With a recipient moving to Georgia the theme of the party was of course “Leaving On A Midnight Train To Georgia” and what better cake fits that theme than the Soul Train.

We started off with a quarter sheet amaretto cake (a relatively new flavour we’ve developed that seems to be gaining in popularity) filled with vanilla buttercream. That was cut to silhouette the train and covered in fondant.

Matching cupcakes were arranged on the sheet to hold up the psychedelic steam from the train.

The cake was finished with the themed piped onto it, along with a hearty good luck!

This cake stood at 13″ tall, that’s pretty hefty for it’s 8″ diameter even though it still wasn’t completely in proportion to perfectly match the 16oz can we were replicating. Any taller though and it would have been dying to teeter over during transportation. It was a little scary carrying this one about due to the height!

Our always popular chocolate cake was filled with chocolate buttercream and of course covered in fondant before using a mix of fondant cutouts and royal icing piping to form all the detail work.

No, the zombies aren’t here yet, but this brain is definitely the tastiest I’ve come across!

It’s a butter cake with raspberry jam between the layers (perfect for that gory look). We covered the cake with a base layer of black fondant and then built up the brain design on top with coils of fondant.

The brain got covered with a thin apricot glaze, this didn’t affect flavour at all, but dyed a blood colour it finished the look of a brain.

The finishing touch was an “evil twin” popping out of the brain. Female so no evil goatee, I had to go with hands on hips and a smirk!

Remember yesterday’s Wedding cake? This is the utterly awesome Groom’s cake that went with it. Red velvet with cream cheese icing he is what we’re calling a “character cake” mostly flat with some shape and relief built up, out of both cake and fondant.

We were asked to make a Guinness cake, in the shape of a wooden keg, it sounded like fun and let us try out new recipes to get it right! In the end we settled on the Nigella Lawson Guinness and chocolate cake, it was rich and flavourful, a definite winner! With the cream cheese icing to balance it it was wonderful!

We didn’t want to do a full keg, but it ended up being more of a half-a-keg, I guess it was a 3/4 keg! We stacked 6 layers and then carved the sides.

To create the wood effect we marbled the fondant, and then scored in the graining. The sides were all done as individual planks, the top as one circle.

I took a look at actual Guinness kegs, but they looked pretty boring, so I took some artistic license. Two metal bands at the top and one at the bottom (if it was a full keg it would have had two) and then a plaque with the Guinness logo on it.

Our good friends at the Austin Astronomical Society once more got their holiday party cake from us. It’s such a pleasure to get repeat customers like this, although it does mean we have to constantly strive to top last year’s cake!

As before, they had a butter cake with our English buttercream, a nice simple flavour that’s a crowd pleaser.

Before covering the cake we took a melon baller and an ice cream scoop to create some larger craters. Then once it was covered in fondant we added some smaller craters with a balling tool. We pinched the fondant up to create a ridge around a couple of the larger craters.

A blast with the airbrush filled in some shadows, and spread a thin sheen of luster over the entire cake.

.. I feel like I need to photoshop an alien into one of these photos!

So, I know I’m about a week late in posting a Halloween cake, but lets just ignore that and carry on shall we?

This cake was a personal one, I made it for our Halloween party which is always a good time to test out recipes on our guinea pigs *ahem* friends! I initially had huge plans for an extravagant cake, as I do, but time, money and home renovations nixed that idea.. I’m not going to say what it was since I now intend to do it next year. So there was last minute brainstorming as I just could not decide how to decorate my cake.

Cupcakes were an initial idea since we had found some skull sprinkles that I really wanted to use, but since cupcakes dry out so quickly I likely would have been making them the day of the party and I really wanted to avoid that, so a full cake it was.

But I still wanted to use those sprinkles, and so the design blossomed. The skulls could go on little fondant plaques to make something akin to cameos… where to use the cameos? Well, as a joining point between swags would probably work. Ok, swags… what next, it’s Halloween, lets add stripes on the sides, definitely black.. and purple would work, nice traditional Halloween colours. So that’s the sides sorted, what about the top. Definitely a piped design, probably in royal icing, but what. I just could not decide and then Michael suggested a nice big spider, even sorting out a design for me so it had a skull on it’s body.

I actually ended up making this cake start to finish all in one day!

