Elmo's Face

I made another Elmo cake for a friend's daughter's second birthday. I got the design from a photo I found on the internet. It was on someone's blog but the baker was not credited.

A few days beforehand, I made colourful gumpaste curliques and also covered a 12" cake board in yellow gumpaste. By the time I needed them, they had dried nice and hard.

Then the day before, I made an 8" round chocolate cake and carved it into the oval, Elmo shape. From the cake scraps, I made cake ball mixture using melted butter, icing sugar and cocoa powder. I then used the cake ball mixture to make two small round balls and an oval ball for Elmo's eyes and nose. I refrigerated the balls so that they could harden up. After crumb coating the cake with cream, I also refrigerated it for a while for it to form a crust.

That night, I covered the two small round balls with white fondant for Elmo's eyes and covered the oval ball with orange fondant for his nose. Then I covered the whole face with red fondant and also made his hand entirely out of fondant. I then scratched plenty of lines into the fondant for Elmo's fur.

The eyes and nose were then put into place and two small circles of black fondant were added to his eyes. I then worked on the other details like the party hat, mouth and the green banner. The confetti were sprinkles which I stuck onto the board with icing. I also used icing to write the wordings on the green banner.

I do love this Elmo, and I hear the kids loved it too! My friend sent me a photo of poor Elmo, after being attacked!

The poor guy survived a whole two minutes after being introduced to the kids! :)

The only thing that bugs me is that I made his eyes and nose a little too big. But he's still cute all the same!

Dessert tables

I recently discovered the website of "Sweet & Saucy", a wonderful bakery situated at Long Beach, California. They do weddings and parties for the rich and famous, like Tori Spelling and John Stamos! Besides having marvelous cakes, they also do mini desserts which are set up on gorgeous dessert tables! Go and have a look at the pictures on their website, it's really dreamy!

So I was totally inspired and wanted to try making small matching treats to go with my niece's "Fairy" cake. As usual, time was a factor for me, i.e. something I'm always short of! So, aside from the cake, I only managed to make some sugar cookies, cake balls and cupcakes.

Here are the pics:

Fairy Cake

Last Saturday we celebrated my niece Annalisa's 2nd birthday. She so small and adorable and sweet, I figured a fairy cake would be just the thing for her!

The cake is a chocolate cake as usual, two 6" rounds stacked on top of each other. They're filled and crumb coated with chocolate buttercream. I covered the cake with white fondant and added circles of pink, pale pink and yellow fondant. For the border, I made fondant balls of the same colours.

I handcrafted the fairy a few days ahead so that it would have time to set. I love how the hair curls turned out. I was going for a cute pixie cut. Her skirt was made using the large daisy cutter.

Here are her teensy wings at the back. I used an ivy leaf cutter to cut some white gumpaste and cropped off the top part. Then I folded it a bit and when it dried, stuck it on upside down.

I made some other desserts to go with this cake which I'll detail on my next post!

Peonie-like kinda flower... 'ish'??!

So I'm trying to make gumpaste flowers now and it's not as easy as it looks on YouTube!! They're so fragile I'm beginning to think they're not worth all the time and effort at all! The smarter solution would be to use fresh flowers, is what methinks!

I tried making this peonie-like flower. I had no idea what cutter to use so I tried heart shape ones. I cut out the petals and veined them, then frilled the edges with a balling tool. I thought of using a deep, rich colour, like dark purple, but it came out more like a brown. Then, when I pieced all the parts together, guess what it looked like? Wood ear fungus!! :)

See for yourself:

*sigh...*

I didn't have much free time, so the flower was still wet cause I brushed it with a damp brush to get rid of the cornstarch. I didn't have time to do the underside (I was already running late for dinner), so the two tones made it resemble the fungus even more!

It was for my sister's birthday cake. I had baked a cheesecake beforehand and covered it with fresh cream. I was afraid the cheesecake was too soft to hold the weight of a full fondant covering. It was rather plain with just the cream, so I stuck a green ribbon around the base of the cake.

Luckily the cheesecake turned out quite yummy, so the 'wood ear fungus flower' could be forgiven! :)

So now, I do not know if I want to waste anymore time with gumpaste flowers, at this rate, I'm gonna need one-on-one classes with Ron Ben-Israel before I can create anything decent!! I really don't think I can afford to allocate so much time to flowers, especially when there are so many gorgeous real flowers which one can use eh??!!

Colourful Gift

A friend requested I make an anniversary cake for her Aunt and Uncle. Initially, I declined, as I was busy that same weekend with the Kitty cake. However, the night before, as I baked the cake and cuppies for the Kitty project, I overestimated, doubled the recipe and ended up with too many cuppies and an extra cake!

The extra cuppies I froze so that the kids could bring them to school over the week and I thought I had better not keep the extra cake as well, as I do not want my kids to feed on too much sweet stuff!

So, I asked my friend if she still needed that cake and she did. Since I had a gumpaste bow I had made ahead of time, I turned the cake into a colourful gift.

The cake is the usual American Chocolate. There are two 6" rounds, leveled, torted and crumb-coated with chocolate buttercream. I covered the cake with orange fondant and stuck on two strips of yellow fondant for the ribbon. Then I placed circles of green fondant for the wrapping paper and placed the bow and gift tag. The "Happy Anniversary" is written with a red edible ink marker. I'm still not crazy about my penmanship...

Anyway, I do love the colour combination here. Really funky and cheerful! Hope they liked it!