Well, not perfectly quiet, but pretty quiet-as I've only done 2 cakes in the past month. To be honest, I kind of needed the break! And the 2 cakes I did? One exceeded my expectations, turning out pretty darn close to my original drawing, and despite the fact that I had to bake & decorate it away from home (which is really awkward in the best of circumstances! I love the comfort of my own kitchen, knowing where everything is & whatnot. Seriously, I forgot to pack like 10% of the stuff I needed-including my camera.)
The event was my sister's baby shower, and she gave me artistic license (WOO HOO!) so I decided to get some more chocolate design experience under my belt. Using basic baby item shapes, I created bottles, pacifiers, ducks, and rattles that were placed around the cake. Oh, and safety pins, but they were very thin & fragile, and not many survived the 2 hour car trip, so I only placed one on the top of the cake. The polka-dots and letters are made from chocolate as well. The blocks were pretty challenging. I had meant to scout around for some square cupcake pans, but had to settle for some mini loaf pans because there just aren't enough hours in the day. The downside to this was I had to cut them to shape, and layer a bit to get squares, and that always results in a lot of crumbs to have to coat over. One of the crucial items I forgot were the supplies to support the cake; had I been at home, i would have had better support going on for those blocks at the top. They're a bit on the tipsy side. The letters SMD are the baby's initials.
Then there's this cake. Oh, I hate this cake! Not so much how it turned out, but the process was nightmare! In addition to the chocolate buildings (using an idea found in the Whimsical Bakehouse book), there was a cool bridge, formed in a curved shape to fit the cake, and a Statue of Liberty. Yeah. After hours & hours of work, the bridge broke (ARGH!) and the Statue of Liberty looked more like the Jolly Green Giant, which I thought would really just confuse people. A little back story on this cake: My sister in law works with woman who lives 3 houses down from me. This woman has been in the long, arduous process of adopting her son for a little over 2 years. The process was finally completed in May, so they wanted to throw a big party to celebrate. My sister in law offered to provide the cake (enlisting me). It wasn't until maybe 10 days prior I was given a final, approximate, head count: 65-70 people!!! Yikes. Way, way, bigger than what I am used to making, by double or more. So this picture does not really portray how large this bugger was. The bottom layers were 14" rounds, the middle was 9" and the top was 6". I think I used something like 6 boxes of cake, and I don't even want to think of how much frosting. The biggest problem with a cake this size was once I assembled it, the scads & scads of buildings and taxi cabs I had crafted out of chocolate just barely gave the impression of a city, when I wanted something hustling & bustling. I'm also still trying to figure out how to best tint the Whimsical Bakehouse
frosting that is my current favorite. The author uses candy coloring, but I can't seem to get her intensity with the Wilton candy colors. The amount of coloring needed to achieve that red was a little disturbing too. In the end, it was acceptable, it's just that it was completely overwhelming, and I probably should have timed things a little better.
Next two cakes on the table: Umizoomi cake request for my friend's 3 year old son the first weekend of July, and a Lego cake for my nephew in the following weeks.
