Psych! Cake

Psych Season 7 is underway! We love Psych, and so does Paul's sister Shannon. You might remember her from our Hunger Games cake in 2012. It was her birthday again, and though we talked about using another book theme for a cake, suggesting either the 2nd in the Hunger Games trilogy or a zombie book she was reading, Shannon decided she'd like to see a Psych cake. 

For those who aren't familiar with Psych, it is a TV program about a private detective agency, a private PSYCHIC detective agency, called Psych. The psychic is a fake, but don't tell the Santa Barbara Police Department that hires him as a consultant. For whatever reason, the folks on the show don't even know, there is a pineapple in every episode, sometimes directly, other times hidden. This cake is obviously a pineapple, and even tastes like one. The cake was a boxed yellow cake mix, but instead of the water it calls for we used pineapple juice. Then, in the butter-cream frosting we added a little more pineapple juice. The pineapple shape sits on top of a flat layer of cake and Nutella chocolate hazelnut spread was used to fill in between. 

Happy birthday Shannon! 

Valentine's Day Cake

Kathy made this red velvet cake for Valentine's Day. The frosty was called creamy frosting and used flour and white sugar. It was like home made whipped cream, but without using cream. The recipe called for heated milk. It tasted great, not too sweet and kind of fluffy.

We piped a whole bunch of flowers for fun earlier in the week and Kathy selected a few to top the cake.

Snowman cake

We were having some friends over for dinner and wanted to show off our cake decorating skills, so we made this:

It's a snowman and a sledding kid! The cake is chocolate with butter-cream and creamy white frosting. The Sled hill, sled, kid and snowman are made from cereal treats.

It wasn't our original intention to make this cake a battle scene between the sledding kid and the snowman, but that's certainly how it turned out.

High School Musical Cake

While Kathy was at her sister's wedding in Utah, a friend of ours covered her for her Sunday school class. As a token of appreciation we made a cake for our friend, Shanta. She loves High School Musical, so we ran with that theme.

The cake was chocolate, and once again we used peanut butter frosting under the fondant. Kathy piped the lettering and music notes. The cake received high praises.

Wedding cake for Michelle and Sam

Kathy was recruited to bake and decorate the cake for her sister Michelle's wedding in August 2012. She flew all the way to Utah just to do the cake...and attend the wedding.

 The cake was made from a mix. It was a spice cake and required too many ingredients to be baking on the road. The layers of the cake were filled with cream cheese frosting and butter-cream was used to "dirty ice" and pipe the decorations.

Prior to heading out to the wedding Kathy made a practice cake at home to freshen up her piping skills.

Strawberry Season

In between cakes we like to try out different desserts. Here are two involving strawberries, 'tis the season!


Strawberry chiffon pie
Recipe - Better Homes and Gardens

Strawberry...cream, roll, shortcake, something

Rock 'n Roll-o

It has been while since we've posted a cake here, but for good reason, we had a baby girl! Kathy and Megan are both doing great and it is hard to believe it has already been two months! As it goes, it is busy with a newborn, but somehow we still managed a few cakes over the last little while. The cake in this post was from April, however, well before Megan was born.
Some friends invited us over and we decided to bring a cake; we are always looking for a good excuse to make a cake. One of these friends is one of Paul's old guitar playing buddies so we made a plan to do a guitar and an amplifier cake. It looked really cool in Paul's imagination, but didn't translate to real cake very well. The structural integrity was lacking on the amp. As you will see, the guitar came out great!

It is to scale, not sure what ratio, but to scale as far as length and width to a Fender Stratocaster. The guitar is cereal treat with creamy white (and then colored) frosting. Rolo candies make the tuning knobs and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups make the volume dials. This part came out well, the amp wasn't as successful.

As you see, the amp turned into more of a rock, than a guitar amplifier. It was supposed to be several layers of chocolate cake with chocolate fudge frosting in between layers, then covered with fondant and decorated to look like a Marshall half-stack. Well, it was obvious after the layers were stacked that this amplifier would not be able to hold its own weight. After an attempt to reposition the cake to help it stand better, Paul got frustrated and gave up. It wouldn't be an amplifier, but it was still a mound of delicious cake, so we covered it with fondant. Upon seeing the finished product we noticed it resembled a rock. By placing the Rolo next to it, and playing on the words involved, we still got our Rock 'n Roll-o cake.You can't win them all.

Captain America! Jello

Paul's office had a dessert competition for the 4th of July. The guidelines were "red, white and blue." Simple enough. We didn't make a cake, but the outcome was still blog-worthy. It tasted as good as it looks!

Raspberry Jello formed the bottom layer of the shield, topped with whipped cream, fresh raspberries, strawberries and blueberries. The "star" in the middle was drawn with whipped cream.

Megan's Frog Cake

Just last week Kathy created a cake for Megan. In our church we give babies a blessing shortly after they are born. Kathy wanted to make a cake for the blessing day to share with our family that would be there. As Megan looks like a little frog sometimes, or acts like one, or for whatever reason we started calling her a frog, the theme for the cake was obvious.

The cake was chocolate with a peanut butter frosting between the layers. The rest of the frosting was butter-cream. We used fondant to shape the little frog. Kathy piped the grass and cattails using the butter-cream.

Box of Donuts Cake

A few months ago Paul's dad asked for a jelly donut cake. For Father's day, we wanted to make this happen. It turns out that there is more to making a jelly donut cake than can be conveniently accomplished in a tiny, residential kitchen. The goal was to make a cake that looked and tasted like a jelly donut. Without a huge frying device, this would be difficult. We wound up ditching the donut shape and taste ideas, and just made a fun looking cake instead.

This first plan was to make a cream puff and fill it with jelly. We made a large cream puff, mixed some frosting with raspberry jelly, and came up with this:

It tasted great, albeit sugary, but not donut like. With time running out, and it seeming like the only way to really do the original design was with frying a huge donut, we went to plan B:

Rather than one donut, we made a box of donuts! That's better, right? The cake is homemade sponge filled with homemade raspberry mousse. It is covered in fondant, the store bought kind, and the swirl pattern was created by simply not mixing the coloring in completely.

For the final presentation we bought some real donuts to place alongside the cake.

Hunger Games Cake

Paul's sister recently had her 13th birthday. When we asked her what kind of cake she wanted she didn't hesitate to say "Hunger Games!" So here it is, our The Hunger Games (by Suzanne Collins) cake.

Kathy has read the series of books, but Paul hasn't, so we are reading them together. Time has only allowed for getting partially through the first book at this point, however. Kathy came up with the design of the cake and we worked together to pull off the different representations from the book. We've come a long way since the days of elementary school book review dioramas, imagine turning this in for a grade!  

Kathy made the cake from a recipe in a cake book, the title of the recipe is Devilishly Moist Chocolate Cake. It was fantastic cake. It tasted like a brownie but was of soft cake consistency. In between the layers is a chocolate mousse which really made the cake what it was in regards to flavor. We used our old-standby frosting to "dirty ice" the cake before applying the camouflage fondant covering. The adornments are fondant, colored frosting, and chocolate rocks.

If you don't understand what the various features represent, read the book! This was a fun cake to make. It took about 6 hours all together to build it. The best part was Shannon's reaction. When she told us she wanted a Hunger Games cake she was expecting a cake with the mocking-jay pin (the book's cover logo, depicted in the first picture) across the top of it. She didn't expect us to create elements of the story. It was fun to show her the cake. We ended up with way too much cake, but it had to be so big to get the different elements included. At least it tasted as good as it looked so it was great to have lots left over.

Happy Birthday Shannon!