Owl Cupcakes

These cupcakes/6" cake were for award-winning news anchor Doreen! Her lovely daughter just turned 2. There were 2 dozen vanilla cupcakes, and 2 dozen chocolate cupcakes.  The 6" cake was vanilla.  The fondant is homemade marshmallow (because I think that is the type that tastes best!) I used a circle cookie cutter that my awesome boyfriend bent into more of a tear drop shape and used that to cut out the bodies and wings.  A small circular cutter was perfect to cut out the eyes, and I have these great fondant writers that made creating the rest of the eyes a snap.  It definitely took some time just because there were so many, but I am super happy with how they turned out. :)  I was really excited that Doreen requested owls, as this was a project that I had wanted to do for a while and this was the perfect reason to.

Honey Cupcakes

These cuties are honey cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting. The honey adds just enough to the cupcakes to give a good flavor but without being too "out-of-the-box." I went with a basic decoration - sugar roses with some sprinkles.

Dad's Birthday Cake!

This cake is absolutely amazing! A fantastic chocolate cake recipe that is moist and delicious, and a cocoa mascarpone frosting that truly is one of the best frostings I've ever tried. It is paired with fresh blueberries and raspberries. 

Patti's Birthday Cupcakes

These cupcakes were for my cousin's 18th birthday!  A vanilla cupcake with a buttercream frosting, fondant bows and pearlized sprinkles. I loved the contrast of the bright color with the black and white wrappers.

Dracula cake for Dawn's birthday!

So my friend's Dawn's birthday was this past Monday, so I made her this adorable Dracula cake! It was a 6" lemon cake with a vanilla buttercream filling, vanilla buttercream frosting, chocolate frosting for the hair, and fondant for the eyes, nose, mouth, fangs, and ears! Whew! I used just a teeny tiny bit of ivory for the skin, and delphinium blue wilton coloring for the mouth/eyes. I used a Wilton FoodWriter marker to draw the red on the fangs.

Since it was only a 6" cake, I had some extra batter and used it up with some cute cupcakes with a neon  green frosting and some cute sprinkles. Doesn't my Dracula have the cutest little ears?!

I got this idea from Coco Cake Land. She has plenty of super adorable cake/party ideas! I may have to try her little green witch kitty...

Baby Shower

I really love when people ask me to make something that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. It just ensures that I try new things and branch out. Otherwise I would just sit here piping pretty flowers and decorating cakes with swirl designs. (Okay, probably not that bad.) This shower was for a baby boy, so the family decided to go with a sports theme!

These were red velvet with a frosting using cream cheese emulsion. It still tasted like cream cheese, but I didn't have to worry about other ingredients throwing off my consistency. This was a great way to get the flavor without doing that. I made a marshmallow fondant and piped on the stitches by hand. It was super time consuming! 

As you can probably tell, I did 8 cupcakes with red frosting, 8 cupcakes with white, and then 8 baseballs.

These were pumpkin cupcakes with more of the cream cheese emulsion frosting. More marshmallow fondant. I used the wilton coloring Copper to get that orange-but-not-overly-orange color. After consulting the internet, I determined that the best way to get the texture I wanted would be to use a very small circular decorating tip (nooo idea which one.) And then by hand slightly push into the fondant. The texture was perfect! It was also time consuming! But they came out perfectly! I just piped on the black lines by hand. 

My only concern with these was that the frosting and the basketballs would be two very-off shades of copper, but I think they turned out okay.

Chocolate cupcakes with marshmallow filling. I actually bought (::gasp::) chocolate fondant, but I had never made it before, and as fondant is still a little tricksy I decided not to try adding cocoa into the mix. I had my boyfriend, Greg, help me with the football shape. I came up with a little template for myself and then used a sharp knife to get the shapes. I just piped on the stitching. 

Vanilla cupcakes with chocolate mousse filling. The soccer balls were actually the ones I had been most worried about prior to starting this project, and turned out to be the easiest. I got the Wilton FoodWriter markers and just drew on the black patches.

My other concern was that with the other cupcakes I did matching colors for the frosting. However... with soccer, it's really black and white. I don't like using all black frosting, but the half&half was a great compromise!

All in all a great project and I was really happy with the results. So was the mom-to-be, and she was what mattered!

Anniversary Party

Yes, I know. I am totally awful at updating this in a timely fashion. Seriously. It's awful. But usually I'm complacent with just posting my pictures to Facebook. Anddd then a few months later, get around to posting them to this adorable blog I have! In any case, over the summer a good friend of mine asked if I would help her with her parents' anniversary party. Of course, I said yes. She came up with a color scheme and some ideas and this is what we came up with.

This is the finished product! Kathy decorated the edging with pearls (because you can never have enough pearls.)

The top of the cake didn't even take that long! I definitely loved how it looked.

We did a few different types of cupcakes. We did mint chocolate, regular chocolate, some with a chocolate mousse filling... the mousse filling was lovely! Definitely something I'll be using in the future. The only thing I wasn't super happy with was the fact that (obvs) it had to be refrigerated. Kathy piped on the green frosting while I piped the ivory flowers.

AHHH I love tiny cakes. :)