Cupcake fun!

Sometimes you just have to bake for youself.... or eat the extras! So we decided to take advantage of this! We had some fun with a book lent to us called "Hello Cupcake". We couldn't resist the cute little sunflowers, especially since we had all the ingredients on hand... always an oreo in our cupboard!! The strawberry cupcakes, being decorated by the little hands, were so yummy as well. This is not a regular flavour that I bake, but we have enjoyed the warm colour and sweet taste of these pretty little cupcakes! (oh and doing the "sprinkle, sprinkles" is the best part of all)!

It also wouldn't be a complete post without some cupcakes for special occations! Since I am soo far behind in my postings, I'm going to group a bunch of my cupcake fun together. I did a few weddings this summer and one of them had these lovely red velvet cupcakes. This sultry colour just screams love and romance and I think that is why it is such a popular flavour for weddings. The bride for this wedding also had gone online and purchased a beautiful cupcake stand. It made for great pictures and I took advantage of it! I hope she had a lovely day and a wonderful life ahead of her with her new husband.

Then this final wedding was done in the summer of 2010 as well. This bride decided to go with some fun flavour choices! (which I love doing!!) She chose a chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream, oreo cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and peanut butter cupcakes with vanilla buttercream. Yum!! I think my favourite of the bunch is peanut butter, but I have a weakness for peanut butter.... then again, I also have a weakness for oreos... ok I can't make the decision, but either way, they were totally sweet!

Thanks for allowing me to use some creativity! I think many customers just assume you have to go plain vanilla or chocolate, when there are so many possibilities out there. Key lime pie cupcakes, rolo cupcakes, chocolate mint cupcakes, creamsicle.... they are endless! Please, don't be afraid to ask about different flavours. Or if you have a favourite treat, just ask if it can be done. I will be honest with you, and I'm always up to the challenge. Ok, now that I'm drooling, I think it's off to bed, to have some sweet dreams. Goodnight!

Purple

The theme colour for weddings this summer was purple!
Every wedding that I did this summer seemed to have the colour purple as one of their accent colours. This wedding reception hall was decorated absolutely beautifully! The purples all tied in together as well as the sweets!
I was asked to do cookies for favours on the tables and a cake truffle cake for dessert. The cookies were sugar cookie wedding dresses and cakes. The truffles were raspberry, chocolate and vanilla. I was sooo happy with how it turned out, and I'm glad the couple enjoyed them as well!

Wedding season!

Wedding season has officially begun here. Well it began a while ago, I just have been too busy to post anything on here!
My first wedding in May was an order for Mini-cinnamon buns. After experimenting with different recipes, we found a winner. And then baking them fresh that morning, and baking 100 over again, the cake made it to the reception with time to spare.
Thank you to the bride and groom for giving me the opportunity to do something creative and different for their wedding. It was fun to do something out of the ordinary.

"Return to Sender...."

So at my real full time job, (baking is my fake one!), I open a lot of mail for Service Canada. And every so often we get in letters stamped with "RTS" or Return to Sender. Does anyone else have a problem with breaking out in song when the lyrics are right in front of you!!! I know of one other person, my co-worker that sits beside me, and every time we come across one of these, we break out in song, with our best Elvis voices and sing "Return to sender....address unknown.... no such number.... no such zone."
Ok, so I have definitely deviated from the reason I am writing this post, but I couldn't help myself.
I got to make a cake for a Postie herself. It was her birthday, and a red Canada post box was the order for the cake. I had fun with this one, as always, and felt a little connected to it, as I open mail all morning at my job as well!
Here's a tribute to our Canadian Postal workers! Thanks for all your hard work. I love getting snail mail!

Baby Dedication

Twins, twins, twins!!
Our friends have twins! And they wanted a cake to celebrate their dedication to the Lord. They were having family and friends back over to thank them for all of their ongoing help with their two beautiful baby boys. I was blessed enough to make them a cake for their celebration. The bottom layer was chocolate and the top layer was vanilla, and in the middle was a cookies and cream buttercream. I hope they enjoyed their special day. God bless you and your family!

Basketball

I was browsing through some of my photos and I came across a few that I didn't think were up here yet! Here is one of them. It was a celebratory cake for the Western Mustangs women's basketball team. They had a year end party and wanted a cake for their gathering.

