Happy Halloween!

We decided to make a Halloween cake for Paul to bring to work. This one is a simple sheet cake with some decorative frosting. The moon is overlayed with a fondant version of the company logo.

Paul works for eDOC Innovations (EDI)

http://www.edoclogic.com/

Now go eat lots of candy!

Chocolate Dream Cake

Whatever you want to call this cake, it tastes amazing! It has milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate. There isn't really anything else to describe, just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Kathy made this cake to share with her coworker on her birthday. You can't tell from the pictures very well as the darkness of the chocolate prevents adequate picture taking, a sign of a very good dark chocolate, by the way, but there are delicate fragments of swirled chocolate adorning the crown of the cake. We can assure you, this one tastes as great as it looks, perhaps even a little better than that!

Candy Corn Cake

For Kathy's birthday there was a lot of cake baking going on in the kitchen. Kathy was working on a cake and cupcakes to take with her to work, while Paul was making a cake for us to celebrate with. About a week earlier we were at the store and were looking at the Halloween/Fall/Thanksgiving decorations that had just been put out on the shelves. There was a candy corn shaped and colored platter that Kathy liked. We decided that a candy corn shaped cake would be a lot of fun to make. As Kathy is partial to candy corn, Paul decided to make the cake for her birthday.

In staying with a fall theme, we decided to use a cinnamon swirl cake mix and top it with cream cheese icing. The cinnamon cake baking certainly gave off a warm, fall aroma.

A single layer rectangle cake was cut down to the familiar candy corn shape. Typically we level the tops of the cakes to even them out, but in this case the natural rounding from the cake rising while baking helped give it the candy corn shape.

The icing was separated into three bowls and colored appropriately. There really isn't much to this cake as far as decorating or bells and whistles, but it is fun to look at. The next step is to try to make this cake with honey infused flavors to try to make it taste like a real piece of candy corn. Perhaps for Christmas we'll have to take on another seasonal favorite, the candy cane!

"Desserted" Island

Finally! We are posting pictures of the "desserted" island cake we made about a month ago. This cake was made a week before the pirate ship cake, and roughly 5 months after the playground cake...obviously these posts are not in chronological order. It has been a busy time since we made the pirate ship cake with Paul starting a new job and us moving to a new town. We hope to get back to creating cakes soon, but for now we'll just have to reminisce about the cakes we have already made. In the intervening time we did put together two other cakes and a batch of cupcakes (for Kathy's birthday!). Maybe we'll do another post with pictures of those cakes together.

So here is the island cake:

The cake itself is from a box, probably white or yellow, whatever was in the cabinet. The frosting was the powdered sugar/Crisco shortening recipe that Paul likes so well. This cake was one that Kathy has wanted to make for some time; there is a how-to for this design in one of her cake books. We took some liberties in preparing the cake and ventured away from the step-by-step process provided by the book. It helped the cake be unique and a lot of fun to build.

There are two layers of the cake: a square base, 10" by 10" and an island cut from a 10" circle. The boulders with waves crashing upon them are coconut candies of some kind, they fit the part perfectly. The vegetation is created with rolled icing (store bought this time), with a palm tree trunk built out of Rolo chocolate covered caramels. For structural integrity there is a toothpick helping to keep the tree up. Cocoa mix was sprinkled around to indicate dirt, as well as some chocolate crumbs left over form trying to carve the hut with chocolate. The carving didn't work, so more rolled icing was used to slap four walls together. It was then painted with melted chocolate and covered with a grass thatched roof of more rolled icing.

The water was a lot of fun to create. Once the icing was spread out we just used the spreaders to create swoops and swirls. Then, using white icing, we created the look of white caps on the waves. It was really easy and came out looking amazing! But perhaps we are a bit biased in our judgment.

Fondant, or rolled icing, can be great to work with, you can make so many neat items. The leaves on the palm tree, the flowers, the thatched roof, and the treasure map were all made from the stuff. Melted chocolate or food coloring paint can be used to dress it up quite nicely. And depending on if you make it yourself or buy it, it can taste great (or terrible). On the other hand, it can be a mess to work with. It is sticky and sometimes unforgiving. Overall it is a great resource for constructing a creative and imaginative, fully edible, great tasting cake.

