I cannot believe that our family friend Samantha is finally going off to college!! I’ve known her since she was 7! Boy, do I feel old; I wonder how that makes her parents feel…hahah For the chocolate lover at heart, I made devils food cake with chocolate-cool whip pudding filling. One of my staples, and a very delicious one at that! This was my first time molding Rice Krispie treats, which was kinda cool. Makes it a lot easier to make supportive figures and is better than wasting fondant. The stage and Sam were both made out of the yummy marshmallow treat and then covered with fondant and dusted with gold glitter. I also tried out a new technique called colorflow for the Temple University mascot. That’s one ugly mascot, but hey, what the customer wants, the customer gets! (within reason of course haha) Once the design is piped and filled in with color, it turns into a hard plaque with a puffed texture. I’m stunned by how easy and how great it came out. Definitely a method that will be used again!
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- Temple University mascot
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- Graduation Cake
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- congrats, Sam!
Finally, a new flavor! Banana cake filled with banana cream pudding and strawberries and bananas.
I admit I took the easy way out with the seashells and used a mold. But considering how difficult the molds were to work with and undefined they were, I will be sticking to my usual way of hand sculpting in the future. The sand was crumbled Nilla Wafers.
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- beautiful seafoam color
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- beach cake
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- seashells and sand
For those of you who are parents or have young family members, you may be familiar with the show The Backyardigans. For me, I have spent MANY-a-days watching this show whenever I visit my little munchkin cousin Joey. (To the point where I find myself randomly singing or humming songs from it from time to time haha) It was his 3rd birthday, so as a gift from his Auntie Justine, I made a fabulous Backyardigans cupcake tier. It was quite a challenge to take on, since I had done my online research of pictures to see how others had made it, and boy were they terrrrrrible! I started to doubt whether I could actually pull it off since even professionals had failed to do so. BUT I had made my committment and it was either that or Yo Gabba Gabba, and the latter was just plain creepy and unacceptable. So I set forth with the challenge.. and totally exceeded my own expectations 
HANDS DOWN, my greatest achievement!
(I took these pictures before I got around to cleaning the cornstarch off of them)
The whole gang! (well, minus Austin) A personalized touch – each of the Backyardigans holding the letters of Joey’s name
Backyardigans Cake
Backyardigans, Tasha and Uniqua!
Backyardigans, Pablo and Tyrone!
Backyardigans Cupcake Tier
I credit Kyle’s dad for building me my cupcake tier to make this possible. It’s the perfect platform for a kids party. Great cake on top and no-mess cupcakes to hand out. These were vanilla cupcakes (perhaps I should start forcing others to branch out to different flavors haha) filled with a chocolate-cool whip pudding mixture.
The real things:
The Real Backyardigans
This cake was made for a family friend. Her favorite stuffed animal was a blue-green hippo named Baba, so I was asked to replicate it as the cake topper. I’m a perfectionist at heart so I had actually scrapped my first attempt at the hippo. I couldn’t help my eyes kept drawing themselves back to the figurine and wouldn’t let me move on! So I ended re-doing it but I’m glad I did because I was so proud of the way the second take turned out. I can’t believe how perfectly I got the fondant to match the real thing. This was a vanilla cake filled with a delicious cream-cheese vanilla pudding. Tastes a lot better than it sounds – Gotta say, it’s one of my favorite flavors!
I was never really that hungry hungry...
The Hungry Hippo
The real thing:
The Original
My aunt threw a surprise 50th birthday party for my uncle, and of course everyone had expected me to make a gag cake. So I made my new-found signature vanilla cake… and in the hectic chaos of it all, I forgot to fill the cake!! haha But that’s okay because the execution of the design turned out way better than I had imagined! The whole cake was then steamed for a shiny glossy look. One side of the cake represented his youth and love of guns and a shooting range, while the other side represented old age, complete with diapers, the “blue pill”, glasses and a walker, as my uncle frantically tries to climb back up to the other side. Everything was hand sculpted out of fondant except for the glasses and walker which were plied out of wire.
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- long-gone enjoyments of youth
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- Clawing to stay at the top…
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- Over the Hill!
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