Volleyball Get-together

This was a cake made for a volleyball "5 year" reunion and celebrating certain milestones in a couple of their coaches' lives.

It is always interesting working with the ball cake, but it usually turns out the way I like it.

I was happy with the fondant of this cake. The base cake was a chocolate cake, while the ball was a rainbow chip. I hope they enjoyed the party!

Cake truffle tree!

Cake truffles! I love doing these cakes! I had an order for a cake truffle cake which was for a bridal shower. She ordered 60 cake truffles, which I did not think would fit on the form that I had purchased... I guess I was wrong! I could have fit around 100 on there!

These were strawberry, chocolate and vanilla cake truffles. Sweet little bit sized cakes, to just pop in your mouth. I don't know if it gets any better!

T-I-double G - rrrrrr!

I love Tigger, and he was my favourite "Winnie the Pooh" character.

"The wonderful thing about Tiggers is Tiggers a wonderful thing....." We sing this song around our house lots!

One of our friend's son was turning 2 and she requested a Tigger cake. It was a lot of fun to do, as usual. We just did a vanilla cake, but covered it in a fondant Tigger.

April flowers bring May showers??

This is the way that it has seemed... well in our April and May anyways.

April was a month of cupcake flower bouquets, and May has been pretty rainy so far. But with the rain comes beautiful growth!

Enough of the rambling, on to the cakes!

I had 2 cupcake bouquet orders back to back. The first one was for a bridal shower in baby blues and yellow. The second one was for a baby dedication. We also provided party favours for them, which were oreo truffle pops... one of my personal favourites! After I did a few of these, my sister-in-laws were home for the weekend and I couldn't help myself but experiment with some flavours for them. We did peanut butter oreo truffles (the favourite among the girls), chocolate oreo truffles and then regular oreo truffles. All were so rich and yummy, but I think the peanut butter ones, "take the cake"!

Birthday Cakes

While in Florida, I was just itching to get my hands into some baking. And the opportunity presented itself. It was our good friend's birthday while we were down there. He was seeing his last year in his twenties, turning the big 29, so we baked him a cake. A chocolate cake with cookies and cream ice cream underneath, all iced with chocolate buttercream and decorated with fondant music notes and guitar. This was a request from David and Kari, as they both thought ice cream cake sounded yummy, and this was Dave's favourite cake! It doesn't turn out to look the prettiest, but it sure tastes good, if I do say so myself.



The next cake was a 60th birthday cake for a very special friend of ours back home. She was thrown a surprise 60th birthday party (for her birthday is not until June) - what a great surprise! The 6 was a carrot cake and the 0 was lemon poppyseed, all iced with a cream cheese icing. There was also a very special request for money to be placed in the cake - how fun! Everyone loved the cake, and she had a lovely day celebrating with her friends and family.

More March Madness!

Hello again!

These pictures are a little slow getting up here, as we are down in Florida persuing God's will for our future and visiting family.

Every order this month has been so much fun to create and very tempting to eat!!

Order #1: 1st Birthday Cake

These cakes were for a birthday boy who was born on St. Paty's day! What a fun theme to have for a first birthday party! I loved working with the greens and threw a little gold in there for some fun!

Order #2: My brother's "Pirates of the Caribbean" birthday cake - yes it is the Black Pearl!

Another fun cake! I wanted to do the ship entirely out of chocolate "bark" to make it look like a wooden ship. I think it turned out pretty good. Even the sails are made of chocolate! If I had my gum paste with me, I would have used that for the angel on the front, but the fondant did a good enough job this time. It was nice and tasty! (oh and the theme song was played as this was presented!! haha, thanks to my husband's ingenuity - it was fun - and we had sparklers as canons!)

Order #3: Ben 10 Birthday Cupcakes

Apparently this is a cool tv show for 7 year olds that I had never heard about! I had fun creating these vanilla and chocolate cupcakes for the birthday boy! I hope they enjoyed them, and I hope they looked like the omnitrix of Ben in the show!

