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!

Tis the season for weddings and I was excited by the prospect of this whimsy cake, they’re always fun and a bit of a challenge.

This is a butter cake with vanilla buttercream, covered in fondant. Each tier stands around 6″ tall (dropping to 4″ at the lowest point) and tapers down 2-3″ inches in width from the top to the bottom.

Congratulations to the happy couple!

A lovely cake for a lovely couple, we were delighted they chose us to be a part of their special day.

The cake at the top of the tower is red velvet with a cream cheese icing, all the cupcakes are a mix of red velvet with cream cheese and butter cake with vanilla buttercream.

We also made the stand for this cake and it’s now available for hire for other cakes. We can customise it by decorating it to your theme.

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!

Our centrepiece cake this year was a pumpkin cake.

Well, actually it was a butter cake, but it was shaped like a pumpkin.. that still counts as a pumpkin cake right?

We were attempting not to be left with too much leftover cake so we just made it an 8 inch round cake, 3 layers tall to get a good pumpkin shape that wasn’t too squat. So he was knocking 6 inches tall.

We made the butter cake a day ahead. It got stacked with vanilla buttercream and raspberry jam. Next up came the carving. I prefer to use a short serrated knife when carving cake, but find the knife you’re comfortable with and go with that, with some practice you’ll find what fits you best.

I put a few deep grooves in so they would really stand out and then crumb coated with a thin layer of buttercream. The cake was put in the fridge for the buttercream to firm up.

First up came a layer of yellow fondant, work quick to smooth it down and press it into those deep grooves.

Next came a layer of orange fondant. Once it’s smoothed down I used a ball tool to do the rest of the grooves, coming back with an airbrush to accentuate the shadows, it’s barely noticeable and that’s the point, but it makes the pumpkin look more natural.

Once the airbrush dye had dried I used an exacto (with a new sharp blade) to cut out a jack-o-lantern face, peeling out the orange fondant leaving the yellow showing through.

Dark green fondant was shaped to form the stem and then a fresher green made vines and tendrils curling around the base. I added some tylose to the fondant to form the tendrils so it would dry quickly, forming the shape around the handles of paint brushes.

He took pride of place on our dessert table for Halloween!

Don’t forget to say cheese!

This camera was for a graduate in fine arts, and an old fashioned camera was on her graduation invites. The recipient is also starting her own photography business. So when left to come up with an appropriate design copying the camera from the invite seemed the obvious choice.

The design needed a little altering to make it suitable for cake, that huge gaping hole at the bottom just had to go! We simplified it a little too.

It’s all butter cake filled with raspberry jam and as is the norm for most of our cakes, covered in fondant. The lens was made from gumpaste. A respectable size, the box at the back was 7″x7″x4″ with the front of the camera coming out at about 6 and a half inches.

Since this is a camera cake, we thought we would take the opportunity to show you our “studio.” The frames for the backdrop and for the lights is all pvc piping so we can dismantle it and have it not take up too much room. The lights are work lights from Home Depot with a frosted lampshade over them to diffuse the light, we can adjust the heights on them, though we generally bounce one off of the ceiling as you can see. And yes, that is a cake drum you see at the front, we use that as a reflector to bounce light back into the shadowy areas.

Halfway through writing this post, I had to stop, and look up the origin of the phrase I used as my title, “watch the birdie.” Turns out variations on it were used all over Europe when the cameras (like the one we made) looked vaguely like a nesting box. Some photographers went so far as to make a little metal bird as a focal point for their subjects. Other phrases, like “cheeeeeese” are used for the elongated vowel sound that shows your teeth .

A 60th birthday was approaching, we were asked to provide the cake.. With a small catch, it needed delivering to New Orleans.*

We were given fairly free reign with this cake, as long as it fed 200 people, tasted good and had a 60s/hippy theme then all was well. Given the delivery requirements we also had to make sure it was transportable, meaning most of it needed to be set up on site.

To fulfil the size requirement we started out with a base, the flower bed, half chocolate cake and half butter cake it was made up of 3 half sheet cakes. Totalling 18″ wide by 33″ long! Wanting to add a bit of pizzazz we made a stem coming up from the centre, with a sunflower head at a 45 degree angle on top of it, with the surprise aspect of the sunflower spun! The sunflower head was a lemon chiffon cake, nice and light yet flavourful. We created the look of the seeds in the centre with chocolate chips glued on with royal icing.

The flowers filling the bed were made form gumpaste. We made them abstract shapes, and in variegated colours, some were even marbled in several colours. We couldn’t transport them assembled so the stems and leaves were made and the flower heads added on site.

We topped the base cakes with a layer of chocolate buttercream and then some cookie crumbs for the dirt effect.

As a final touch some peace signs were added to the garden.

The cake had the perfect site at the venue, a table with spotlights above it. So with the dimmed lights of the party it really stood out.

We are pleased to say the cake was demolished and everyone enjoyed it, many people took samples of each flavour. As a nice touch, one that we were pleased to see, many of the children got sent home with one of the flowers as a token.

Here’s a brief video of the spinning sunflower in action.

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*I should make the point here, we don’t usually deliver cakes to 500 miles away. This was an exception.

The stars are pearl dragees and royal icing, for some variety in size, then we added some large stars on wires.

The main challenge was how to decorate buttercream to look like marble, after a few practices we found a method that seems to work for now, giving light and dark variances in colour, and veins running through it.

We added the age in Roman numerals around the side and then researched the Latin equivalent for Happy Birthday (as I discovered, the Romans didn’t celebrate birthdays as we do, so there’s no direct translation, the inscription we found appears to approximately mean ‘congratulations on the moment of your birth/natality’

The cake was a vanilla butter cake with black raspberry filling.