raspberries and lemons

the other day i started to make a cake for a very special little girl. i am not done her cake yet but i will show you pic's when it is finished. she is getting baptized and i am so excited to make this cake for her as our gift to her on her special day.

so, making her cake inspired me to make a quadruple batch of batter so i unfortunately has some left over.... YA RIGHT!!! the cake is a white cake so it was easy for me to add freshly grated lemon zest, and whip up some raspberry buttercream icing. once i was finished with that i made some lemon curd from the box because i didn't have 6 lemons on hand at home and i did not want to go to the store.

my boy decided early in the morning he wanted to have a lemonade stand and i told him that i would make him some cuppies to sell along with his lemonade. he did really well and ended up making $19.50. so i had enough left over from the cake batter to also do up 2 dozen of these lemon raspberry cuppies.

after madly finishing the cupcakes, i started on the cake. it was four layers high, three layers of lemon curd and covered with raspberry icing. it was one of the of the best cakes i have ever made. so good i could have eaten it without the icing and that is usually my favorite part!!

butter and sugar

there is something amazing about butter and sugar. when you put them together, they always make wonderful things. i know they are not good in the quantity that i eat these two food groups in (yes i know they are not a food group), but they always make something warm and delicious.

i love how my house smells when i bake. i love the feeling of being able to make something that people enjoy. i love watching my kids eyes light up when they see the Gert (remember, that's my mixer's name) come out, or a beater being released from the mixer. i love watching them try and lick of every part of their sticky little fingers and i am sure if they could, their head would be in the bowl... i know mine you. right now would be a great time too because i don't have any hair to get dirty in it!

this afternoon after church i decided i needed to make a treat. so after investigating a few options i decided to make whoopie pie's. have you ever had them? they are so easy and SO good. i made some plain vanilla with vanilla icing, vanilla with raspberry buttercream, and sprinkled ones for the kids with the two different fillings. i tried quite a few to make sure they were ok to eat... they were!!

some cuppies!

i really want to be able to have more posts on this blog than my other blog, but i am sadly catching up quickly with the other.... wish i had more energy for cakes. but i am happy that i was able to crank out a few cuppies this time!! it felt so good to do something creative again. not so good to clean up the mess which is still pretty much a mess... i'll do what i can. my babe will eat the left over and probably lick the counter clean so i think i am covered.

i wanted to do something fun for my hubby's work so i made some gold themed cakes this time. i thought they turned out ok. i love how i always learn something(s) when i am doing this, like next time my flag poles will have to somehow be stronger. or the flag be lighter. all i know is when i went to bed there were 6 erect flags, and when i woke up this morning there were three, and two of them broke after i took some pic's. whatever... there are better things to worry about.

this time i tried a swiss something buttercream (freakin' chemo brain!!). it is not as sweet as the other buttercream i make, but ken thought it was really good. not my fave because it wasn't sweet enough, but it is b.e.a.u.-tiful to work with. i am excited to try it a bit more often.

so i decorated them with gold tee's, flag poles, golf balls and that little circle thing is supposed to represent an argyle print of a golf shirt... didn't really turn out how i had planned but i have a better idea for next time as to what i will do!

my birthday cake!

i had a few people offer to make my birthday cake. it was so sweet! but i honestly needed to do it. i had a few cakes that i was supposed to do before i found out we had cancer, my girlfriend's baby shower cake... it was going to be so cute, and my boys 7th! birthday cake. but i was not in the head space to do it. so, before i start chemo, i wanted to do to my cake.

i wanted it to be bright and girly. i think it turned out that way! i loved it!! it was three layers of vanilla/oreo cake filled with oreo buttercream and a vanilla custard. the best part of it was making it with my mom and dad even got his hand in there.

cake

i am making a birthday cake for me!!! i am so excited... you'll have to see what i come up with. but i just wanted to let you know that despite all that is going on, i still have the cake bug!

do you like nuts??

the request for the cake at one of the office's in town this month was a butter pecan cake. i hope it turned out ok. i thought i burned the pecans, and then i burnt one of the cake. i asked Ken to taste it and he spit it out on the floor and then laughed and said it was really good. SIGH of relief. i didn't want to be starting it all over again at 10pm! it was three layers high and had a butter pecan frosting. you most certainly do not want to encounter this cake with a nut allergy of any kind! i thought it was pretty good though... as i did sample the cake tops and some icing! you know me. :)

wanna play?

i was asked to to a toy story cake for a girlfriend of mine. he little man turned 5!!! she was a life saver as she had a plan as to what she wanted AND.... AND, this is the best part, she was supplying the figures for the cake! don't get me wrong, i love to make things and such, but such detailed characters would have been very expensive and would have taken FOREVER. so i used the figures.

