Taste the rainbow!

Anyone who knows me will know that I adore baking and decorating cakes, so when my niece's 6th birthday was coming up, of course I offered to bake her cake!  I really have no idea what she is into right now because every time I ask her she gives me a different answer, so I asked her what her favorite color is.  She told me her favorite is light purple, but then later she came up to me and whispered that she really likes all the colors in the whole entire rainbow.  Well, of course I had to make a rainbow cake for her!  Now, I love for cakes to have a little bit of a surprise factor, and this one is no exception!  I made several 8" round cakes and cut them in halves so they would sit in a rainbow arch shape on the cake board.  I hollowed out the middle 3 layers and stuffed them full of skittles!  Then I put the outer layer on and sealed it up, iced it like a rainbow, added some little cake ball clouds and threw on some gold coins for the gold at the end of the rainbow.  Voila!  Nobody knows what is inside until it gets cut open when they get to "See the rainbow, Taste the rainbow" (get it, skittles reference!)

6th Birthday Awesomeness!

My dear sweet baby is growing up!  My son recently celebrated his 6th birthday, and if you know me at all, you know I love baking and decorating cakes.  We wanted an Avengers theme so we had some inflatable mallet things and all kinds of Avengers candies and junk. So much fun with 7 boys between the ages of 6 and 8 jacked up on sugar! HAHA!  Anyhow, back to the cake: my favorite part!  I wanted something special, and I know my son could care less about eating the cake, he just likes the idea of getting one and eating the icing, however he DOES love rice krispie cake...so I decided to combine the two for a specatcular combo of a Captain America shield (of cake) and a Thor hammer (of rice krispie cake)!

16" cake pan with a heating core filled with vanilla cake (some of which was dyed blue)

It took an entire bottle of Wilton Red Red gel coloring, and an entire bottle of Christmas Red to get my batch of red icing to not look totally pink!  I also added in a pouch of strawberry jello powder to give it a little extra something.

The Thor hammer was made in two parts, the handle which I coated in melted chocolate and then sculpted some lines into, then I formed the hammer head and frosted it with the vanilla buttercream and sprayed it with Duff''s edible silver spray.  It looked fantastic after it sat for a few hours.  The shine almost disappeared and it looked pretty much like Thor's hammer!

MMMMMMmmmmmm Tasty cake!!!

Baby Shower Cake!

A friend asked me to bake a cake for a baby shower, and of course I'm not going to say no.  I love baking!  She requested zebra print and left the rest up to me...although she did manage to score a deal on some Wilton Sugar Sheets in an awesome zebra print that made my life so much easier!  I thought to myself "you know what would be awesome?  If the cake itself was zebra print when you cut into it!"  Of course I really had no idea how to do this so I guessed, and (unfortunately I didn't get any pictures from when it was cut into, as it was at someone else's house at a baby shower I wasn't at) according to the guests, it worked perfectly!

I baked 4 little mini cupcakes and wrote the baby's name on them and they were set on top after the cake got there.  So cute!

Notes on using sugar sheets:  It was my first time using them but I have used frosting sheets before.  Basically the same thing.  Cut them carefully and make sure they aren't too dry or they won't peel nicely from the backing.  If you find they are too dry and are cracking and not peeling off the paper nicely, stick a damp paper towel between the backing sheet and the package (not on the sugar side) and zip it shut for about half an hour.  It makes a HUGE difference!  Crumb coat your cake and then slather on the frosting nice and thick.  For this cake I used about 6 cups of frosting (including between the layers).  This 2 layer cake was 8"x8"x4" and took 2 sugar sheets to cover the sides and the top. If you are putting them on a cake you had previously frozen to crumb coat they may sweat some as the cake warms up.  No big deal, just something that happens.

P.s. This is what the baked layers looked like before I put it together.