Playground

Kathy works at an elementary school. She promised the kids she would make a cake for them if they behaved well over a period of time. They did. So she made the cake. This was the first time Paul helped out on a cake. This was when they discovered the joy of building cakes together.

The children requested to have certain playground aspects. There are swings, a soccer field, a skate park, and a school bus. Rice Krispie treats were used quite a bit, as were Twizzler Pull 'n Peel. Pepperidge Farm Pirouette rolled wafers (cookies) and melted chocolate round out the ingredients for the decorations. The cake is two layers of Funfetti cake mix, covered by home made fondant. Kathy put a lot of work into that. It is cheaper to buy the ingredients in comparison to the pre-made fondant, but it does take a lot of effort.

The supports for the swings are the cookies, painted with melted orange chocolate. The flat swing is crafted from fondant, the "tire" swing is a small frosted donut. The "chains" are Twizzler pieces. The sand pit is Rice Krispie treat.

Here we have the soccer field. The goal frame is cookie, painted with frosting. The field lines are frosting. Kathy crafted the soccer ball out of a large marshmallow, Paul painted the black spots with melted chocolate, applied using the almost pentagonal shape of the end of a Pull 'n Peel Twizzler. Kathy's mom wove the net out of Twizzlers.

The skate park was carved out of Rice Krispie treats and painted over with melted chocolate. We bought some spray on black food color, but for some reason it made the fondant taste like burning (we always sample parts of the cake along the way, for quality assurance). We ditched the spray color in favor of melted chocolate. It turned out very nicely.

Finally, the school buss. Carved from a block of Rice Krispie treats, painted with melted chocolate and a Twizzler as a brush, and wheeled with York Peppermint Patties, this bus was actually functional in that it could roll on it's wheels.

The little people on the cake were bought at the store, we aren't that crafty yet. This cake was prepared in May 2011.

Pirate Ship

In honor of National Talk Like a Pirate Day, we have made this cake:

We came up with the idea and quickly sketched out some plans and decided what materials we would need. Throughout the process of building the cake we experienced a range of emotions. At first the cake was looking like a brown rocket ship, but we persevered and eventually the finished product is quite obviously a pirate ship. We are very pleased with the outcome.

The cake is made of three layers of 9" x 13" sheets. For fun, we used one layer of yellow cake, one layer of chocolate, and one layer of strawberry; it's a Neapolitan style cake!

We are using boxed cake mixes for convenience, but making our own icing. This time we used a recipe for creamy white icing, and added a half cup of cocoa powder for coloring. The cocoa powder had a dual effect by taking some of the sweetness out of the icing, which usually isn't a good thing, but in this case, it was alright. Creamy white icing is sugary!

After stacking the layers we used a knife to carve out the boat shape. Kathy iced and styled the wood planking. Paul created deck rails, a bow, and a rudder housing using cocoa crisped-rice treats. The mast is made from skewers wrapped in fondant, colored with black food coloring. The sail is also fondant, colored with yellow and red food coloring, and rolled out on the same spot as the black fondant. Residue from the previous coloring helped give the sail a weathered look.

Kathy fashioned the "skull and cross-bones" out of fondant and black food coloring "paint." We made a cannon out of fondant and housed it between two chocolate covered graham crackers. Malted milk balls were used as a pile of reserve cannon balls nearby. The anchor and chain were formed from fondant, along with the ship's wheel. A few candy blocks round out the deck's accoutrement, stacked neatly by the mast.

For water we used some blue colored frosting accented by white frosting; a technique we learned while making a tropical island cake last week (we'll post pictures of it soon). The whole cake took a few hours to put together and was a lot of fun. With each cake we make we feel more capable and learn new skills. If you have ideas for a cake, post them in the comment section, we are always looking for new ideas!

Introduction

Welcome to our cake blog! We are amateur cake decorating enthusiasts and wanted to show off our amazing creations through this blog. Maybe someday we will open a bakery and decorate cakes professionally, but for now it is simply a once-in-a-while activity for us to have fun. If you need a cake for any occasion, let us know. We'd love to design something fun and delicious for you!

Whenever we make a cake we will take pictures and do a post about it. We have done three cakes together so far and will post pictures for those over the next few days.

-Paul and Kathy