Chocolate Day!

Happy Chocolate Day everyone! Our volunteers here at my complex are so awesome that they organized a Chocolate Day for everyone. The heads of the committees asked all of us to bring a treat for the girls to partake of. I didn't know what I was going to do because I wasn't able to make it to the store to get ingredients for a chocolate treat. Luckily the head hancho D gave me some stuff and a new idea. D said to take Ritz crackers, put some peanut butter in between and then dip it in white chocolate. I went a little bit further and drizzled some melted chocolate chips on top. These aren't really a pastry but they seem too good not to share.

I got a little bit over excited when D asked me to set up the table for her. I grabbed some books off my top shelf (didn't have to use a chair. yay!) and my white board off the fridge and went down to the lower lounge to set it up. I used the books to create risers and levels so it wasn't all just flat on the table. I wanted to make it look interesting. I got onto Pinterest and found a funny quote about chocolate to put on my white board to add to the table. I really like the way it turned out with all the other volunteer's chocolates. 

Hopefully the girls enjoy it because you can tell how much love and effort all of the volunteers put into making Chocolate Day awesome. 

Parent's Anniversary

My parents just celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary on January 3rd. I am so thankful for their example of a good relationship not only as husband and wife but as best friends and parents. They truly are the worlds greatest parents, I don't care what anybody else says. If you've got a mug that says "World's Greatest Mom/Dad" that mug is lying to you. ;) I love my Mom and Dad so much and cannot think of anyone else I would rather have as parents.
So, back story with this next cake. I was scheduled to leave in the morning on Saturday January 4th to go back to school. My parents got up with me and both came to the airport to drop me off and make sure I got there safely. I'm sitting at the gate, an hour before my flight leaves like I'm supposed to, surrounded by other returning college students. Around the time I would assume we would begin boarding to have the flight leave on time, someone gets on the intercom and announces that our flight is delayed and they do not have a time for departure yet. I think, "Alright that's fine. There are delays all the time with flights. I'll still make it to school sometime this afternoon." About a half hour later, another announcement: The flight is still delayed and they will let us know when we can begin boarding, they don't have an estimated time yet. Then after a few more minutes, the person next to me gets a text on their fancy smartphone and they tell their buddy "Hey the flight's been cancelled." Not even two minutes later, I get a call from my mom. My dad got a text on his fancy smartphone with the same message: My flight has been cancelled. Great. So I wait a few minutes, and sure enough, an announcement is broadcast saying our flight has been cancelled and rescheduled. I call Mom back and she says Dad is on his way to get me. So that's basically how I ended up doing this cake for my parents, because I got an extra day with my family, which I really enjoyed. While Mom and Dad were out celebrating, I hurried and made them a cake because they didn't know it was coming and I wanted it to be all done before they got home. It's not the best cake I've done so far but I feel it's pretty good for having left all of my cake tools at school. I seriously had nothing to work with, not even frosting spatulas. Luckily Mom had some tips in the pantry that her mom had given her and I had just gotten some more frosting bags for Christmas. All of my cake pans were still at home, so I had those. But I didn't have a hand mixer to mix the frosting together with. I found a hand-hand mixer in my Mom's utensil drawer, two beater things that you had to crank by hand. The food coloring I found up in the spice cabinet worked out really well because it was a really similar shade to the green my mom had picked out for wedding colors. I still need to work on writing with frosting, but I gave it my best shot!

 Dad got Mom some beautiful tulips for their anniversary. He really is the world's greatest example on how a man should treat a woman. And she is also the world's greatest example for how a woman should treat a man.

There's a reason this cake is on the large side for my family, who doesn't eat tons of cake. My cousin will be getting married in April and I convinced her to let me do their wedding cake. She wants a strawberry marbled cake with fondant flowers and it's going to be so fun to make and I'm really hoping it will turn out great. I basically used my parent's wedding anniversary as an excuse to experiment with her cake. I used two cake mixes to get the marbled effect and subsequently filled three cake pans, which will feed my family that's down to two kids at home, weeks to eat. But even if they end up tossing it out, it was a great learning experience for me. Every time I do a cake, I learn something new. I'm loving the experiences that I'm having with this whole process. Hopefully I'll be close to flawless one day. 

Tea Party

Remember my last post, about me being old? It's a total lie. My body may be getting older, by I'm still a child inside. My roommates and I still have tea parties for heavens sake! ;) We decided as a group that we wanted to celebrate everyone's birthdays, even though M was the only one who had an actual birthday while we were all together. So the rest of us each took a month and pretended it was our actual birthday. We went bowling for M in September, did a spa night for K in October, I had a tea party in November and N had a movie night in December. As part of my celebration, I used the giant cupcake pan I had brought up with me and made a lovely floral arrangement, with hot pink rosettes. We used it as our center piece and it brought the table together quite nicely. Thankfully M was able to get the WeCar, the shared car on campus, and we were able to drive instead of walking all the way down to Deseret Industries to get china to use and groceries to prepare our food. Once again, K used her craftiness in arranging the food and even made flowers out of the cuties we had gotten. M and K had herbal tea tucked away on their shelf that we pulled out and put in our tea cups. The whole night was very fun and a great way to make memories. Here are some pictures of our table after everything was put together:

Look at these lovely ladies, all dressed up for the party. I love my roommates and I loved the opportunity we had to spend time laughing and talking together. Thanks for the wonderful memories girls!

