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?!”

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.

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.”