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.

Gone Fishing

My sister-in-law's step father asked if I would do his retirement cake. He said he wanted it to look like the party invitation. When I got the picture, I almost said no, but then I decided I would take the challenge.

Even though he was "retiring," he had a boat and he decided to spend all of his time taking clients out fishing. Sounds pretty rough for someone who absolutely loves fishing. It's funny that people retire and then manage to simply find a different job.

I took the picture, inverted it, and blew it up to 11 x 17 size. That way, I could do a buttercream transfer of the entire top of the cake. It would be far easier than trying to do it freestyle. I had also been wanting to try doing an entire cake's surface as a transfer since I figured it would provide additional stability to the image. If you try to do an image with a lot of detail without surrounding support for it, the details are likely to break off when you try to remove if from the plastic. I figured that one giant sheet of frozen icing would be pretty solid and easy to manipulate.

I had a pretty large bamboo cutting board that I taped the image to the back of. I carefully covered it with plastic wrap so there were no wrinkles at all. I then set about mixing the many colors I needed one by one and slowly built the image up from light to dark. Once I had the main image complete and all of the background details, I filled in the background water and sky. I then stuck the whole image in the freezer for a couple of hours. I was working on the previous Mario cake just before finishing this one, so it was another really busy day.

I took the image out of the freezer after it seemed to set up and readied to put it on the cake. The cake was covered with white buttercream and I tried to make sure it was still wet when I flipped the image from the cutting board over on the cake. This is a tense moment, because the image warms quickly after you take it out of the freezer and if it warms too much, there is absolutely no chance you will get a second attempt before it softens. You have to work quickly.

I managed to get the image almost perfectly centered on the cake and shaved off a little bit of the image that hung over the sides. I then piped around the top to cover the edges and the small gap between the icing image layer and the icing below it. I was piping the border just before walking out of the house. It was also a very humid rainy day, so the icing took a while to set up. Travelling without letting the icing crust completely is a dangerous proposition. I pushed it a little too much and the top border icing did shift a little bit. Nobody commented on it and I may have been the only person who really cared, but it bothered me. I actually like this type of image better than some airbrushed or printed image. It seems much more impressive when it's all made from icing, especially when it is a detailed image like this one.

Mario 1up

What better for a birthday than a 1up mushroom from Super Mario. This is another swim party cake, but for once the parent asked for a theme. Mario is certainly a theme I can work with. I got inspired by this one and did something way more elaborate than I would normally do for one of these.

The base of the cake was a two layer 10" cake. It was covered with blue buttercream to make the sky background, then partially covered with fondant to represent the clouds. I made the castle from the game and the little shrubs with eyes that are so cool in the backgrounds. The castle has the child's age on it as a nice little touch.

The face of the mushroom is two layers of 6" cake. That tier was also covered with fondant and I added the eyes. That one was pretty easy.

The top layer was the tough one. It was two layers of eight inch diameter cakes with a little bit of the 6" leftover cake that I took off to cut down the height of the 6" layers. I then had to shape the mushroom top. The top was covered with buttecream icing to make the fondant stick and then covered with green marshmallow fondant. The white spots were spaced out somewhat evenly to give a good view from all sides.

I got to the site and set up the cake. While I was setting it up, there were classes going on and several parents sat around and watched me finish the cake. I asked a couple of times if it was a cake or not. When the mother of the birthday boy got there, she had some Mario Kart cars to put on the cake. I knew she was going to bring some figures, but I didn't know they were Mario Kart, or I would have used that theme. It worked out great though, because there was just enough room around the edges of the mushroom to put the carts around the top of the lower tier. I absolutely love how it turned out.

Jungle Baby Shower

One of my brother's good friends is a veterinarian. She's extremely nice and was having a little girls. My sister-in-law asked if I would do the cake for the shower. She had definite ideas about what should be on the cake. She wanted two tiers with one tier being white and the other chocolate. It got interesting from there. She wanted a checkerboard pattern on the bottom and jungle wildlife on the top with vines and vegetation. She had a material swatch that was going to be used in the nursery as a reference material. I had fun with it from there. The colors were a light green and apricot, which is an interesting combination that works somehow.

Now, I finished this cake on the same day that I did the red wedding cake. It was a busy week. I don't want to do that again. It's way too much work to do two cakes of that size in one week when I'm doing it in the evenings.

The cakes were first covered with buttercream, then I put a thin layer of fondant over them. Next, the animals and checker board pattern were made from marshmallow fondant as well. I kept everything very thin so it wouldn't be too chewy when all stacked up. The vines on top are buttercream.

To make things even more interesting, I was not delivering this cake. Since it was so far away and I had to deliver the wedding cake on the same day, we decided that my brother would bring the cake, stack it, and pipe between the layers. I sent the leftover icing to do that. Since I wouldn't be there, I sent the instruction to get pictures once the cake was complete, so I didn't take these. I got them in my inbox as I was setting up the wedding cake and was pleased with the result. I get a little anxious when I'm not the one finishing up the cake.

Motorcycle

I've realized there is an issue with some of the motorcycles out there. They look like scooters when you see them from the right angle. A friend asked me to make a motorcycle cake for a friend of theirs. I figured it would be a fun challenge. I got the pictures of the bike in question, and we talked it out. We figured the front view would be the easiest to put into cake form. The cake itself was chocolate with chocolate buttercream covered with marshmallow fondant.

