4 Tiered Fondant Cake: 18th Bday!

First of all... Happy 18th birthday to my sweet sister Kallie, and happy 13th birthday to my cute brother Brody! They had a pretty awesome day yesterday, as they do every July 6th together. Cute little birthday buddies!

So anyways, as you all know.. I've been trying new and different things with CAKE. So when I seen a cake from The Shaky Baker, I just HAD to make it in orange for my sister. She's been in choir for 7 years, and she's played the piano for even longer. I knew the music symbols and the piano design were perfect for her!

So I started out with my favorite cake recipe from scratch, and made 8 cake batters... Yes.. You read correctly.. EIGHT. I had no idea baking big cakes was going to be soooo much cake! But it was worth it!

My first bottom layer came out looking like this...

I almost cried.. But then I let my other 3 layers sit in the pan to cool for a little longer before I popped them out, and they looked just fine. But on the next set of 4 layers, I was sure to put more Cake Release in my pans.. Just in case ;)

I made 4 batches of fondant for this mega cake too. I used a new recipe.. and it was FABULOUS! I found it from Veena's Art of Cakes. My best discovery yet with fondant making. The two white ones I made were perfect. But when I made the two orange ones, and the one black, they were a bit sticky while I was forming them in a ball to sit over night in the fridge. I had a little trouble rolling them out though. I'm not sure exactly what I was doing wrong.. they might have been too dry. But I got cracks and tears in my fondant once I put it on the cake. 

I know it was my first time though, so I was a little forgiving. Practice makes perfect, right? So I'm going to keep practicing, and hopefully I'll be able to figure out where I went wrong. 

I made little goat poops for the pearls around the cake.. lol we have a baby goat.. So when I started rolling the black fondant in little balls.. OBVIOUSLY someone was going to make that connection. 

My sad attempt at free drawing a treble clef. 

Happy Birthday Kallie Bug. You're the best sister there is. Love ya!

Thanks for reading, if there's any suggestions anybody has on fondant making.. PLEASE let me know :) I love advice!

Until next time!

Two Tiered, Orange & Pink Zebra Cake!!!

Kara and I made our very first fondant covered cake! And we made it into two tiers! We were pretty darn proud of ourselves! It was super easy to do, and so much fun!
I was half expecting this cake to take us ages to do, and a few long nights, but we got it done in 3 nights in about 3 to 4 hours each night. I'd say we did pretty well on our timing!
Regan, the cute little 12 year old that we made our cake for, told us her favorite colors were "Sunset Red and Peach." Sooo... we got as close to peach and sunset red as we could. It turned out more pink than red, but it still looked cute!
We  made two 14" and two 9" round cakes to stack on top of each other for our tiers. With a vanilla pudding filling in between the four layers, and a cream cheese frosting to coat the outer layer of the cake before we put the fondant on.

9" top layer!!!

Yay for fondant!!!!

Our first time working with rolled fondant! :D

So pretty and smooooooth!

14" bottom layer!

Yay! We did it!

While Kara was rolling fondant and showing off her muscles, I did some playing around with a high heel cupcake. We thought it'd be a cute cake topper for Regan, so we found different images on Pinterest and created one of our own.

The base of the heel was a graham cracker covered in white chocolate.

The heel part was a Twix.

And then of course a cute little cupcake in Zebra printed paper.

Pink Sparkles!

Ta-Da!!!!

Then we rolled out our orange and pink fondant, and started making zebra striped to place on the cakes.

We rolled what was left of the fondant up into little balls to make "pearls" around the cakes.

I cut out letters from fondant for Regan's name

Placing the high heel :D

Our cute little accessories we decorated the cake with

Had to put a tiara on the heel for the Princess!

Yay!! We did it!! It looks so darn cute!!

Happy Birthday, Regan! She loved the cake, and she said it tasted wonderful! Everyone at the party agreed!

This was so much fun to make, and I'm soooo very excited to keep making new cakes and cupcakes every week! Wish me luck!

6 Layered, Orange Ombre

My sweet sister just graduated last week, the 23rd of May, 2013!

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make another cool cake, and she wasn't complaining when I told her it would be ORANGE!

Her favorite color is orange, so when I found this super cool cake off of howdoesshe.com

I had to try and do the 6 layers!

It was fun trying to figure out how to make orange cake mix... I was having a blonde moment and couldn't figure out how in the world I was going to get different shades of orange. Before I was about to go to the store and look for orange food coloring, I had to remind myself that yellow + red = orange.

We got there! 6 different shades of orange. Or 6 almost different shades of orange. 

I followed the tips on howdoesshe.com and used the 3 different frostings she recommended. It wasn't pretty, but when it was stiff and frozen enough to frost, I was glad I followed the "crumby frosting" suggestion. It made the cake easier to frost the last layer so that I didn't get orange cake pieces all over the pretty white frosting.

I popped it in the freezer while we went to Kallie's graduation ceremony, and when we got home, it was perfectly ready to frost! I used a marshmallow fluff frosting, and it was actually pretty good. 

Our happy graduate!

Yay for the Class of 2013!

The graduate and I! :) I'm so proud of her!

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