Aging Gracefully

I sometimes find it a bit of a challenge to design birthday cakes for adults.  Bright, fun kiddie cakes are easy for me to visualize, but it seems like I have to exercise my creativity a little more when I’m planning a cake for an older adult.  I guess I see it as a fine line between tastefully mature and boring.

The cake I’m sharing today was designed for a lady’s 79th birthday.  I tried to keep the color palette on this cake a little more sophisticated.  I mean, I really didn’t think the birthday “girl” would appreciate lime green, hot pink, and turquoise, so I chose cream, brown, and coral.

And instead of polka dots and stripes, I decided to use a couple of different techniques to create a cascading floral design.  I punched out some flowers from gumpaste and applied them to the cake, and I hand-painted a few flowers and vines directly onto the cake.

I love the dimension that I got by using the two different techniques for the flowers.

This cakes was made with 6” and 8” tiers and served approximately 30.  It was filled and iced with buttercream and covered with homemade fondant.  The flowers are made of gum paste, and the tiers are trimmed with satin ribbon.

Lindsey

Spiderman

With a new Spiderman movie coming out this summer, you know some little boy is going to want a Spiderman birthday party.  Here are a few pictures of the Spiderman cake I made for 4-year-old Clark.

This cake was made with 6” and 8” round tiers.  It serves approximately 30 people.  The cake is filled and iced with buttercream and covered with homemade marshmallow fondant.  The buildings and numbers are cut from fondant.  The rich red and jet black colors on this cake were achieved using an airbrush.

Lindsey

A VERY Pink Cowgirl Cake

It was kinda quiet in the bakery last week because I was working solo.  My right hand man was outta the country, so I had my work cut out for me.

Here’s a very pink cowgirl cake for 4-year-old Maddie Claire.  She was getting a pony for her birthday, so her mom requested that I incorporate a horse onto the cake.  The final design for this cake was a combination of several different cowgirl cakes that mom had seen online.

I was happy to be able to put together this unique cake that was just perfect for Miss Maddie Claire.  This cake was made using 4”, 6”, and 8” square tiers.  It’s a combination of chocolate and vanilla cakes filled with buttercream icing. The cake is covered with homemade marshmallow fondant. The horse, belt buckle, and ropes are made with fondant, and the bandana print is piped with royal icing.  The cowboy hat is sculpted from rice cereal treats and covered with a fondant/gum paste mix.

Lindsey

Cake Canvas

 

Q:  What do you get when you cross a cake with an oil painting?

A:  This…

Recently a friend asked me to make a 40th birthday cake for her husband.  He has black Angus cattle, and she asked if I could incorporate them into his cake somehow.  The challenge for me was to design a cake that didn’t look too cute.  I wanted it to be a masculine cake.

Then I had the idea of doing a hand-painted landscape directly on a cake.

I had the Tool Man stop by and take a few pictures of the cows and the barn to be sure I got everything just right.

This was my favorite cow! I think it looks pretty neat.

As a child I took oil painting lessons and enjoyed painting for many years.  However, I probably haven’t painted any pictures in the last 5 years, so it was quite nice to sit down again with a palette and some brushes and let the creative juices flow.

The entire cake was covered with homemade marshmallow fondant, and I painted the scene with icing color thinned with almond extract.  It took about two and a half hours for me to complete the painting.

The cattle cake was made of 4”, 6”, and 8” tiers.  The top two tiers were white cake with buttercream filling, and bottom tier was red velvet with cream cheese filling. This cake served approximately 35.

Lindsey

Wild Thing

Warning!

The cake I’m about to share with y’all is a little “out there.”

Don’t get me wrong.  I love, love, love this cake,  but it is very unique, and it does make quite an impact.

When Abby found a picture of this cake design online, it was love at first sight.  I was thrilled to be able to recreate the look for her 18th birthday.  I hope that she and her friends enjoyed the final product as much as I enjoyed making it for her.  What a fun cake!

One new thing I tried on this cake was making my own fondant.  Store-bought fondant it just so expensive, and quite frankly I don’t like the way it tastes.  So…. I did a little research online and found a recipe for homemade, marshmallow fondant.

It worked!  Not only is it super easy to make, but I think it tastes a lot better than the store-bought fondant.  Who knew that marshmallows, powdered sugar, water, and shortening is all you need to turn out beautifully smooth cakes?

Once I got the tiers covered in fondant, I added fondant “ribbons” and painted on the spots and stripes.

Then came the feathers.  Oh, the glorious feathers!

Ty was shocked to say the least.  He posed for this picture, but this is just about the exact face he made when he saw the completed cake for the first time.

The feathers may dwarf the cake a little bit.  This cake has 6, 8, and 10 inch tiers and serves approximately 90.

Lindsey

Wood Duck Cake

Last weekend I had the opportunity to decorate another hand-painted cake.  This year for his birthday, Spencer requested a wood duck drake similar in style to this bass cake I did for him a few years ago.

To make this cake I carved the silhouette of the duck into the top layer of the cake to give it a little dimension.  Then I covered the duck with fondant, and using icing color thinned with vanilla, I painted the details onto the duck.  Not too difficult a task for me considering my background in oil painting, but still this was a very time consuming cake.

Other details I added to the cake include these cattails made from fondant and royal icing…

The grass and borders piped with buttercream frosting…

And these adorable fondant shotgun shells.

I think the shells just make the cake.  So simple to create.  If you can roll a play-do snake, you can make these.

This cake was 9X13 and served approximately 40.

Lindsey