Mario Kart Go Cart Track

My son wanted a go cart birthday party. We went to a local go cart track, which also had a huge game room. Personally, I spent most of the time out on the track and had a blast. After the party, the kids that were at the party that I raced with started telling others at school that I was an awesome go cart racer. Love it!

So, to go with the party theme, we decided he would get a Mario Kart themed cake. I pondered this one for a while, because I wanted to bring in the go cart feel.

The "tires" around the outside of the track are cut out using an O fondant letter cutter, then rounded out a bit. The track is also fondant. The cake was chocolate and I used a chocolate buttercream icing (my favorite combination) on the cake to make it look sort of muddy. I then used the hair/grass tip to put on the grass. During a trip to the party store, we found the other props to put on it. The Yoshi and Mario carts were attached to small containers of candy. I popped those off and just used the carts. The prize box in the back left was filled with the gold coin candy that I ended up using to spell his name out on the track. The mushroom also had candy in it, but I didn't use that candy for the cake. I think it was green apple candy, and it was really good. We ate it later. The bomb and star were also candy filled. I thought putting the mushroom under the jump was a nice touch since that is like one of my favorite tracks in the game.

Since this one was chocolate on chocolate, I got a lot of compliments on it. It always turns out real moist. I think we ate less than 2/3 of it at the party, so I took it to work the next day. It didn't last until lunchtime.

Soccer

I never realized just how complex the design of a soccer ball really is. The combination of different types of polygons never really struck me until I had to reproduce it. The child for this party wanted a soccer themed cake. This is pretty much what I came up with.

I think you can safely assume that the kid's name was Emily and she was 8. Most of this was done with only buttercream icing. Only the black part of the soccer ball is fondant. The balls were two layers of cake which were hand-carved to get the ball shape. In order to get them all onto a board that would fit into a standard cake box, I had to keep them pretty close together. It doesn't look bad, but icing the area between them was a nightmare.

Elmo Cake

I'll go on record saying that there are two icing colors that I hate to make. Red and black are horrible because they take a whole mess of dye to get a vibrant color. You can't exactly do an Elmo cake without being bright red.

The heart, mouth, nose and eyes were fondant, but the rest was buttercream icing. In fact, it took a little while to do because I used the grass/hair icing tip to give him a fuzzy appearance. That means that for every square centimeter of surface that I had to place the "hair" and pull away to get the effect I wanted. It's not hard, just tedious. He looked cute though, and they loved it. I've gotten other orders of of this one.

Carving the figure was probably the hardest part of this cake. Trying to get enough detail so that it wouldn't disappear under the hair and especially trying to make it look like one leg was slightly in front of the other without compromising the strength of the cake was interesting. It worked out though. The eyes were the biggest problem because they kept wanting to fall off since they stuck out a bit until I got the fondant over them and sort of tacked it down with icing. You could see individual fingers in person, but they don't really show up well in the picture.

Elegant Baby Shower Cake

So, the research and development for the last post was to make this cake.

I was asked to come up with ideas for the baby shower cake. When she sent me the invitation, I immediately said, "Why don't I do that?" The picture in the middle of the invitation was the basis for the cake above. The flavor was Italian Cream, and I used cream cheese icing under the fondant and between the layers since it had two. The whole cake was initially covered with the pink fondant to provide a solid layer for structure. If you piece together the colors, they tend to want to separate and look terrible. If you cover it with a solid layer, then layer over that with the other colors, no problem. I used buttercream for the outlines and facial features. My wife tells me it looked much better in person. I generally agree, but still like the picture.

I received great feedback from the party that this cake was a major highlight of the festivities. They loved the flavor as well.

