A Carolina-themed wedding rehearsal

My friends Tristan and Miranda gave me the ultimate compliment back in the Spring of 2009 by asking me to make the cake for their wedding rehearsal. They were actually the first folks to ever ask me to do a project for them!

Tristan and Miranda first met their freshman year at UNC back in 2000. They became very close friends, and ultimately started dating in 2006. Tristan proposed to Miranda on November 14, 2008, and they set their wedding date for exactly a year later, on November 14, 2009. I was so excited to be invited to the wedding to begin with, and then, when they asked me to do the cake for their rehearsal dinner, I became even more excited!

We decided that since they met at UNC, a Carolina-themed cake would be both fun and totally appropriate. The cake needed to feed 50-60, so we decided on an 8-inch square 2-layer cake, topped with a 6-inch square 2-layer cake. Each tier was to have a Carolina-blue and navy-blue argyle pattern on the sides. We then decided to include the Old Well on the top of the top tier, with the wedding date printed on the "apron" of the well.

So, I started with the argyle pattern. I thought a frozen buttercream transfer would be the best approach - I could make it a few days ahead of time, and the diamonds would be smoother than if I piped them onto the cake directly. So, I printed out the argyle pattern, taped it to a cookie sheet, then covered the pattern with wax paper. I then used white and tinted buttercream icing to pipe the argyle pattern:

Then, it was time to make the Old Well. I wish I had taken a picture right after I piped the date, but I forgot. Anyway, here's the Old Well:
And, here are the pictures of the final product:

And, the happy couple! They got to practice cutting their cake before the wedding day.A big, big thank you to Tristan and Miranda for inviting me to be a part of their celebration. Also, CONGRATULATIONS and best wishes!

It's a ladybug picnic

I grew up watching Sesame Street and have fond images of the Ladybug Picnic counting spot. Please click here to watch the video.

I was asked to make a birthday cake for a 4-year-old's birthday party following the Ladybug Picnic theme. This was so much fun!!!

My first LOLcake!

For those of you unfamiliar with the "lolcat" phenom, below is a nifty definition stolen from Wikipedia:

A lolcat (pronounced LOLL-kat, with the "lol" not being an initialism), is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin" and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name "lolcat" is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation "LOL" and the word "cat". (src)

For my friend Harris' birthday, I wanted to make him a "lolcat" cake, since I knew he would appreciate the joke. So, I found the perfect cake:

(src)

I wanted to have the "cannibal cake" eyeing some little cupcakes:

Don't they look scared?

And here's the birthday boy!

Wedding #1!

I was fortunate enough to be able to do the baking for a wedding in August, thanks to Andrew and Kelly! We decided on a variety of cupcakes in 3 flavors, with a top tier cutting cake. For a more traditional look and some consistency between the cupcakes and the cutting cake, I decorated each cupcake as a rose, then used royal icing roses to decorate the cutting cake. It turned out wonderfully! And was so fun to do!

The three cupcake flavors were chocolate, vanilla, and hummingbird. Hummingbird cake is a traditional southern cake with bananas and pineapple - very similar to a banana bread, but much "cake-ier."

Sea of cupcakes

Yum...

Cutting cake with royal icing roses

The full set up

Pietacular?

So, I had a lot of blackberries this week, so I wanted to make some blackberry pie. But not a conventional pie...

Enter pie pops!

And pie pockets!

The pie pop idea is, sadly, not mine, but was stolen from Luxirare and Bakerella. They are super duper easy to do, although you have to be careful not to put too much filling in them. About half of mine were useless, because so much filling leaked out.

The pocket pie molds are from Williams-Sonoma.

Louis Vuitton cake

My friend issued a challenge last week. He wanted a Louis Vuitton themed birthday cake for our mutual friends. They are brothers, both with birthdays the first week of August, and both with an undying obsession with Louis Vuitton. For those of you unfamiliar with this designer, the bags look like this:

Now, I'm not talented enough yet in the "sculpting" arena to make a bag-shaped cake. So I figured we would just have to settle for a square cake with the Louis Vuitton design imprinted.

To do this, I downloaded a desktop wallpaper with the Louis Vuitton design. Then I flipped the image (so it was mirror image). I printed that out and covered it with wax paper to pipe each of the designs using melted vanilla candy coating (white chocolate would have worked as well - possibly better).

I then made gold "paint" using edible gold lustre and lemon juice. A couple of notes about this. The instructions say you can use vanilla extract, lemon juice, or vodka. I thought vanilla extract made sense, because the candies were made with vanilla candy. NO. Bad choice. Obviously straight vanilla extract tastes gross and is very strong. That was a moment of braindead-ness for me. So, I switched to lemon and all was peachy keen. The painting took a very long time. If I were to do this again, I would really search in earnest for edible gold lustre SPRAY paint. I think that would be much more time efficient.

Anyway! So then I had the candies, made an 8-inch square red velvet cake, and iced it with chocolate buttercream frosting.

And, folks, here is the final product:

Second photograph courtesy of Jermaine:

What a busy weekend!

This is the 3rd and final cake of the weekend, a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting. This was decorated with a giraffe for the birthday girl, who was turning 3!