Snow Leopard Birthday Cake

Happy Sunday! This week brought a birthday cake, several appointments for wedding cakes and, of course, time for Halloween Treats! I'll start out with the birthday cake first.

This little 4 inch cake was white cake with raspberry filling covered in black (chocolate) fondant and white (vanilla) fondant and decorated with handpainted fondant dots and details. The Birthday girl just happens to be an upcoming Bride that I'm working with so it was fun to be able to do a mini birthday cake for her as well!

This brings up a topic that I may not have covered before. Fondant. I have heard over and over again "I don't like fondant" or "I don't think I'd like that stuff". What they mean is that they have heard over and over again how awful fondant is or they have tasted old fondant. As with most of food preparation, fresh is best. If you are eating something that has been sitting in a can, jar or tub for months it may not make you ill but it just won't taste as good as freshly made. All of my fondant is either freshly made by me, within the week of your event, or is Duff's fondant. I have no idea how "fresh" his brand is but it tastes fresh. It doesn't taste chemically or like it's had all the flavor leached out of it and all that is left is something that tastes like you'd be better off chomping on the cake box than the cake. Without fail I have been able to make converts out of people once they have tasted my fresh fondant. The Birthday Girl this week is one of my newest converts. We were going to do a buttercream covered cake, now it's being covered in fondant because it's SO yummy! I also make my buttercream fresh each week. So that means not only do you have a freshly baked cake, covered in freshly made buttercream but it's also topped in freshly made fondant! In the food world, fresh is best!

Halloween Alien Cupcakes

Pictured is just one set of many that were made this weekend for a client. These funny little aliens are something you can SO easily make at home. I lightly tinted buttercream after baking the cupcakes and then used prebought sugar candies to make funny faces on top. These were intended to make lions, bears and clowns but I mixed up all the pieces, using eyes for noses, ears for mouths, mouths for ears, etc. to create some funny little Aliens.

These were yellow and white cake cupcakes and they were SO good that I wish there had been more extras of this order! Cupcakes are the one baked item that HAS to be made as close to delivery time as possible. The paper cupcake liners let alot of air into the cake portion of these and, for cake, air is the enemy! An unsealed, by icing, cake is prone to drying out very very quickly. This is why you crumbcoat a cake. It seals in that moisture. But you can't do that with a cupcake since a small bit of icing goes only on the top. So with time and air as your dreaded enemies you have to make sure that you deliver your completed cupcakes within hours of finishing the baking/decorating process or you end up with a dry crumbly cupcake. I actually had the client ask me how I could possibly have such moist cupcakes...aren't cupcakes dry and crumbly? NO! Cupcakes are suppose to be moist little morsels of yummy cake!

The kids thought these funny little critters were just hysterical. Since they were made for kids we were pretty happy to see the smiles and hear the laughs, followed by "these are GOOOOOD!" after they finally ate all the candy off the top and dug into the actual cupcake!

Since Halloween is actually tomorrow I do have have one more order of cupcakes to go. Those will be made fresh tomorrow and delivered soon after. I'll share those with you next week!

Speaking of next week...I have an Anniversary Cake order that I am SO excited to be working on! The design is so romantic and yet so avante guarde, I just can NOT wait to get started on it. I'll share it with you next Sunday!

Cat