Research & Development

The people at my office are often my guinea pigs for trying out recipes. Not that they are complaining. I generally try out lots of recipes before settling on one that I am going to use full time. This time, I had an order for an Italian cream cake for a baby shower. I wanted to make sure that I had the best recipe possible, because the person I was making it for holds a special place in our hearts as one of my son's former teachers, and an excellent one at that. So, what I did was try two different recipes, each prepared with different ingredients. Then I tried two different icings. For each cake recipe, I split the batter and made one cake layer with unsweetened coconut, and the other with sweetened coconut. The two recipes were completely different as well. One was this real elaborate recipe, much like a German chocolate cake, and the other was a quick throw together recipe. For the icings, both we re cream cheese based, but one was loaded with nuts and the other was smoother. I took all of these to work and put out a sign explaining that people had to work for their treat. They were asked to vote on their favorite cake recipe and favorite icing recipe. The winner would be my new go-to recipe.

I looked over several recipes before picking the two I did. After you've been cooking for a long time, you get pretty good at looking at a recipe and gauging whether or not you'll like it. These two recipes stood out. I  got lots of very good feedback from people. Since my office is loaded with engineers, some people put a whole lot of thought into their feedback. I was very surprised with the result. My personal favorite was the more complex cake recipe. Mostly because the texture was light and the flavor was more delicate. The overwhelming winner of the vote was the easier recipe. Who am I to argue with popular opinion.

Hello Kitty

This one was challenging to get photos of. I took photos of the figure and the various layers, but I had to have the customer take a picture of the final product. They didn't live anywhere near me, so I wasn't going to deliver. Instead, I gave them the layers and some extra icing to cover the seams with after they stacked it.

The figure is pure fondant. To give it structure, it just had to sit out for a day or two to dry out. I was a bit worried about damage to her during the trip. The flowers did come off, but they were able to reattach them.

Above is layer one before delivery. Then, there's layer two. Note that the supports (straws) are already in the cake and it's ready for stacking. From what I recall, one tier was white and the other was chocolate.

The final picture was taken after they assembled the cake at its final location.

Demon Pumpkin

This is another non-baking post, but it is food related. It's another one of my Halloween creations. I entered it into my company's pumpkin carving contest and took first place again. Sadly, I'm not sure that first prize even covered all of my materials for this one.

I cleaned the larger pumpkin and carved it, saving some of the goo. The part that I cut out for the mouth was carved to make the tongue. I bought the teeth at a Halloween store. The actually glow in the dark, which is pretty cool. The smaller pumpkin was only carved enough to get the face on it. That thing was rock hard. I little of the goo from the big pumpkin was draped over the smaller one. The eyes are radishes with the ends snipped off and the horns are squash pushed into a hole I cut in the side.

We put this out front Halloween night and I think I had more comments on this one than any I've done in the past. Hmm... It's summertime, so it's time to start thinking about this year's entry.

High School Musical

This one is for another swimming party. They were really into High School Musical at the time. I think it may have been a little while after 3 came out, but the memory is a little fuzzy on that specific detail.

I was not about to do the full image of all the kids from the movie, so I settles on the silhouette. The silhouette is a buttercream transfer that was kind of tricky. The hands wanted to break off as I tried to remove the plastic from the image. Normally when I do those, I'm pressing the image into more buttercream and the entire thing sticks pretty well. In this case, I was trying to get it to stick to fondant, which it doesn't really want to do until the image thaws out. It was a bit of challenge and I had to do a few repairs, but it looked fine. Fondant is a natural pick to get the curtain effect on the sides. By bunching it up a bit, the effect is easy. It's almost like working with real fabric if you make it thin enough.

Swimming Flamingo

This was another interesting request. A swim party customer wanted a flamingo cake. I entertained the idea of doing a standing flamingo for about 10 seconds. I would have done it for a significant fee, but not for what I was going to get paid for it. It would have involved building a structure for the cake. They also wanted chocolate, so I came up with this.

You can make out some of the details, but the lighting blocks some of the feathers and smaller details. I'm not sure what the blemish on the left side of the image in the chocolate is. It wasn't readily apparent on the cake when looking at it.