Once the cake was stacked and crumb coated I kneaded the colour into the fondant. I was aiming for purple but starting from scratch (rather than buying pre coloured fondant) purple is really a pain to make. We’ve tried in the past and ended up with a really gray-ish shade, so once I hit this shade of burgundy I decided that I was happy with that.

The cake was covered and then taped up with a very low tack masking tape so I could airbrush the stripes. They ended up fuzzy around the edges rather than sharp but I think that gave it a nice look.

This was my first attempt putting swags on a cake, definitely something to practice on a personal cake. They weren’t as perfectly even as I would like them to be but not bad at all for a start. I stuck them on with royal icing and put on the cameos with the same.

I had prepared the spider body early in the morning, piping the skull and then filling in the body so the skull was in the body rather than on top (it also meant I could trace the design), it got a few cracks as I put it on the cake, after piping on the spider webs, but it looked pretty good. I gave it an outline and then piped on some loooooong legs, so they spread over the entire top of the cake – that’s a 9″ wide spider *shudders*

A band of orange ribbon (that I had actually bought to finish my costume) gave the cake it’s finishing touch.

Firefly has always been a favourite show of ours. Neither of us discovered it until it had sadly ended but it hooked us in and is a show we can happily re-watch (when we have that elusive thing known as free time).

Apologies to anyone not familiar with the show Firefly, a lot of this post is going to seem like gibberish, guess you’ll just have to go and watch the show to find out what I’m talking about! *grins*

The cake needed to be relatively simple so we were left with the brief of Firefly “themed” and just make sure it feeds the right number of people… And make sure it’s chocolate, lots of chocolate! (it’s chocolate cake with a rum syrup and chocolate buttercream).

Size wise we went for a half-sheet cake (12″x17″) with a 10″ round cake on top. This splitting of layers meant that we could incorporate a couple of different elements into the cake. We decided early on that the round cake would be turned into the Serenity logo. The metallic red disc with a burnished gold centre and Chinese characters (that we assume actually say “serenity”).

What then to do with the sheet cake underneath? Finally we settled on decorating it to look like a metal hull (of a ship), albeit a rather rusted one.. maybe it’s a Reaver ship! *grins*

Then we added two logos onto that cake. The Browncoats and Blue Sun, both influential in the plot lines. I wish I’d taken a picture of the full Blue Sun logo before half of it got covered!

A banner at the front declared Happy Birthday to the birthday girls, in both English and Chinese since language in the series contains Chinese elements.. at least I hope the banner says Happy Birthday in Chinese.. I’m going on what google translate told me!

A finishing touch of blue gloves for the “hands of blue, two by two” and the cake was done.

It’s the first time we’ve used fabric to cover a cake board and we’ll definitely be doing it again. We really loved how the textured red looked under the cake.

We got a request for a peanut butter cup cake, it didn’t need to be huge, the shape and flavour were the important bits.

We umm-ed and ahh-ed over trying to make a peanut butter flavoured cake but finally settled on a chocolate cake with a peanut butter flavoured icing.

The cake had some mild carving to give it it’s distinctive shape.

Fondant or buttercream was of course not going to do the trick so we covered the cake with milk modelling chocolate to replicate the chocolate coating.

As a finishing touch we made a wrapper for it out of, well, wrapping paper. Painting it with tempera paint in a logo very reminiscent to a famous brand but using the recipient’s name instead.

Reviews were glowing, and despite being a chocolate cake the flavour was spot-on. Hooray for peanut butter and chocolate!

We had a fun cake to make this week, one we were looking forward to as soon as we knew what they wanted. We are both fans of the films of Hayao Miyazaki, so a cake based off of Ponyo his latest, more child friendly, film excited us.

They wanted the main focus to be based around the scene with Ponyo running on the waves…

So, off we got to baking, a moist chocolate cake, four layers tall, with our rich buttercream icing (chocolate of course!).

The cake was initially covered in a layer of white fondant and then the scene on the top was pieced together from fondant. We scored some of the fondant to make more details (like the creases on her dress) and painted a few accents (facial features).

The trouble was, the sides looked blank. So they got painted with “waves” in the style of the end credits from the film. Some royal icing borders were piped to neaten the cake up.

All that was left was the writing. The line “tiny little fishy, who could you really be?” is in the main theme song so to reflect the baby shower theme that was changed to “tiny little baby, who could you really be?”

There were 2 dozen cupcakes to go with the cake, you’ll see them later this week!