Besides modeling chocolate I also used some royal icing to make a cornelli lace design on some of the cookies, and colored sugar also adds a nice touch.

I’ve finished teaching 3 cake decorating courses at the Michael’s Arts and Crafts in North Brunswick and they were a lot of fun. I will be teaching Course 3 in January so I decided to make another display cake to put up in the store. I used a lot of the techniques that are taught in Course 3. The cake is covered in white fondant and the Poinsettia design was done using a technique called brush embroidery. A blue fondant ribbon borders the bottom of the cake and little blue snowflakes were piped on the side.

My first class will be in October so to help promote it I created a autumn inspired cake to display in the store. I used all of the techniques students will learn in the  first course.

July 5th is my father’s birthday and my parents often visit me in NJ around that time. It has become almost a tradition that I make him a birthday cake every year. He absolutly loves the Entenmann’s yellow cake with chocolate fudge frosting, so I wasn’t surprised when I asked him what flavor he wanted and he told me to make it like the Entenmann’s cake. I did just that, a yellow cake layered with chocolate ganache and covered in chocolate fondant. I airbrushed a tropical sunset scene on top (since my parents now live in Florida and my father loves it there) with a blue seashell border around the bottom to finish it off.

On Sunday, May 24th one of my best friends, Robyn, got married. Not only was I one of her bridesmaids, but I made her wedding cake as well. She wanted the cake to be very non-traditional and funky. At her request I made the cake black to match the bridesmaid’s dresses and I included brightly colored gerbera daisies to match the bouquets we carried.

The cake was five tiers of cookies and cream cake with chocolate ganache filling and vanilla buttercream. Each tier was covered in black fondant and decorated with green royal icing in a cornelli lace pattern. The gerbera daisies were all made out of gumpaste. I attached a dowel to the cake board that went through all the cakes in order to support the top tier and to make it look like the stems of the gerbera daisies were going through the top cake. I used green straws wrapped in florist tape for the flower stems.

Keeping with the theme from both the engagement and bridal shower cakes I also made for Robyn, I included a bride and groom that I hand made out of fondant. Since her new husband, Bryan, is a fireman I made sure to include a firehat as well.

This was the first time I tried to make a cake that looked like a building and it was a little trickier than I expected. I had to calculate the heights, width, and depth that each cake had to be to keep the towers in proportion to one another. I then had to cut, stack, and carve each cake to be straight and level. 

Each tower is made of two tiers of cake. The bottom tier has lolly-pop sticks that act as supports for the top layer.  Each cake is covered in fondant and the windows were airbrushed on using a hand made stencil. The flying fish fountain in front of the hotel was recreated using fondant since that is where the wedding ceremony will be. A few gumpaste palm trees and “sand” (brown sugar) finish off the landscape.

My friend has an old trunk that once belonged to her grandmother and she used to use it every year when she went to summer camp. I tried to make the cake look like her trunk by covering it in brown fondant and adding black fondant details. I then printed out postcards of all the places they have been or plan on going. The postcards were printed using edible ink on edible icing sheets and attached to the cake.

Here is a picture of my entry:

All the cake tiers and the cake board are covered in ivory rolled fondant with cranberry and gold accents. The cake is topped with 3 hand made white gumpaste lilies (one of the flowers in the Bride’s bouquet) that were brushed with white luster dust. The stamens were painted with gold luster dust to match the other gold accents on the cake.

The main inspiration for the wedding cake was the bride’s theme of “Tradition with a Twist”.  I used a combination of topsy-turvy tiers with geometric red accents to create the optical illusion that the cake is actually twisting. I also incorporated all three of the bride’s colors (ivory, cranberry, and gold). The gold decorations on the cake were modeled out of fondant using a mold and then hand painted with gold luster dust.

To keep with the groom’s wish that his cake not “clash” with the bride’s cake I kept the style very similar but inverted the color scheme. I also wanted to highlight his interest in Impressionist art. One of the most famous impressionists was Claude Monet. Monet loved to paint many types of flowers including tulips (another one of the bride’s flowers). The image on top of the groom’s cake is a reproduction of a painting by Monet called “Tulip Fields in Holland”. The image was printed using edible ink on an icing sheet.