Kali's Castle Cake. Vanilla Chiffon Cake filled with Vanilla

Buttercream and covered in Vanilla Marshmallow Fondant. All Edible

Kali's Curly Q Cake. Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cake filled with
Raspberry Buttercream and covered in Vanilla Marshmallow Fondant

Vegan Chocolate Cake filled with Apricot Buttercream and

covered in Vegan Buttercream. All Vegan except fondant flowers.

This was one busy week for me and for my client! All three cakes went to the same client for family events. The Castle cake is based upon a drawing by the 6 yr old birthday girl. She drew it out and colored it and I did my best to capture her design in cake. The look on her delighted face was all that I needed to know that there was a happy ending to this Castle Tale. This was for the kids bounce house party. The "secret" to this cake isn't much of a secret. The turrents are actually cut down sugar cones. Normally I would just fold food grade cardboard into a cone and cover it with fondant but I wanted it to be as all edible as I could make it for this charming little girl. Even the crown on this cake is made of fondant with candy jewels adorning it so that the birthday girl could just take a bite out of any part of it if she wished! She promptly called the figure and the crown as her own!

The second cake is the Curly Q cake. Now this cake was for the family dinner celebrating both the birthday girl's day as well as her grandmother's birthday. So while the Castle Cake was for the little girl and she got to pick out the flavors and filling for that cake, the Curly Q cake was more for the adults of the family so her mom decided a little more grown up version for the family dinner. The chocolate chocolate chip cake is a rich moist cake with little pockets of chocolate all through the body of the cake. Add that to the rich taste of fresh marshmallow fondant and you have a decadent dessert that the adults just loved. The kids loved all the candy curly q's! They are the "secret" to this cake. For this effect all you have to do is use wooden skewers and wrap strips of fondant around them, swirling from bottom to top, and then let them dry till firm. Then, using coffee stirrers to hold them up securely in the cake you just slip the curly q's right over the stirrers and stick them into the cake!

The last cake was my biggest challenge. The birthday girls grandmother is a vegan. Now, no dairy can mean no cake but there are ways around this and you still end up with a tasty dessert. Using some caker contacts I found a great recipe for dairy free chocolate cake and for dairy free buttercream. The cake turns out to be more like a brownie in consistancy. So moist but very dense. To me the buttercream was the bigger challenge. How to make something based from dairy products taste like it has dairy products when it doesn't is a huge challenge. Thanks to one caker friend who suggested using Vanilla Almond Milk I was able to get buttercream that is vegan and tastes amazing! It got rave reviews from not only the grandmother but also from those who didn't think a vegan cake could taste good!

This week I will learn how to make a new flower. I have a Christmas cake coming up next week so this week I get to learn how to make sugar paste poinsettias. I'll post my results next Sunday. In the meantime have a great Thanksgiving. I am personally thankful that I get to use my art to create such yummy masterpieces!

Cat