a round cake and carved it into the island. We colored the frosting for water and grass. The boulders along the coast are some kind of coconut candies, they worked perfectly for boulders. The water was topped off with some white frosting to highlight the crashing waves. The hut is made from fondant and painted with melted chocolate. The thatched roof was also fondant, these pictures don't show the detail well, but it looked good. The palm tree is made from stacked Rolos and fondant leaves. There is a treasure map, hand painted with a tooth pick out back of the hut. The dirt strewn about is cocoa mix. There is a little waterfall that starts at a spring with some fondant flowers next to it.

This cake was a lot of fun to make, and very sugary to eat. Luckily we shared it for a potluck lunch at church. We did eat the remaining materials that I crafted into a frog looking cake, which sadly was not photographed. It was very sugary. If you have any fancy cake needs, let me know, maybe we can make a cake for you.