Congrats, Grad!

My Uncle Mike graduated from ASU! (Arizona State University) To celebrate the occasion, I made a cake!

Now, before anyone comments and says "ASU's colors aren't pink and yellow, they are maroon and gold!" I know. The thing is, I only had the basic grocery store colors that give you pink instead of red and yellow instead of gold. So that's what I was stuck with. All in all, I think this cake turned out pretty good. And the family thought so too, which is what really matters in the end.

Halloween

 My mom's side of the family is pretty big. She has five brothers and one sister. Two of her brothers have five kids each, another has two, and my aunt has nine. I have a lot of cousins and we try to get together as often as we can. One of our favorite things to do is gather at a public park. One such gathering happened around Halloween and I wanted to make a Halloween cake so I could practice with fondant. I took the idea from a Wilton's cake decorating magazine that my grandmother had given me. I made a pumpkin and fall tree with no leaves and grass for the top. This was the result:

 

Obviously my technique needs a little work, gotta figure out how to not have it sag. I'm getting there, though, and having a lot of fun along the way.

Happy Birthday, Brother!

It's my little brother's birthday! Since he's my brother, he didn't get a choice if he wanted a cake or not. Being a boy, he loves baseball, thus the inspiration for this next cake. His favorite color is blue so that was an easy decision on what color the background should be.

The best way to cover up a mistake is to make it look like it was on purpose. I accidentally did something to smear the white baseball onto the blue, so I turned it into a baseball that had just been hit and was flying through the air. You never would have known if I hadn't told, would you?

First Time With Fondant!

I had been wanting to try to decorate with fondant for a while but didn't want to spend the money on something that others told me wasn't that great tasting. Then my friend said her aunt made the best marshmallow fondant. I had never heard of marshmallow fondant and decided to look into it. Turns out, I can make my own fondant from home with just marshmallows and powdered sugar. Awesome! This was great because my friend's birthday was coming up and I was able to use fondant on her birthday cake. She made it ten times more amazing by wanting a top hat cake.

My friend's favorite color is purple and it was easier to do white instead of black for the hat because I didn't have any black food coloring. The base is just cardboard that I painted white and cut in the shape of a circle.

So this was my first attempt for the top hat. I used a pan we usually bake angel food cake in because I was hoping it would be tall and make a good sized top hat. It didn't. So I kept it for my family and just played around with the left over fondant. Both cakes were very fun to make and I had a blast with learning how to use fondant.

Cupcake Fun!

My family wanted cupcakes, so I decided to play around with deocorating them. These were done with my grandmother's tips that she had given to my mother, who let me use them. I saw this idea to use kool-aid in your frosting to flavor and color it and thought it was such a neat idea and decided to do half vanilla, half kool-aid flavor. But, when you do half and half, you have to remember to do the same with flavoring. Not thinking it through, I dumped a whole packet of kool-aid into the half a can of frosting. Those cupcakes were tart! They were yummy, just really tart! Hahahah. Oh well, this is a learning stage for me and I'll remember that for next time!

 

I love using tips and doing a bunch of different designs. I deffinetley had a lot of fun decorating these cupcakes. And my family really enjoyed them. My dad loves when I make cakes and cupcakes for us to eat and not give away.

Valentine Treats

So for Valentines Day at school, I decided it would be fun to make some sugar cookies for my lunch table. I'm trying to make a variety of treats and didn't really want to bring a whole Valentine cake to school. These were super easy and fun to make. Pink and white are the classic Valentine colors, so I did some white, some pink and then some half white, half pink. I was just playing around and being creative with the cookies, and I think they turned out great. Plus, the girls loved them.

 For some extra fun, I found some red and yellow sugar crystal sprinkles in our cupboard and added them to a few of the cookies.

New Beginnings

 

For Young Women New Beginnings, I volunteered to make cakes. Our theme was "Happily Ever After" and how Personal Progress could help us work towards our fairytale endings. So, since it was storybook and princessy, I decided to carry that to the cakes. They needed to be simple because I didn't have much time to work on them. I focused on the trims and working with different tips. Once again, they turned out really good.

Sticking to the princess theme, my mom picked up some little tiaras and they were perfect finishers for the cakes.

 For this cake, I found some cool looking stencils with my grandmother's tips. I wanted to do something different for each cake and this looked really cool.

To make the plates we put the cakes on fancy, we got cheap paper doilies and they looked very pretty on the tables.

Like all the cakes I make, I had a lot of fun baking and deocrating them. They turned out wonderful and were perfect for the night. I was so happy with the way they turned out.