Heart Cake

This was for a birthday cake for one of my favorite cousins.  To begin, I decided to make sponge cake.  I did one little heart shape of that and...fail.

I got over that pretty quickly.  So, I moved on to just a white cake in a heart shape.  That was much more successful.  For the frosting, I had vanilla buttercream and I mixed in strawberries.  I think it's better to have strawberries on top, though.  This made the consistency very thin and watery.

I then colored fondant and covered the cake in pink fondant.  I was impressed with how easy this was!  However, it was only one layer of cake, so I'm sure this isn't the reaction every time.  Then, I cut out little free hand hearts and starts with more fondant.

It looked super cute and I added her name, Sienna.  Amazing.  But, of course, I couldn't stop so I kept going!  I added food color to some of the hearts to add variety (lesson learned:  do not put food color on top like that, it stays like that and gets EVERYWHERE!).  I also did little stars or something with royal icing.

All-in-all, best cake yet!  It tasted great, however, there are still a lot of things I am learning and trying to figure out.

Oreo Cake

I decided that about every other cake is good, so this one came out okay!

My mom teaches an early morning bible study class.  She has a handful of kids who are freshmen in high school.  She asked if I would start making cakes for them for their birthdays.  It gave me the perfect excuse to make at least 7 cakes a year!  Yippee!  It's no fun making a cake if you don't have people to eat it!

This boys favorite dessert was oreos, so I got a-googling.  The cake was just a chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream and you mix in the oreos with the buttercream.  I went very heavy on the oreos.

It may not be "store bought" quality, but as long as the person eating the cake loves it...it's perfect!  He loved the cake and I thought it was pretty tastey myself.  It gave me a good oppritunity to try writing on the cake again and an attempt at a border.

Regression?

Now that I had made one cake, I was a pro right?  This should be easier every time!  I decided to make Chocolate cake, again with my pie pans.  The cake looked great.  I decided to make chocolate frosting, a lot of it....I thought.

Later in the night, I started to fill the cake.  I learned that if you leave the cake for a while, it decides that it never wants to leave it's pan again!  I tried my very best, but with no luck, the cake crumbled.  I decided I would still use it and forced that cake into a pile.

When frosting, turns out that I didn't make even close to enough.  So I dug in the fridge a pulled out some old vanilla pink icing.  I felt very defeated at this point because nothing I could do would make this cake better and it was just way worse then even my first cake.

Ugh.  Regression.  I did find a package of sprinkles and I felt like that made it a little better.  It tasted really good, I just could not get it to look good as well.

The First Cake

I had been thinking to myself after watching sooo many cake shows, "I can do that!"  On a weekend road trip to Prescott, AZ I decided to make my cake debut.

I went to the local grocery store and bought what I thought would be perfect.  Funfetti cake, chocolate frosting, and some colors for the decorations.  I also picked up 2 9" rounds and plastic decorating tips.  Surely this is all I needed to succeed.

As I was waiting for my cake to bake and as I was tickled with anticipation of my first ever cake (or baking item for that matter) was almost done, my friend from Prescott asked if I had read the directions for high altitude.  What??!  I never thought that being up in the mountains at about 5,400 feet would do anything different to a cake!  Apparently it does.  So, my semi-burnt and semi-awkward cake came out right then.  I also figured out that I had bought pie pans, not cake pans...who knew!

It was okay.  So I started out to frost.  I dipped my butter knife in my container of frosting and starting smothering that cake.  After it was covered in all the chocolate I could possibly get on it, I attempted to smooth it out with the knife.  I'd seen this so many times on tv, how could this be hard?  I channelled the Cake Boss as got into "the Zone."

Upon exiting "the Zone," I found that the cake did not look like I had imagined.  In fact, it looked like a kid played with it.  The writing saying, "We heart Brandon," wasn't as professional as I thought.  Upon further review of my work and standing back a bit, it wasn't quite what I wanted to accomplish.  I thought I was making an amazing cake, one that you would want to buy from the store.  I may have missed the mark, but I stand by my "Brandon" cake.  I think for my first cake ever, it wasn't that bad.  It tasted pretty good, too!