 

College Cupcakes

It's official; I'm old. I have started my first semester of college. Now I don't feel old based on this fact alone. I feel old looking back on the kids I used to babysit and the fact that they are getting the Priesthood and going to Stake Dances and starting high school and growing up. These facts make me feel old. And I realize that I'm not old at all, but I have definitely noticed that I am no longer a child. I've come to terms with this new fact of life. Sort of. The one thing that hasn't changed is my love for cake and decorating it. In fact, I feel like it has grown. That's why I was so excited when my dorm complex announced that they were doing a Bake-Off and they wanted us to do cupcakes. I immediately reached for the new cupcake recipe book Mom had gotten me for my birthday and my roommates and I got to work. We spent the morning laughing, dancing, and singing along to Pandora as we each did a different task to complete our cupcakes. It was a great bonding activity and I will cherish it always.
The recipe we decided on was a Chocolate Raspberry cupcake with raspberry frosting. We made a few alterations based on what we could or could not get our hands on and created these masterpieces:

My roommate K is really creative and suggested we melt chocolate and draw pumpkins and "BOO" to add a Halloween element. She did that and I really like how they turned out, they really added to the cupcakes. 

We may have not won first prize, but it was a really neat experience to do something I love with people I love and see it all come together. 

I really want to persuade these girlies to come work with me once I get my own bakery. Think of all the fun times we would have together! 

Hawaiian Birthday

One of my really good friends from school knows my passion for cake decorating and asked if I would make her birthday cake for her Hawaiian luau. I was stoked. She was my first real consultation. I picked her up after school and we went to Jack-in-the-Box to put some ideas on paper. This is the design we came up with (it was mostly her!)

From this design, I created a really great cake, if I do say so myself. I had so much fun trying new techniques and shaping the cake to what it ended up being.

 This was the front, with the fondant volcano and palm trees sitting on the butter cream water. The volcano was chocolate cake, the water vanilla.

 

For a while, I had no clue how I was going to go about forming the volcano part. I considered just baking a 9"x13" smushing it into the shape of a volcano, but I knew that wouldn't go over well when it came time to cut into it. I couldn't come up with anything that would be good enough. Luckily for me, Mom is great at coming up with ideas. She suggested using one of those giant cup cake pans, the ones where they make a single giant cupcake, and going from there. So I invested in a new cake pan and got a great reaction from partygoers and the birthday girl herself.  

Close ups of the butter cream waves.

 

  

 Close up of the message to the birthday girl.

  

 

I formed the palm trees around a skewer and then had to hot glue the leaves on top so they would stay. I then had to pipe green butter cream around the base of the tree to help smooth the transition from tree to cake. 

 Hand made palm fronds, drying on my cool fondant drying rack that I got to use for the first time!

 

CLASS OF 2013!!

It has finally come! After 12 long years, we have graduated high school! It's so surreal, I don't know what to do with myself. My time has always been taken up with school work, homework and after school rehearsals. I guess it's time to get a job now that I have free time.
With graduation comes graduation parties, a time to celebrate this accomplishment with friends and family. One of my good friend's parents asked me to make a cake for her graduation party. I was beyond excited to be asked to do this project. I only got one picture with my camera phone, so it's not very good quality, but here it is!

The bottom two tiers were hexagon shaped and the top tier was round, to form the cap. My friend Jos is really into music and was even Drum Major for our school's marching band senior year. I tied in her love for music by piping the notes to one of the songs they played in band onto the bottom tier. I could have done a lot better with the piping but I was trying to hurry and get the cake out the door and to the party. And the fondant could have been smoother. But all in all, I think this cake turned out pretty well and the group was pleased with what I had come up with. I love being able to work with cake and learn new techniques to use. 

Welcome Home, Elder!

My older brother was in Canada for the past two years serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. He returned home a few weeks ago on April 25th. We had a homecoming party for him that Sunday, the 28th. I knew we would have a big crowd so I made a bigger cake than I usually do. This is an idea I got off Pinterest and modified a little bit.












 My fondant skills are really improving.
 I'm starting to get the hang of making, coloring, and rolling it out.

I was going to make a fondant tie, but I ran out of time. Then I was just going to drape one of Elder's ties around it, but the tie I grabbed had been worn a lot and not washed and Mom suggested not having a dirty tie on the cake, which is a really good idea. So I just grabbed some green cardstock and cut a quick tie. Its not like it was on their for very long anyways because everyone dug in as fast as they could.

