Commissioned

My friend, Nicole (of cake class fame), has admired the paintings that I did for Drew and Kate, so I offered to make some for her boys' room. I had her pick out the ornaments and canvases, and I planned the designs.

I am pleased with how they turned out, and I hope Nicole and her boys like them, too! Here they are:









One of the pleasant side effects of parenthood is how your offspring can unexpectedly stoke your ego. While I was doing these paintings Drew and Kate were perched on either side of me. Drew looked at me and said, "Mom, you're an Artist!" What can I say, the kid is easily impressed.

An Unmitigated Disaster

My mom and I are big fans of the website "Cake Wrecks," which spotlights cakes that "go horribly, hilariously wrong." Up until now I haven't made any cakes that could take a spot of honor on that site. Until now.

Last week I was commissioned to make a cake for my husband to take to his school's career day. Luckily, this was a freebie -- no one was paying for it. All week long I thought about the cake I'd make, and I decided on a white cake with white frosting, strawberry jam in the middle, and a few strawberries on the top. I'd do some borders, but this was going to be a simple, elegant cake. Maybe something along the lines of this:


I should digress here to explain that at the Hobbs household we are very proud skinflints. Even though we live in Texas, we strive to keep our air conditioner off until the very last day possible. I'm perfectly comfortable to go with the windows open and ceiling fans on until it reaches about 82 in the house. At that point we reluctantly shut the windows, crank on the A/C (to 80 degrees), and await the electric bill. I failed to take any of this into account as I set off to bake the cake on Thursday afternoon.

For reasons that may or may not have had to do with the temperature, my from scratch white cakes were not the best. They did not come out of the pan easily and broke a smidge, but not so badly that I didn't think I could skillfully hide their deformity. So a lot was riding on that frosting!

Instead of my usual, go-to icing, I decided to experiment with one of my mom's very good fudge frostings. But instead of using regular, unsweetened chocolate, I decided to try white chocolate. Did I consult a recipe book, or maybe the internet, before I went about this substitution? No. No, I did not.

I had to use a full bag of powdered sugar to reach the consistency I was looking for, and this made the frosting taste like...sweet, sweet sugar. Not like white chocolate. But, that was all the powdered sugar I had, so no going back. I got my cakes on the platter, slathered some of the strawberry jam in between the layers, and set off to frost these hideous cakes.

It wasn't long before I realized there was a problem. The frosting was not sitting on the cake like usual. Instead, it was sliding around and melting off the sides, emphasizing exactly what I'd wanted to hide so badly! Just then it came to me: THIS HOUSE IS 81 DEGREES! I stopped what I was doing, slid the cake in the fridge, closed the windows, and cranked up the air conditioning (to an appalling 76 degrees!). Alas, it was too late. Here's what the cake looked like when it went into the fridge:


After a few minutes I brought out the cake to see what could be done. Maybe I could salvage it? Maybe the icing could be made to stay put? Nah....


As it often happens, once something starts going downhill, there's not much you can do to stop it. Before long, the jam started seeping out the sides, and my white cake became a pink monstrosity:


At this point I just had to laugh. How awful does that cake look!? There was absolutely no way to fix it. All I could do was take some pictures and do a humility check. Also: make alternate plans for a cake for Zach to take to work the next day.

The best part was when Zach got home that evening. The offending cake was in the fridge, and he stopped off there to get some water. I was busy with the kids, and a few minutes later I said, "Zach, I fixed the most awful cake today." "Oh, yeah," he said. "I wasn't sure if it was supposed to look like that or what, so I wasn't going to say anything..." Now there's a smart husband.

Post Script: The make up cake I decided on was a homemade "Sock it to Me Cake," which is basically a sour cream pound cake with streusel filling. It, too, was a disaster. It failed to come out of the pan and looked very, very ugly. Luckily, I had massive amounts of frosting left over from the first cake, so I just generously drizzled it all over the cake, successfully hiding its many flaws.

Non-Cake Creative Endeavors

Cake business has been slow lately, so I decided to finally get around to creating a few paintings for my daughter's room. Just last week she moved into a big bed from her crib, and redecoration was necessary. Now, according to my husband, that redecoration didn't need to consist of new paint on the walls, but he was overruled!

The idea for these paintings came a few years ago when I was decorating my son's room. I wanted to paint some simple cars and trucks on square canvases, but I wasn't confident in my ability to paint cars. While wandering around Hobby Lobby, I found the cutest wooden ornaments (for lack of a better term) - they had all kinds of cars, trucks, tractors, etc. All I had to do was paint the backgrounds, and glue the ornaments on to the canvas.

