Emily's Graduation!

So, I haven't posted anything for a while. I've done some cakes and cupcakes since my last entry, but due to camera breakage, a two week vacation to my sister's, post vacation recouping, and summer vacation acclimation.... I have been lazy.

We went out to California for my incredible niece Emily's High School graduation. Where have 18 years gone?! We talked for a couple of months about me doing a mad hatter style cake for the event, with as much as I could cram on to it that represented who Emily was, is and will be. Not a small task when you look at how incredibly active she is and the number of teams and organizations she has been a part of! The biggest hurdle for me with this cake --- other than the fact that

1. we were arriving about 36 hours before the party so all the actual baking was left up to my sister and mom (normally I make the cakes with less time, but this was originally going to be a 4-tiered cake and we needed the kitchen oven and space to prepare the rest of the party food)
2. my tools, fondant and food colors had to pass through TSA inspections
3. I broke a toe packing my fondant rolling pin the night before we left for the airport and boy! does that hurt! 

.... apart from all of that, the colors of her High School and her University were totally clashing. Em decided the party theme colors should be entirely different from either school to top it all off; green and purple. So color was my biggest hurdle. Hence, the green and purple cake, with red, blue, black, and gold colors on the structures. Her High School was the Los Banos Tigers (crimson and gold), and she will be attending UC Santa Barbara in the fall (blue and yellow with the Gauchos as the mascot --- you have to look it up if you are clueless like I was!).

All of the structures were fondant-gumpaste combinations; some of the animals were solid fondant. We had both schools represented by their letters and their mascots. The pig represents her many years in FFA (Future Farmers of America) raising and auctioning pigs and I also recreated the FFA emblem by hand-painting it in food coloring. The frog represents her interest in studying amphibians at UCSB. And two of her sports also made it onto the cake... swimming and water polo. Emily is also a very accomplished public speaker, served as student rep on the Board of Educators, and held various officer positions throughout her high school career. None of these things made it onto the cake, more from my exhaustion than for any other reason --- although it is hard to represent those things!

The cakes were baked by my mom and (I think!) my sister. The bottom was carrot cake -- which I have to say was out of this world! The middle was a chocolate cake, and the top was a yellow confetti cake. We decided to not include the fourth layer that I originally planned. I was going to test a new recipe on them, but alas... it will have to wait for another opportunity. Everything was covered in butter cream frosting and then covered in my home-made marshmallow fondant (that my mom help make for the first time --- go mom!).  This cake was truly a family affair! Emily's gorgeous little sister, Elizabeth, and our amazingly talented sister-in-law, Kelly (http://www.florettedesigns.com/), helped make and paint the silver fondant balls around the second tier. Elizabeth also colored most of the fondant for me and I think she probably did more that I am forgetting by now! Mom or my sister made the frosting - possibly both of them. It's all a blur! So, in the end, it all came together and was actually almost all consumed by the end of the party. We had a perfect amount of carrot cake left over for us to savor the next day.

It was an awesome trip. I can't believe Em is on her way to UCSB at the end of the month. I'm crying for my sister! Makes me think of Toy Story III -- bring Kleenex!