The flamingo body is fondant layers to give it some depth. The details are mostly done in buttecream icing. I tried a different border on this one by using the leaf icing tip and making it look like more of a lacy border. Not bad, but something I would have to work on. The towel on the leg had the kid's age and name. Obviously, the child didn't pick the idea.

Scooby!

I got a text asking if I could to a Scooby cake. Then they sent pictures of what they had in mind. The idea was a standing Scooby, which was cute, but would have taken forever to do and cost quite a bit. Since the kid in question simply wanted a Scooby cake done by me, we went the cheap route. I did a buttercream transfer for the image, then simply iced around the image. Easy, fairly quick, cheap, and the kid was happy. Mission accomplished.

My brother pointed out that I left his dog tag off. I actually knew that. I didn't make the image small enough to include the whole thing, so I just left it off entirely. The original idea I had was to put four of the tags on the sides of the cake, but I ran out of time to do that and the effect was not as complete as I wanted.

Swimming Angry Bird Cake

I absolutely love how this cake turned out.

This is another one that was done for a swimming party. They wanted an angry birds cake, but I'm sure they didn't dream it would look like this. I used few pictures from the game to get an idea of what the different views of the bird looked like. I picked the yellow one for the shape. Making a ball like most of the birds' shapes is fairly easy, but if you are going to transport it, it could be a problem since the sides can settle a bit. I went with the yellow bird because of the cone shape. Since it was a swimming party, I added the goggles to the bird. I tired to make the goggles look like they were transparent by stippling white dye over the green goggles to give it an effect like you were looking through them to see the eyes. The effect turned out reasonably well. The beak I struggled with a bit. I made it in two parts and let the fondant sit out and dry so it would stand up to gravity. I then attached the two pieced with icing and toothpicks. It still wanted to come off, but it did stay eventually. If I did it again, I would make the beak out of one piece instead. I think I used a chopstick under the top part of the beak to ensue it would stay in place, which finally did the trick.

As you can see from the other angles, there are feathers on the head and tail to round it out. This one was sort of fun, because there were swim classes going on while I set this up. I had a small crowd around me watching as I put on the finishing touches. I even had a parent ask me if this was a cake, just so they could be sure. That made me feel pretty good.

Minecraft Tae Kwon Do Cake

I will be the first to tell you that I'm not terribly fond of Minecraft. I can understand the allure of the game, because it's like having a digital lego set, but it just doesn't hold any interest for me. Now, kids my son's age, that's a different matter.

A friend of ours called to see if I could do his birthday cake. He wanted a Minecraft Tae Kwon Do cake. I had to scratch my head on that one. I looked for some pictures and some came close to what I was looking for, but I still modified it a bit to look a little cleaner. I think it turned out well.

The kid was quite pleased with the result. I sent him a photo message on the phone before I went to deliver it and he called me to thank me for doing such a good job.

Get In My Belly!

I've been remiss about posting. I'll soon remedy that. I have dozens of cakes to post, but I'll get there.

This one was for a baby shower. As if it wasn't hopefully readily apparent. They were looking for an idea for a baby shower cake and I've always wanted to do one like this. To be honest, I really want to do one like this for someone with a sense of humor as warped as mine and make the dress one that has a slightly plunging neckline. Then, just before folding the upper part of the dress up, add nipples to the breast and write "Got milk?" under the dress's material so it is covered up. Then, if someone gets curious, they get a surprise and everyone else gets a good laugh. hopefully, someone will ask for that cake now that I've put the idea out there. But I digress.

This one was white cake with buttercream which was then covered with marshmallow fondant. The belly was about two and a half layers of cake and the boobs were probably just under two layers so that the belly would stick out more. The customer picked the colors of the dress and wanted the colored polka dots. Honestly, when I got the dress color on, I liked the way it looked so much that I almost waited until I delivered the cake to put on the polka dots to see if they really wanted them. You run the risk of the fondant hardening if you do that and the dots would not have looked right, so I just finished it the way they wanted before I delivered. I wish I had at least thought to take a picture without the polka dots, but I didn't. Oh well.