Happy Sunday! Friday was my birthday. Normally I'm over at our grown younger daughter's house and either we are going out to dinner or they are making me dinner there. My birthday cake is usually made by her and is always lovely. Yes, she is a "Caker" too! Being that it's in the middle of October we usually have baseball on the tv in the background and it is always lots of fun. But this year kinda messed up the schedule a bit. I had an order last weekend (the poker table cake) and I have an order next weekend (a baby shower cake) over in their area so we didn't go for my birthday weekend in between. We held off on the family celebration until next weekend. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to celebrate with my husband and 12 year old son. And that meant I got to make my own cake!!!
Now before you think "oh poor woman has to make her own birthday cake" let me be very clear. It is a total treat to be able to make my own cake. I can only think of 3 years since my daughter turned 15 that I have had a chance to make my own cake so it doesn't happen often. And, yes, she is making me one for next weekend too so this is, indeed, a chance to make my own cake, eat it and still have someone make me a cake too! So this is my pre-birthday-cake birthday cake. If you follow me. Ok, it's a good excuse for me to make a cake, play with the piping and eat cake and still get a "real" Birthday Cake next weekend.
It was a very exciting possibility until I broke my finger. As I mentioned last week, I am ambidextrous so breaking the middle finger of my right hand wasn't as big of an issue for last week's cake as I thought it would have been...until it came to the piping. The piping was murder. And my birthday cake design was all piping. Lots and lots of piping. So I baked the cake, a six inch hex shaped pink lemonade cake, on Tuesday and then kept procrastinating actually decorating it because, well, I knew it would hurt and I knew I didn't "have" to make the cake because it wasn't my "real" cake. It's just for us. Did I mention I knew it would hurt?
But, finally, on Friday morning, I pulled the wrapped frozen cake out of the freezer and filled and crumbcoated it. And let it sit for 5 hours while I procrastinated some more. I went and did some chores, played a bit on the computer, worked at my other job...putting off actually decorating this cake sitting on my table. Finally I filled the piping bags with the colors, assembled the paisley shaped cutters and frosted the cake in a flat white. And then, you guessed it, procrastinated for another half hour or so.
This was when I decided I needed to figure out a way around my hand issue. I have a client cake next week and, yes, it has piping on it. Not a lot but it does have piping on it. So I used the cutters to gently press into the side of the white frosted cake all the way around. Then I used the dark wine colored frosting to outline where I had pressed. I quickly learned that the only way to pipe without hurting my hand was to hold the bag in such a way it, basically, looked like I was flipping everyone off! I had to hold the bag with my middle finger sticking straight out and the other fingers wrapped around the bag. I was very happy that there was no one around to offend! LOL!
The rest of the pattern I got from the plates and napkins and I just used small bits and pieces of that design to fill in the sides of the cake. A lot of people ask me how I get my ideas of what goes where and, honestly, I think it's the photographer in me that makes this easy for me to do. If I were going to tell someone how to do it themselves though, I would say to find something like the napkins and just copy the whole design. Use cutters for the hard shapes and then just follow the design on the napkins (or pillow, or invite) to fill in the spaces.
The last piece was the fantasy flower topper. I just used white fondant with a lot of tylose mixed in so it would dry up quickly. I rolled it out to the thickness of a dime and then used a circle cutter to cut out rounds. I then just folded the rounds so that there were two points, one point for the center, one to the outside of the flower. I just stuck them together with a mist of water and let them set up for about an hour. After that I painted them with gold luster dust paint. The center of the flower is just a round that I pinched two points onto and then pinched two more points making it into a square. Once the paint had dried I placed the whole flower onto the top of the cake, filled the center box with orange frosting and added a dab of the wine colored frosting.
As mentioned, next week is a baby shower cake! I'll share next Monday! See you then!
Cat
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