So, today was the day I had to drop off two different cakes while also managing to squeeze in my own family's orders for my son's birthday cake and school cupcakes. The cakes also had to be delivered within 30 minutes of each other on what was possibly the last day in the 90 degree range for this year!
The birthday cake and cupcakes were easy and yummy - banana cake and chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and fondant monkey faces. Our son's class has been doing a monkey theme all September, so I decided to keep it going another week with the cupcakes. One little girl refused to eat "a monkey" - so I guess they passed the visual test at least!
The birthday cake had to be Spiderman - my son's latest obsession. A last minute plastic Spiderman had to be added to it. My royal icing red was just too pink for Spiderman, as was my fondant. I forgot to make either medium in advance to let the color deepen. I
don't think my son held it against me... =)
The first cake delivery today was for Cuttin Up Hair Salon for kids (on New Center across from Target). I take my kids there and they are great!!! Great people, friendly, clean and fun environment for the kids while they wait for their turn, and the owner sisters have been a huge support by advertising for me to their clientele. Can't thank them enough! October celebrates the salon's first year anniversary/birthday, so I have been dropping off cupcakes for the last two weekends and will do so for the rest of October. I decided to do a "small" mad-hatter cake for them to show clients a fun birthday cake option. I decorated it all in home-made fondant in the store's colors and chocolate buttercream frosting underneath. The cake layers were traditional white cake and a fantastic lemon cake. The cupcakes were the same as my son's birthday cupcakes - banana and chocolate - with colorful swirls of buttercream frosting. The aerial picture isn't the sharpest, but I liked how the colors played together.
The last cake was the cake I made for a contest at the Children's Museum of Wilmington. If you haven't' been there with your kids, you have to go! A very fun place where you can easily pass several hours and escape the heat of summer (which is what we did all July and August). Today was their birthday celebration. They hold a giant birthday party for the museum, with gifts from guests, birthday cakes galore and the traditional singing of Happy Birthday. There were no regulations on the cake contest other than to make it museum oriented. So, I decided to make fondant replicas of almost every room the museum has to offer: pirate ship, rock climbing wall, spider web rope climb, circus cars and ticket booth, science color lab, teddy bear hospital, and the list goes on and on! I made this cake last night in the wee hours - some where between night and morning. The humidity and temperature of just about everything was against me. Not to mention the hour. Needless to say, the fondant did not do what it was suppose to and basically had a major melt down on me, or the cake really. Then my teetering mad hatter levels started to actually slip. I responded with a quick dowel rod. I was bested by the weight of everything and by the time I had precariously delivered the cake this morning, the dowel rod was trying to make a break for it right out of the top of the cake. Everyone still loved it despite all its faults and I won 1st prize!!! I'm so excited!!! I have never won a thing - my husband reminds me I won his heart. True, but sappy. =) Anyway, I have learned valuable lessons in time, humidity, temperature and weight. Must take all of these things into account! Did I mention I almost ran out of gas between delivering the two cakes and picking husband and son number 1 up from soccer? And did I mention that today was 90 degrees with seemingly similar digits for humidity? It has been beautiful fall (70 degree range) here for well over two weeks! The weather gods were against me... but I won! Yay me!
Here are three chocolate cakes that could be for any occasion or celebration. The "cherry" blossom cake and the one with the lit star candles were very dense and sinfully delicious 'dark chocolate and rum decadence' cakes. The other cake was per my son's request, a 'double chocolate brownie' ice-cream sandwich cake. All cakes were covered in chocolate ganache, but the ice-cream cake ganache was not a pure traditional ganache --- I used low-fat milk instead of heavy cream and as a result it did not set as thick and shiny as the real stuff. I also beat it in the blender after letting it cool to give it more of a whipped consistency. This cake also has the home-spun lollipops from the cupcake episode - I just stuck them to the sides of the cake in an attempt to use the remaining lollipops and hide the mess of the brownie sandwich.
The mini octopus cupcakes for were a daycare celebration. The octopus bodies were gum drops that I cut in half. They were adorable! 
Brianna was a 13 year old girl whom I had never met. Her aunt hired me to do a cake for her birthday and said "she likes pink." I saw several purse cakes on-line and thought that a teenage girl may just like the idea. I got the approval from the aunt and went with it. Not being a purse carrier myself, I had a hard time deciding what style purse to make and came up with this design based on ease of constructing the cake. The 'simply chocolate' cake is covered in a chocolate butter-cream frosting and then covered with chocolate fondant. I used a raspberry glaze in between cake layers. I bought Satin Ices chocolate fondant and although it is expensive, it was delicious and very easy to work with. I since found a recipe that I use to make fondant, but for people who don't want to make it, I highly recommend this product! Everything on this cake is made of fondant - the cell phone, the lip stick, the change purse, the braided purse straps, the VISA gift card. Everything except the candy gold coins - my son thought I should use them, so I did.
