Deer on Mount Cake

I was asked to do a retirement cake for a hunter and they wanted a deer! This one was fun! I decided that I really needed to use fondant for the horns although I was still turned off to fondant. I looked up some recipes for making my own fondant but wasn't brave enough to try this yet. I once again turned to the store-bought fondant, knowing that since it was only for the horns they wouldn't be eaten. This cake didn't turn out the way I envisioned it in my mind, but I thought it still turned out cute!

Bear Cake on a Sheet

I did this bear cake for a larger group of people, so it needed to be on a sheet in order to feed everyone. I got my pink right this time!

Soccer Ball Birthday Cake

I had the opportunity to try something different with my ball pan for my nephew's birthday cake. He wanted a soccer ball for his cake, but they needed a cake to be a little bigger than just the ball. I decided to put it on a sheet and make it look like a goal. The sheet wasn't large enough to use the entire ball, so this is just one half of the ball. I was also able to use my grass tip for grass this time!

A few weeks later I had the opportunity to do this same cake for another little boy's birthday. They needed the sheet to be large enough that I could use the entire ball.

First Birthday Bear Cake

Taelyn's first birthday was approaching and I decided to do the bear again, but make it look a little differently this time! The good thing with the bear cake is that you can make him/her hold something in its hand. For Lindsay's bear, she was holding a rattle. I wanted her holding balloons for Taelyn's cake. I found the mini bear pan to go along with the large bear that I already had. The mini bear is perfect for a first birthday smash cake. This bear was white with a pink leotard and a little tulle ballet skirt on. You can't really see the tulle skirt in the picture, but it is there.

Bear Cake

Kacey Ginn (who is the self-professed biggest fan of my cakes) and I were throwing a baby shower for Lindsay, who was having a little girl. I didn't want to do the duck again... I wanted to do something a little more girly. I found the bear pan at Hobby Lobby and decided to try this one for the shower. This is also when I learned about the grass/hair tip. And I thought that piping stars was very labor intensive! Piping hair will sure make your hand sore! I loved how this little diapered bear turned out! My biggest lesson from this cake is that a little pink goes a long way!! With some of the gel tints, you have to add quite a bit of color to get it to look the way your want. The pink is the opposite of this. You can easily add too much of this and you end up with fluorescent ears!

Duck Cake

My next self-taught lesson at cake making was the duck cake. After the baseball cake, a few friends and family members wanted me to do cakes for them. I had a few baby showers in a row that I was asked to do cakes for so I began to Google images of baby shower cakes. I fell in love with this cute baby shower cake that was a duck sitting in a bath tub. I bought the duck cake pan and began the process of learning to make a great cake duck! My first duck about pushed me over the edge! I made FIVE of them before I was pleased with the end result!! The instructions that come with the duck pan are very straightforward and make it seem so simple. Believe me... it takes a little more effort than just setting the pan in the oven and letting it bake! Lindsay still talks about all of those ducks sitting around my kitchen. I would offer cake ducks to anyone that came through the door of our house because I had so many of them!!

The duck cake was the first cake that I made my own buttercream icing for. I haven't bought a can of store bought icing since then! Homemade buttercream just tastes SOOO good! The duck cake was also the first "real" cake that I used fondant on. I made a "fake" cake for a special event one time that was Styrofoam covered in fondant, but I'd never used it when it was meant to be eaten. Once again, I used the Wilton store-bought fondant from a box to shape my soap and bubbles. I loved the way that the fondant looked and these small details really made the cake cute, but that boxed fondant is DISGUSTING!  I can't believe people actually use that stuff to cover cakes. That experience left a "bad taste" in my mouth for fondant (pun completely intended!). I was turned off after that and it would be awhile before I would work with it again. Overall, I was pleased with how the duck cake turned out. I don't have pictures of all three of the ducks. I only photographed one because they all looked pretty much the same!

Baseball Cake

It was 4 years later when I tried my next custom cake! I don't remember what inspired me to try again, but Scott and I went to Hobby Lobby one day and I used my allowance (the explanation of the "allowance" deserves its own post) to buy a crown cake pan. However, for some reason I didn't try the crown cake at that point in time. Our friends Seth and Lindsay were just getting home from their baseball season on the road, and I decided that I was going to make Seth a baseball cake for his birthday. So back to Hobby Lobby I went, using more allowance to buy a sports ball pan. I got the tiny star tip (because I didn't know any better), some parchment triangles (because I didn't know any better), and once again - the store bought icing! For HOURS, I piped tiny little, white stars all over the baseball, finally finishing it off with the red laces. I think I had carpal tunnel syndrome after piping all of those stars, but I couldn't have been any prouder of this cake. I had learned to use the star tip on my own, and I had learned to fold those dreaded parchment triangles on my own. I felt so accomplished! I finished off the cake by adding "grass" around the edges (I didn't know then that there was a grass tip that made real looking grass!). All of our friends were so impressed with the baseball cake. And I was encouraged to keep trying more custom cakes!

First Cake

So... I make cakes. Everyone is always curious as to how I got into making cakes as a hobby, so I guess I should start with my first cake ever. Before we moved to Jackson, Scott and I lived in Olive Branch and I was a special event coordinator. I would always look at cakes that people brought in for their special events and think to myself, "I could do that." So one Saturday Scott and I were at home and I thought I would give it a shot. I had no cake "tools" at all. I baked a cake in a square pan and cut it into the shape of the University of Kansas Jayhawk (Scott's obsession) using a butter knife. I then used store bought icing and colored the icing using liquid food coloring. With a butter knife, I spread icing on the cake to make it look like the Jayhawk. You can definitely tell that it was my first cake!

You can see my fingers at the bottom of the picture holding the cake together! And if you look closely you will see a crack diagonally across the center! Definitely not my best work (as Scott would say!). But it was my first one, so we were both pretty impressed! It was a few years before I tried my hand at another custom cake again!