Santa’s Coming to Town

December 2023

My daughter is a December baby and I’ve always been very careful to separate her birthday from Christmas. But this year, she was game to embrace the month and go full bore with a Christmas cake and a gingerbread house decorating bonanza.

The trickiest part for me was to figure out how to make the climbing Santa… especially a climbing Santa carrying a tree. Looking at the cake now, it seems like Santa could have really used a longer ladder. It kinda seems like he’s looking up, wide eyed, at the ladder thinking “How in the world am I supposed to get up to and ON the dang thing?!”

Floral Explosion Cake

October 2022

My daughter turned 18 this year. I felt like she needed a more mature cake, so I decided on a triple layer chocolate ganache filled layer cake — topped with fresh flowers from her grandma’s beautiful garden.

Still need to practice how to attach sprinkles to a tall cake. Clearly, I winged it, which is pretty much what I do with every cake I make and decorate, even after all these years. Winging it is my superpower.

Church of 8 Wheels Cake

December 2022

This year, my daughter wanted to have a roller skating party. We went to the Church of 8 Wheels in San Francisco, which is just like it sounds…. an abandoned church that has been converted into a roller rink.

Everyone was a bit wobbly on their skates so there was lots of skating in groups and holding hands. Which also meant there was a lot of “If you’re going down, I’m going down too.”

Love Letter to Hawaii

DECEMBER 2021

I was feeling particular homesick so this seemed like an appropriate theme for my daughter’s 15th birthday.  Both of my kids feel like Hawaii is their second home and love it as much as I do.

We talked about all of the things we love and the first things we do when we get there. It’s always:  Beach, Willow Tree Kalbi for dinner, Agnes’ malasadas for breakfast.

Work in progress:

The shell was the first thing I made because I knew it was going to be the most difficult. And I was right.  The shape, the pointy bits, the ridged interior…. I almost feel like the success of this shell was kind of an accident.  Below is  a photo of the inspiration.  My dad found it somewhere in the waters of the South Pacific and now it sits on a shelf in my house.

Plumeria

Malasadas. Basically donuts,  but not really. I’m not a donut fan, but these Portuguese donuts are magical. And a tradition.  I would never consider eating three glazed donuts in one sitting, but I think nothing of it when it’s a malasada.  It’s the same way I think about cookie dough. I’d NEVER eat eight cookies in one sitting, but when it’s dough??? I easily have 4 giant spoonfuls of dough each time and could  likely eat the whole batch and never get ’em in the oven. I made up the term  “Cookie Doughn’t Count” to explain this phenomenon.

Manoa Chocolate. We are obsessed with this chocolate and are members of their monthly subscription club which means each member get three bars delivered every month.

Willow Tree Kalbi with rice and kimchee.  Our first night tradition. Always.

Shave Ice.  I *think* this one is my favorite. The ice is colored sanding sugar and the straw is a toothpick I colored with a red Sharpie.

Requisite Palm Tree. This involved a lot of wire and time as I had to wait for everything to dry before I could assemble it.  And of course, one of the palm fronds cracked in half so I “glued” it back together with royal icing.

Finished products, different angle.

One very very happy birthday girl.

Halloween Candy Cakeophony

October 2021

The idea started brewing (no pun intended) when I saw the witch legs sticking out of a neighbor’s front hedge.

How cute, I thought, if those were sticking out of the top of a cake.  But then I thought, if the witch had accidentally nose-dived into the cake, what would be happening to her broomstick or whatever she was carrying?

 

And thus, the idea was born.  And my mind kept thinking, “Oh! and I could do this. And that… ! And how cute would it be if…”    Hence a cake with eyeballs, spiders, webs, and of course, a giant candy sack and of course… candy.

I’ll admit I got a bit carried away with the candy…

I also got a bit carried away with the cake part. I found two chocolate cake recipes – one from The Violet Bakery Cookbook and one from Luscious Chocolate Desserts. One called for dutched cocoa and the other for natural cocoa.  Hmmmmmmmm.  I decided this would be a good opportunity for a taste test, although I’ll be honest: I still have no idea which one I prefer.  I’m going to have to make them again to be sure.

Regardless, I ended up with a 4 layer cake and covered it in black buttercream, then marshmallow webs.

Then the fun part:  decorating.  And going overboard with the candy, as I’ve already said.  Hence the name, Halloween Cake Cakeophony.