As I started working this, I carved out the shape needed and then started covering. First I put on a thin layer of gray fondant to act as the metal surfaces. Then I layered on the red and black where needed. Finally, the headlight was added. The headlight details are simply painted on with thinned cake dye.

Once it was put together, I realized just how much this thing looked like a scooter. I wasn't happy with it, but it was too late to do too much about it. I didn't hear any complaints, but I was personally disappointed that it didn't look cooler than it did. In retrospect, I would have preferred to go with a side shot.

Interesting Red Wedding Cake

This one is another interesting story. I got a text from a good friend of mine. He's one of those guys that would literally give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He had a friend and co-worker that needed a wedding cake done and wanted a quote from me. I gladly gave him one for the size they were asking for, and the rather cryptic description he was provided. His friend opted to go with me after talking to a few other people.

I talked to the mother of the bride and got the specifics. That's where it got tricky. The description of what the bride wanted was rather unique. They wanted a tier of white cake, a tier of chocolate, and the top tier made of red velvet. Each tier was to be decorated differently. The bottom was to be wrapped with a wire edged ribbon, the middle covered with red swirls and the top covered with small broken red candy. It took me a while to ferret out those details to the point I felt comfortable with the idea that I could make a cake resembling the description.

To make the story even more interesting, I got this order only about a week before the wedding. I figured there had to be an interesting story behind it, because nobody orders a wedding cake a week before their wedding.

The two bottom tiers were covered with fondant. The red swirls are buttercream icing. The top tier was covered with buttercream icing, then I pressed in large clear ruby red sprinkles until it was completely covered.

I made the cakes and delivered them across town as well. I set up the cake by simply stacking the layers and putting a red border between each layer. They had also requested that pearls be incorporated into the cake somehow (lots of design elements on this one!), so I got some edible pearl candy and pressed it into each of the red border dots. I takes a few minutes, but it is a nice touch of elegance.

I had to wait around for the mother of the bride so I could get paid. She also brought the cake topper, which I thought was a nice touch. I'm not sure why they ordered a huge layer of chocolate cake for the bride's cake, because the grooms cake ended up being a huge chocolate cake covered with chocolate dipped strawberries made by a friend of theirs. They certainly didn't need more chocolate. It turned out that the person with the money showed up late, so I ended up staying through the ceremony to get paid. It was sort of weird because I was in shorts and a t-shirt and everyone else was all decked out. I couldn't help it though. It wasn't my fault I was still there. The wedding was at one of those event centers where everything (ceremony, reception, pictures, etc.) occurs within about a 40 foot diameter.

I found out from my friend that the person they were going to have do their cake backed out after either a falling out or after some changes to the cake, I'm not sure which. It was way late for someone to back out like that, so they scrambled to find someone who could do it on a tight budget. The cake wasn't real detailed or difficult, so it wouldn't have been a big problem for anyone who could bake.

New Bon Bon Mold

Since making the chocolate bon bons out of the chocolate cake and chocolate buttercream icing, I've tried other combinations. I still haven't tried a red velvet and cream cheese icing one yet, but it's on the list of things to attempt. To hopefully make the bon bon creation process easier, I ordered some bon bon candy molds to try out. I wouldn't say it took less time to make the bon bons this way, but it caused fewer headaches.

I really don't enjoy the whole dipping in chocolate thing, so I was looking for something different to try. What I did with the molds was paint the chocolate on the mold first, let it set up, then put the filling in a zip top bag. After cutting a small corner off of the bag, I piped the filling into the molds. After that, I simply had to drizzle a little chocolate on the "bottom" surface to seal the filling in.

Previously, what I had to do was chill the filling, roll it into small balls, chill it more (cold enough to stand up to the melted chocolate, but not cold enough to freeze), dip the balls in melted chocolate and then make sure that enough chocolate dripped off that it wouldn't pool on the parchment paper when I set it down. It's a pain. To make things worse, if I did freeze the filling balls before I dipped them, there was provably a 50% or better chance that the chocolate coating would pop or crack open as the center warmed up because this filling apparently shrinks when frozen. As it warmed up, it would swell and break the chocolate coating open. I don't have that problem with the mold method, so I'm sticking with them. You also get that pretty finished effect and the cool little swirl on top without trying.

Look, Another Pool!

Here is another pool party cake. I wanted it to be a little different, so this time it wasn't a large pool with stuff around it. I opted to simply do a bunch of large pool accessories.

The towel on the left has the child's name on it, as if you couldn't tell. I went for fairly bold colors for interest and contrast. The towel, goggles and flippers are all made from fondant. The cake's surface was buttercream icing dyed blue to at least remind you of water. The white highlights on the flippers are also piped buttercream. The name and stripes on the towel are more marshmallow fondant.

Just for full disclosure, I was working on this one late into the evening on a Friday. When I got done with the flippers, I noticed that one of the foot holes was larger than the other. I wasn't about to go back and re-build them because it probably would have involved me making a whole batch of fondant to do the fix. I just let it go, which is hard for me. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist on my cakes if I have the time to do so.