When I went back to Hobby Lobby for Kate's paintings, they didn't have many cute wooden ornaments anymore. But Michael's had a huge selection! I went through the same drill to pick out ornaments and plan the backgrounds to paint. I think they turned out really cute! Kate really likes the paintings, and won't quit standing up on her bed and pointing out the animals. "DOG! CAT! FWOG! FWAMIN" (unintelligible).

Here they are:

Peyton's Sheriff Star Cake

When we last left my weekend cake adventure story, I had a tub of experimental frosting in the refrigerator, which I'd decided to use as filling for Peyton's birthday cake. The big hurdle here would be the torte-ing, as I have never cut a 9 x 13 cake in half before. I read that it's easiest to cut cakes when they're cold (or frozen), so I put it in the fridge for a few hours before I was scheduled to decorate. It worked like a charm, and the cake cut with no problem. I used a large bread knife instead of the wire "cake cutter" I purchased when I took the cake class. It turns out that the wire does not cut cake very well at all...it just snags, drags, and makes a big mess.

The theme for this 3rd birthday party event was cowboys/sheriffs. I decided to do a sheriff star, and use the colors red, tan, and yellow. Red is a difficult color to make. You've got to use about a gallon of food coloring and let it sit for several hours to "cure" in order to get a very deep red color. I wish the red had turned out a little deeper for this cake, but it was OK.

I would like to try to start making my cakes fancier as far as the details go. Up until now I've been satisfied with getting the main design looking good, throwing on a border and calling it a day. But when I see cakes that I think are really impressive and pretty, it seems that they have some extra detail that really makes the cake. That's why I did the decorative piping on the side of this cake and the two-colored border. (Well, that and I had a bunch of extra frosting left!)


The filling on this cake turned out very well. It did add two sticks of butter worth of fat content, but it sure was good!

Pat the Hammer from Handy Manny

This weekend we have two birthday parties to attend, and I am making cakes for both of them. I made the first one yesterday; Pat the Hammer from Handy Manny. I was nervous about designing this one, because there are a lot of characters to choose from and none of them seemed particularly easy. I set out the usual way: scouring the Internet for a coloring sheet featuring Pat the Hammer (as that was the character I chose to put on the cake). Turns out I couldn't find a decent graphic to copy, so I had to do some finagling...I scanned, cropped, and enlarged a coloring sheet so that I could get Pat in the size that I'd need for the cake.

Earlier this week when I was thinking about making the cakes, one of my favorite bloggers, Pioneer Woman, posted a recipe for "The Best Frosting I've Ever Had." It's an interesting recipe that starts with a base of milk and flour, and then uses granulated instead of powdered sugar (and also, um, TWO STICKS of butter). I thought I'd give it a try for the Pat cake! The "Best" recipe takes longer than my usual frosting recipe, so I spent quite a lot of time on it. As I was putting it together, though, it was clear it wouldn't work for my purposes. For one, it was yellow, and two, it was very fluffy. I'd planned to make my usual decorator icing to put on top, but it was so fluffy that I was pretty sure that my decorations would sink (or fall off) the cake. As far as the taste of the icing, it was really good -- reminded me a lot of tapioca. Since I wasn't sure what to do with it but didn't want to throw out good frosting, I stuck it in a Tupperware container and put it in the fridge.

I whipped up a batch of my usual cake icing - it's not the recipe we learned in class, but a concoction I created using butter, cream cheese, and vegetable shortening. In my opinion it's a much better taste than the strictly shortening recipe they had us make in class. That stuff could clog an artery (and a pipe, for that matter!) in about three bites!

After the kids went to bed I got to decorate, and I was really happy with how it turned out!


As for the rejected "Best" frosting that I stored in the fridge, I got a great idea while decorating Pat. For the cake I'm scheduled to make today, I'm going to torte it (cut it in half) and use the frosting as a filling! It's a perfect consistency and taste to put in the middle of the cake. And as long as I don't break the cake into six pieces when I torte it (it will be a 9 x 13, too), it ought to be really cool!

Monkeying Around with Fondant

Another baby shower! (I'm sensing a theme here.) This time I needed to put a monkey on the cake, and since I have a four- and nearly two-year-old, the monkey I know most intimately is Curious George. A few cakes ago when I'd bought black fondant, the package also came with brown and light brown fondant, so I decided to try it again.

I found a cute coloring sheet for George and used it as the template. I cut each of his body parts into a template piece, then put it over the brown fondant. Then I cut each piece out with an exacto knife and pieced it back together on the cake. Then I traced the entire picture with black frosting and created his eyes and smile with frosting, too.

I'm still not sold on fondant...maybe it's because I don't know much about it, but I prefer butter cream.


The other cake was the baby's initials.

Car Cake

My assignment for this baby shower cake was to match a "car" theme in the nursery. (Not "Cars" the movie, just cars in general.) I decided to attempt a three-dimensional approach for the car, and used crushed up Oreos for the road.