What Happens When I'm Bored and Alone

For some reason that I can't remember, my family went out of town and left me at home alone. Now, if I were a stereotypical teenager, I would have immediately contacted all my friends and thrown a party while my parents were gone and probably destroyed the house. Lucky for my parents, I am not a stereotypical teen and they returned to a house that was still standing and not a complete disaster. Instead, I made a mess of the kitchen and created not one but two cakes. It was shortly after Mother's Day and since I didn't have the time before to make Mom a cake, I made one after. It was lemon cake with lemon flavored frosting. Both came store bought I'm pretty sure, but I made the purple frosting to practice my roses, writing and borders. The roses and writing still need a bit of work, but this cake turned out pretty good and Mom loved it. 

 

 

 

 

My brothers and my dad are picky and don't like lemon cake so I made them their own yellow cake. Being boys, and my heroes, I decorated theirs in a superhero theme. My dad and my youngest brother like Superman and my second youngest brother likes Batman. It was a simple design but I think it turned out awesome. And the boys were happy that this time the cake was for them and not leaving the house for someone else.

 

Bow Tie

Remember the friend with the top hat? For her next birthday, I made her a bow tie cake. It's always fun to make cakes for this friend. So, to do it, I took my smallest hectagon cake pan for the middle and a square pan cut diagonally to form the outsides. I ran out of time to cover with fondant, so I just frosted it with canned frosting from the store. To decorate, I placed green and purple circular sprinkles around the edge. It turned out great. I just love doing this!

Culinary Class

I'm taking culinary arts this year in high school and I am loving it. I'm learning so many new things that I can't wait to try at home. This past unit, Mrs. H. had us do cakes. I was jumping with excitement when she told us and all throughout the instruction. I did learn new tips and tricks to cake decorating, which was awesome. Though the assignment was really simple, I still had a great time with it. I passed the unit with flying colors. I wanted to do something cute and fun, so I chose to pipe a duck on my cake. Mrs. H. gave us a star tip and a circle tip to work with. 

The Birthday of a Videogamer

My best friend's little brother was having a birthday and she threw him a surprise party and came to me for the cake. After racking my brain and deciding the easiest thing would be to make cupcakes for the teens, and using his love of video games, I came up with this:

 

I simply took my brother's PS2 controller and put the 24 cupcakes in that shape and frosted with chocolate frosting. Then I cut out the buttons from black construction paper and added them. It was a piece of cake!

Trying out Pinterest ideas

I have recently become aware of this awesome site called Pinterest where people post different things under different categories and share ideas of crafts and baking and hair and weddings and it's so amazing, but a bit of a time waster. Anyways, I was scrolling through Pinterest one day and came across someone's idea for ice cream cupcakes. They were so darling and I decided that would be my next project. So I got out my mom's cake bowl that I've taken over to do my mixes in and got busy making the kitchen a complete mess. I experimented with the cake mix a bit and added drops of extract to flavor it. I started with a yellow cake mix (from a box. I'm sooo original, I know) and split it up so I could do four flavors: chocolate, strawberry, mint, and "vanilla"(it was just the yellow cake, no extract).

I also put some extract in the frosting to help add flavor to the cupcakes when they came out. I grabbed some cake cones we had in the pantry and arranged the cupcakes as if they were scoops of ice cream. The cupcakes were frosted with a knife and then I piped at the bottom to give it a cartoon-y ice cream look. Topped them off with sprinkles, butterscotch candy, and even an Andes mint I had gotten from someone. I really liked how they turned out, and my family did too. They were awesome, waiting patiently all day for me to be done creating. When I told them I was done, they all swooped in like a flock of vultures. Pretty sure they were all gone within the week. 

Picnic Cakes

We recently had a change in our Young Women presidency and got a new Young Women president to run things. I already love this lady a lot. I met Audrey a year ago at girls camp when she came up as craft coordinator. That camp was a lot of fun and I will never forget the things I learned from my Young Women's leaders.
Audrey and I are kindred spirits because we both use Pinterest for EVERYTHING. So for one of her first mutual activities as Young Women's President, we had a picnic theme and she went all out. She spread picnic blankets out in the young women's room, brought all sorts of picnic foods and planned a lesson that had to do with picnic ants. I don't quite remember all the details of the lesson, but we are encouraged to be hard working like the ant and remember we have a purpose.
Audrey remembered that I love decorating cakes and asked if I would do some for this mutual activity. I love it when people come to me for cakes instead of me going around asking if people want a cake. Since we have such a big group of girls, I decided to make two cakes so everyone could have a piece. One was vanilla, one was chocolate.

This was the vanilla one, shaped to look like a picnic blanket with fondant ants on top. It is kind of sloppy, but my fondant skills are improving. 

This one was chocolate and my favorite. I've decided I like working with frosting rather than fondant. I taught myself how to do the basket weave by looking at a picture in one of my cake magazines. The handle is a black pipe cleaner. This one was really fun to work on. 

A close up of the fondant ants I made to add to the cakes.