The cake was a huge hit and as always, I’ve come away from the experience with a lot of “Next time, I’ll try this…”

Painting Party Cake

Courtney wanted to do a Bob Ross painting party for her 13th and, thus, wanted a similarly inspired cake.  Below is my initial brainstorm.   I knew I wanted paint to ooze out of the tubes and I finally figured out how to make it happen …STRING!

Here are the paint tubes being made.

And here are the paint brushes and the palette knife. I rolled string into the brush part so that when I added the colored royal icing, it would look like paint was dripping off.

And here’s the end result of the brushes.

The full cake.

Full cake from another angle.

Here are the in-progress paintings….some of the girls didn’t get much further than this stage. And I have vowed never to do a painting party again 😬.  BUT, everyone had a great time and I had to keep reminding myself that *fun* was the whole point.

“Nailed It!”

Aubrey loves baking and watching other people baking on @nailedit.  So we decided to do our own version for her party this year.  We thought a lot about what to do for the “original” cake– we needed something that was elaborate enough to make it hard, but not too hard for teenagers, with varying degrees of baking/sculpting skill, to replicate.

Here’s what I sketched out:  A two tiered cake with fondant butterfly and crushed candy rainbow swirl.

Working on the butterfly….

And here’s how it turned out:

One huge mistake I made was wildly over-estimating how many jolly ranchers we’d need to make our rainbow swirl around the cake.  I bought a 4lb bag…we probably needed only 10 of each color. Maybe less. Here are photos of the two teams hard at work.

And the final unveiling! They did an incredible job. I’d even say the Nailed It.

Ice-Cream Splatter Cake

December 2018

This year Courtney wanted a fake ice-cream cake, but she also wanted a paint splatter cake, so we combined the two ideas!

I started with the cones. I wrapped fondant around real cones and then added the pattern. Someone asked me why I didn’t just use real cones…   Oh… that would be so much easier, but obviously defeats the whole point of what I’m trying to do.  Truth be told, sometimes I don’t either! 😬😂

It felt a little bit like I was cheating to use an actual ice-cream scoop to form the fondant ice-cream.  I did it anyway.

The splatter paint part was the hardest for me. I used candy melts, but they seized so quickly that it was mostly a gloppy mess. I played around with  it a lot and finally got it to work, but I definitely need a candy melt tutorial– or perhaps just use something else entirely if I ever go down the road of making cake pops.

Here’s a shot of the top of the cake and the three cones:  Strawberry, mint chip and bubblegum flavors!

Success!

 

Lush + Spa Themed Extravaganza

Despite my horrible drawing skills, here’s what I envisioned for her cake.  The peanut -shaped thing is supposed to be a bathtub.*

* proper perspective (of anything!) not included 😬

Big shoutout to my 11-yr old daughter for making all the Lush bath bombs.  She chose a bunch from the Lush website then made teeny tiny replicas! They looked exactly like the real thing.

Because I wanted the spa girl to be in a bubble bath, I needed to make arms and legs.  But I had to make and remake her hands and feet many, many times because I just couldn’t get them quite right.

Turns out I don’t  have quite the right tools (or small enough fingers) to make delicate appendages, so hats off to the experts.

As a result, my bathing beauty looked a bit man-ish for a 14-year old girl, but it’s okay…the intention was in the right place. Plus, bath bubbles.

Then I painted her fingernails and toenails to make it look more realistic (and if I’m being honest, less man-ish).  I needed magnifying glasses for that.  And a toothpick!

And now the cakes. I baked three chocolate cakes from Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Parties cookbook (actually baked these the night before), but the morning of the party, I stacked them with chocolate ganache in between.

Then added the final crumb layer before layering over the fondant…

 

The fondant layer…

Here I am piping the bath mat….

Here’s the first look at the finished product.  I wish I had taken individual pictures of all of the things on the cake, but I didn’t.

Here’s a list of what was on it:

  • Claw-footed bathtub
  • side table
  • glittery (sequined) lampshade/lamp
  • pitcher of lemon water
  • bath bombs
  • slippers
  • book
  • face mask
  • cucumber eye treatement
  • bath turban
  • edible homemade sequins and fondant flowers around the base just for decoration.

Side view…

And at last, a picture of me and my happy,  newly crowned 14 year old

Now I need a deep tissue massage and a long soak in a Lush-scented bubble bath!

Where’s Shadow?

There was a lot going on for me this year so instead of making decorations for a full cake or several cupcakes, I opted for a one extra large cupcake in a small flower pot, just for the birthday girl.

We have a 2 year old, VERY ball-focused pup, so this rendition of her seemed quite appropriate.