Summer Cupcake Series VII

It is week VII of the Summer Cupcake Series, if you missed the first six weeks you can catch up with the links below:

Week I - Tropical Cupcakes
Week II - Watermelon Cupcakes
Week III - Cupcake Cones
Week IV - Grass Cupcakes
Week V – Glazed Gluten Free Lemon Cupcakes
Week VI – Berry Pie Cupcakes from Oprah.com

Following in the direction of last week’s post, I am pointing you over to one of my absolute favorite bloggers for the cutest Hawaiian cupcakes ever! Bakerella posted these cupcakes last week and I adore them! The ‘sand’ topping, the cute little 'Aloha' signs, and most impressive of all…the leis made out of individual fondant flowers.

Picture from Bakerella.com

I’m contemplating whether I have enough time to make these for an upcoming event. But considering how busy things have been over the last couple of weeks I should probably choose to make something that doesn’t involve hundreds of mini fondant flowers, just to be on the safe side.

I LOVE Bakerella, her creations are amazing and inspiring and she introduced me to Pioneer Woman (well to PW’s site, so it was more of a virtual introduction than a ‘Hey have you met Pioneer Woman? Pioneer Woman this is Chelle.’) This wouldn’t have really been possible anyway since neither one of them has any idea who I am. Although I did meet Pioneer Woman, but she also met 500 other people that night so it’s not likely she remembers me. Maybe I’ll get to meet Bakerella at a book signing just like I met Pioneer Woman, because guess what?

Bakerella has a book coming out next month!!! Woo Hoo! I can’t wait! You can learn about her book here. She hasn’t said yet, but I hope she does a booking signing tour. If not, maybe I’ll invite both of them to the wedding…I wonder if they would come or if they’d think I was crazy and get a restraining order???

Anyway…if you haven’t been to Bakerella’s site you must visit it ASAP.

You can find more pictures, decorating instructions, and the yummy recipe all at this URL: http://www.bakerella.com/lei-time/

Enjoy!

My First Cake Order

A friend of mine asked me to make the cake and cupcakes for her sons’ baptism this past weekend.

After getting a better idea for what she wanted and determining that it was something I could do with my current skill set, I happily agreed. It was such a great opportunity for me to get some more practice in and as you all know I do love baking so any excuse is the perfect excuse!

I used the baptism invitation as my inspiration.

First, before we get to the final outcome, I have to show you the smoothest icing job I think I’ve ever done.

I was proud of myself.

After I stopped patting myself on the back for the smooth icing, I made the cake to match the invitation.

I had a little trouble with the cross looking just perfect (I initially used a tip that was too small for the outline and had to go back and ‘fix’ it); I’m sure most people would have thought it was fine the first time, but the perfectionist side of me wasn’t quite satisfied. But I think it turned out alright. The cross was made out of two different colors of fondant and then outlined in butter cream frosting. The names were made out of chocolate. The date and borders were also done in butter cream frosting and the side border was done in fondant.

Then I made some cupcakes. The liners I used were yellow and blue because those were the boys’ favorite colors. I bought bright yellow and blue liners because the colors usually aren’t as vibrant after the cake is baked; however that wasn’t the case this time and I thought it was a little too much. I have seen a lot of cupcake photos (in books and online) that have two liners on the cupcakes, I always thought it was kind of pointless. However, in this case I gave it a shot to try and subdue the original cupcake liners a bit so they would flow better with the colors of the cake.

The crosses on the cupcakes are fondant, some of the cupcakes had very light colored sprinkles on them and some were just the butter cream…I thought it would be good to have a variety.

When I was all done, I boxed them up.

I need to find a large box that has cupcake holders included, because my handmade version didn’t work so well.

Then I delivered them to the party location and set them up.

I think they turned out pretty well!

Perfect Match

Some friends of ours recently had a baby. We decided to take dinner over one night. And of course I couldn’t send a dinner without dessert, so I decided to make a cake. I figured it would be a good excuse to practice my cake decorating because I haven’t done much since my Wilton cake decorating classes ended.

I used my new Wilton 8-inch round, 3-inch deep cake pan; it holds an entire box of cake mix. It was highly recommended by my Wilton instructor but I didn’t get it until Christmas. I like it because it’s only one pan to clean instead of two and all you have to do is level the top and then cut the rest in half. But, it also gave me the BEST cake I’ve ever had. It came out of the pan so easy and so perfect.

Look, no missing pieces that stuck to the pan.

Isn’t it a beauty. I probably stared at the cake for 3 minutes I was so impressed. (I know you must be thinking I’m crazy, but the small things in life excite me.)

It was a vanilla cake, but I colored it pink since they had a baby girl. (I know, shocking, since those that know me know that I despise the color pink…it goes back to me not being much of a girly girl. But I figured not everyone is as pink averse as myself and it would be kind of cute, and it would kind of match the decorations.

Note how perfectly flat the cake is…

I finally got to use the cake cutter I got for Christmas and it worked great! It was so easy and so level.

As it turns out I get carried away in the baby clothes section of the store. Those mini outfits just sucker you in.

Here’s the gift bag we got them.

What does this have to do with the cake?

Here’s the cake.

I used the gift bag for inspiration.

They match!

In order to match the glitter dots on the bag on the cake I went off to Hobby Lobby to find something that might work. I found pearl dust and I have to say I was very pleased (I used white); it was so easy to use and added just the right amount of shimmer. I can’t wait to use it more in the future.

Sparkle Circles on Gift Bag

Light Pink Sparkle Circle on Cake

Sorry the sparkly shimmer doesn’t really show up that well in the picture.

I needed more than just dots for the top of the cake, so I tried an experiment with the name. It was the first time I had tried something like this that wasn't made out of royal icing.

The name is made out of chocolate!

The cake is frosted in normal frosting. I made the dots (on the cake and on the cake board) and the pink scallop border out of fondant.

Look what else I found at Hobby Lobby….

A fun window cake box!

I have to say that the cake box made it SO much easy to transport and was much more convenient for a ‘drop off’ cake than my cake carrier.

Overall, I'm very happy with how it all turned out!