My niece, Emery, has really gotten into these little dolls called Lalaloopsy. They’re plastic but made to look like rag dolls in lolita style dresses with giant ringlets on their heads. I actually think they’re really cute if not sort of creepy for the giant button eyes. Anyway, that’s what Emmy decided she wanted for her birthday cake this year so I did what I could. Her mom asked for the toys to be on top and to have buttons all over the side. It was lemon flavor cake with coconut flavored frosting and multi-colored on the inside. The buttons and platform the toys were sitting on is coconut flavored fondant with some piping for the stitches.

I’m not completely thrilled with how it came out, to be honest, but at least I didn’t have a meltdown like last year. The quality of my cake decorating is diminishing, but I’m finally able to actually enjoy doing it now that I allow myself to make mistakes. If I had learned that lesson when I first started, I would surely have way more cakes on this page than I do now. I wish I had thought to get more (better) pictures of it, but who has time for pictures when your niece is that excited?

My mother finally came to see me, a month after her birthday. I still told her I would make her a cake and here it is. She gave me absolutely nothing to go on other than that she likes purple. She doesn’t have any special interests or anything that I could work into a cake, so I went with the tried and true flowers. They’re always pretty. I had been dying to do a cake covered with rolled wafer cookies on the outside so I worked that in, too.

All the flowers are royal icing covered with pearl dust (and perhaps I used a heavy hand, but the end result was beautiful.) I spent all week making the flowers, but a lot of my earlier ideas failed, so I was working on them the night before, panicked because I didn’t know if they would dry by the next morning and not knowing what other flowers I could crank out in no time, so I just made some up. I guess they looked a little like zinnias, but I didn’t care. Anyway, they did dry (thanks to the cooling rack + fan combo) and all was well.

It was rather delicious, too, or at least so I’m told. The cake was devil’s food, the frosting was chocolate hazelnut (made with a whole jar of Nutella!) and there was a thin layer of vanilla buttercream on the top for the leaves. The rolled wafer cookies were also chocolate hazelnut flavor. All the guys at the construction site loved it.

My boyfriend bought me some Autumn cookie cutters with two leaf shapes and an acorn, each in 3 different sizes. I just had to use them for something, so I made his coworkers spiced sugar cookies with a rolled marshmallow buttercream decoration. The rolled buttercream recipe I used came out a lot like fondant, but tasting better. I don’t care much for decorating cookies with royal icing, mostly due to my lack of skill at it so far, so I needed to find something easier since I had to make several dozen cookies to feed everyone. It also had to be stackable so regular buttercream was right out. Anyway, I was going to marble the tops with different colors but was unsure of how good it would look so I just stuck to solid colors. Then I drew each vein by hand with a toothpick. It took a while but I’m really pleased with how the cookies came out. Also, they were delicious.

This is a cake I sort of slapped together for a cakewalk at a church. I just didn’t want to show up empty-handed when I don’t even go to the church. I felt bad taking advantage of the time, effort, and money of their volunteers as well as bringing 3 guests, without at least contributing something of my own. Anyway, I was sort of disappointed by the quality of their cakewalk. It wasn’t their fault, but I thought there would be actual cakes there. All I saw were mostly Pillsbury tube refrigerated cookies and things like that. My cake looked huge next to all the piddly little things that people brought. Being my first cake walk, I guess I was just expecting too much. Oh well. I’m sure the family who won my cake enjoyed it. Even if the cake itself was crap (it totally wasn’t) there is still a whoooole bunch of candy to make up for it.

This was the final cake for my Wilton Course II class. I initially resisted the idea of making the cake since the colors on the cover of the book just weren’t my style and I was having a really hard time coming up with a palette that I thought would look great. In the end, though, I got inspired by some pretty paper I saw at the craft store and decided to go ahead with it. It’s still not my favorite cake and I had a hell of a time on the basketweave because my frosting was too thin and only got thinner as the heat from my hand warmed it up, but I got a picture of the good side so it’s okay. I actually liked doing the basketweave and will probably try to find some way to work it into a cake again. I like knowing how to make so many different kinds of flowers with royal icing, too. They can be used on so many things and they’re so easy. Well, most of them…

I made this cake as part of a 2 hour demo at Hobby Lobby that my Wilton instructor organized. I had a really fun time making it, using all the different techniques I had learned in course 1, but used in different ways from what we were taught. I drew the unicorn myself with various stock images as reference. All in all, I was extremely pleased with cake and is probably my favorite so far, even more than the Super Mario Galaxy cake. I just really love unicorns and I like the variety of techniques I used in this. I’m also proud because it’s the second cake decorated in the same day which is a first for me.

This was my final cake for the Wilton class I was taking. After working with it over the course of the month, I can safely say that I pretty well hate fondant. I know it’s my own fault, though. I insisted on making my own marshmallow fondant and, never having worked with fondant before, didn’t know the consistency I was looking for. I made it way too hard on myself and was pushed nearly to the point of tears when working on this particular cake. In the end, though, it came out okay and I am happy with the results. It’s just going to be a while before I bother with another fondant cake.

Here’s another cake I made just because. I wasn’t happy with how the Moogle cake came out so I wanted to make sure I actually felt comfortable doing an image transfer (no gel transfer this time – I just used a toothpick to trace over the picture I printed out and lay on the cake) then filling in with stars. I am actually pleased with it this time because all of the little lines are still visible and it looks right. The outlining was a little sloppy, but that was partially the fault of the frosting. I made it too thin so it was a little hard to work with. I used the same frosting on my shell border and ran into problems there, too. Either way, I like the cake well enough. I just need to figure out how to make it stop developing air bubbles underneath the buttercream. I think it has something to do with my refrigeration of it since it never started until I started doing that.

Anyway, goombas are obviously from Super Mario Bros. which is owned by Nintendo. I’m pretty sure this image is some art from the NES days, but who knows?

I made this cake just as a practice for some of the techniques that I had learned in class the previous week and would be learning the following week. I’m not happy with how it came out at all, but I learned a few good lessons. Ultimately, the biggest problem I had was trying to cram too much detail into too small of an image. It ended up sloppy and sad, but here it is anyway. I picked a moogle since there are almost no moogle cakes out there and even if I don’t care too much for Final Fantasy’s latest iterations, the earlier ones still hold a place in my heart.

The image is from Mario Hoops 3 on 3 for the DS, and I used piping gel to transfer the image to the cake. It was really messy and didn’t work like it did in class. Again, I think it was the level of detail I tried to fit.

I made this cake for a couple of little boys for their birthday. I was basically given free reign to do what I wanted and I knew they liked this game and I happen to love it, so it was a perfect fit. It’s my version of the cake seen here. I contacted the original decorator to get tips on recreating her work and she happily offered them and gave me her blessing to do it. I made a few changes from her design, not all of them better. Anyway, it was my very first decorated cake, so it took me nearly 50 hours of work to do over 4 days. Somehow, it all came together and I had a pretty awesome cake to present to the birthday boys.

I didn’t get paid for my work since I viewed it as practice. I made a lot of mistakes on this cake that even I could easily see as a beginner, but that’s all part of the learning process. The point is that the kids were thrilled, I was thrilled, and it was pretty tasty, too.