Order #4: Shower sweets

I had an order for 14 dozen different shower sweets. We made rolo cookies, lemon-yogurt cupcakes, sugar cookies, raspberry white chocolate bars, butter tarts and cherry chip cake truffles! It was hard to resist making extra to eat, but we managed! I hope they had a lovely day celebrating such a sweet girl!

This month's activities

March madness has begun!

I can not believe the business that I have received for the month of March!

Each weekend is being filled with many orders, and I have even had to turn 2 down already!

Well here are the orders as of late:

#1 - I had an order for a baby shower (1 of 2 for this month). It was for our music pastor and his wife and baby boy, so we did some vanilla and chocolate cupcakes with soothers and "music" onesies on top for decoration. I love babies!

#2 - This order was for a first birthday party. This little girl has a favourite dolly called "Stella" which I was asked to replicate for her cake. The poor sweetheart was sick on her birthday, but hopefully some sweet cake was able to cheer her up, especially if it had her best friend Stella on it!

#3 - Another order that I had for this weekend was for a good friend of mine. She is a photographer, and I had asked her to do some work on some photos for me... payment, a birthday cake! Happy Birthday Kate! I'll do a little shout out and give you her site. She is great at what she does. Thanks Kate. A red velvet and buttercream icing cake was for her special day.

Hope you enjoy all these shots!

1st Birthdays

This month came with a couple of 1st birthday cakes. The first one I did was a minnie mouse cake, made with a strawberry cake.

The second one was a hockey stick cake, with a puck as the smash cake, made out of white cake. For future notice I think I will try to stay away from black icing for the kiddos (or more for the parents of the kiddos!)!

Little Mermaid Cake

This cake was done for a special 3 year old friend of ours. They wanted buttercream icing - for the taste of course!! All the decorations are out of fondant, and it was a white cake. Ariel is actually a cute little toy I found and had to use on the cake! Again, a Disney cake, which I love!

Birthday parties!

It was my son's 2nd birthday this past week, yea 2! And since he was turning 2 we made 2 cakes, which is not going to be a tradition! We just happened to have 2 separate family get togethers, therefore, needed 2 separate cakes! The first one we made was very simple, a train done all with a star tip for time saving and sanity saving reasons! It was a replica of the show "Dinasaur Train" which he absolutely goes giddy about!

The second one was a replica of his favourite movie character, Lightning McQueen! Another show he is bonkers about! We just had to do this cake. McQueen is made entirely of cake, covered in fondant. The base cake is a banana cake recipe found in this months Canadian Living, covered in fondant and buttercream icing. The wheels are actually oreos, the perfect size for this! It was such a fun cake to create, and lots of fun to eat too!

Itouch cake

It was my brother's birthday, and what better to make for the techie, than an Itouch cake!

We made this in an afternoon, so it was a quick job, with the details not being completely up to snuff, but it was still yummy and close to the original. Next time, I would make a more dense cake to hold up the weight of the fondant. Altogether, we had fun creating!

My Brother's Wedding

It seemed only fitting to do a "Cake Truffle" cake for my brother and now sister-in-law. Ever since I discovered these sweet little treats, they have been a big hit with these two. They would make them for all occasions, so this one seemed like a must! When I saw a picture of a cake truffle cake, while browsing wedding cakes online, I instantly emailed it to them, and they liked it as well. I tentatively said yes to do their cake, (while I was pregnant and could possibly have the baby on their big day), and secretly hoped I could do it! Our little baby boy came a month early, so I was able to work on it, with my mother. She formed all the cake truffles a few weeks in advance, and we dipped and decorated 2 days before the wedding. It all came together nicely, but I would say making the form for it to go on was the most labour intensive part of the whole project. Overall we were very pleased with the outcome and I think everyone enjoyed this sweet little treat that represented the bride and groom very well! Many blessings to a beautiful lifetime of love and serving our awesome God together!

December Birthdays

We had some family birthday celebrations this month, along with our dear Savior's birth. These consisted of a cake covered in tools for our 2 year old toolman nephew, and a pretty pink cake for our aunt. The tool cake was all made and molded out of fondant and the pink cake was a carrot cake covered in cream-cheese frosting. Much thanks goes out to my mother-in-law and sister-in-laws who lended me their hands for these projects - which have become more challenging with a newborn and toddler.