i loved how it turned out! it was one of my faves to do. :)

it's been a while again.... excuses, excuses

ok. well i have been busily updating my other blog, and i wanted to update my favorite blog of the two i do. this one make me really happy. so at the end of Februaryi did a cake for one of the sweetest teenagers i know. she is actually only 3 3/4's as she was born on a leap year. seriously, i love her and her smile if infectious. she was having a "chocolate" party. so to keep with the theme of it, she wanted a chocolate cake. so i did a dense chocolate cake, with white chocolate cream filling and it was covered in a crusted chocolate icing. i, like you already know, don't LOVE chocolate cake, but i think i would have like this one. so here is it!!

my WORST nightmare

my worst nightmare is making a spelling mistake on a cake and ending up on cake wrecks. i hopefully won't get that far with this one. the entire time i was making this cake i kept double checking to make sure that i was spelling everything correctly.... i just noticed now, that i did not. might want to do that in the future if you are make a cake WITH WORDS ON IT!!! what a.... dork. here it is without further need for more of an intro:
seriously.

new beginning's cake

yesterday and ALL of today i was working on a cake. it is for a group of girls at our church called young women. their program tonight was an inspirational way to start off the new year and set goals for themselves of things to achieve both short and long term. i made a cake for these wonderful, beautiful and sweet girls. once i was one of them, but i am sure i wasn't so sweet! ;) i love them and i love their potential.

my idea for the cake was to take their values and put them onto the cake:

faith

divine nature

individual worth

knowledge

choice and accountability

good works

integrity AND

virtue

while making the cake it made me think of being a young woman again.... what i was like then and who i became. anyways, enough sappy stuff, i am not usually like this. maybe it's because i am running on 4.5 hours of sleep and i sniffed up enough "AmeriaMist" color from my air brushed that I am sure I will have black lung by the morning... literally, the inside of my nose is black and I WENT OUT LIKE THAT!! luckily i am already married because i know i am way past help. my hubby is a great man.

wow, enough blabber. so last night my goal was to get the icing onto the cake and get them smoothed, stacked and ready to go. just when i thought i was going to be done, i put the top tier on crooked and had to fix it and then it made a HUGE mess. i did swear. and then i got it together and kept going, until 2:30AM when i finally got things somewhat back to how it had looked before this -

i know i shouldn't swear, but at that time of day... i am just glad that i didn't punch it!!!

so today i worked on cutting out letters and spraying them so i could finish decorating the cake. it did not turn out at all how i had planned, but i ran out of time (like always) and barely got the cake to the church on time (lol, i'm so funny).

but really, i was there minutes before they finished, and i was still an hour late. so here is the final product, i am very glad that i kept all the million hearts that i cut out for v-day or i would have been up the proverbial creek.

overall i think it turned out just fine.

valentine's day fun

for the month of february, i think i have been baking almost every day. i still have two more cakes to finish before the end of the week and i am really tired, but still excited to finish them up. i LOVE to decorate, just incake.... um, ya, tired.... just in case you didn't know. i have them both baked and one half iced so i am almost to my favorite part!!! but before you get to see them (they aren't even done yet so you can't because i don't completely know what they are going to look like yet) i will show you what i came up with for the rest of this month.





some for birthdays...










some for school....







and some for my sweeties to decorate! they really did a good job and had a lot of fun. i just love these little stinkers!

hope your valentine's day was a hoot!

gingerbread is not just a good cookie!

i made this cake for an office for Christmas. it was a gingerbread cake with beer in it! i don't drink so i felt pretty stupid going into the store and asking where the beer even was. but i found it. it was a dark something-or-other, in with a purple label. it had a hint of chocolate behind it, so i was told. so i snapped it up and came home. i was so proud of myself because i actually kind of created the recipe for it so i was really excited. (all i really did was combine 2 recipes and make one that i thought would be good, but i am still calling it my very own! well i did modify it and make it mine.) the ginger in it was actual chunks of crystallized ginger and that was the highlight... it was delish!

cute carrots

i love carrots. i love carrot cake. for this cake i decided that i would leave the icing carrots on the back burner and do some little fondant carrots. they were really easy and fun and they turned out pretty cute!

the next series of pictures on my computer after the carrot cake was me in a bikini! LOL.... really LOL. i am 40 lbs overweight, due to eating fondant carrots instead of real carrots (and a few other cake products...) and it was really funny to see that picture. luckily i didn't post that one or you all would have barfed. i will maybe post an after picture one of these years. in the mean time i better put those "before" pictures in a vault!

nothing to do with cake

i have had a few people bug me for the fact that i like to have a clean house. i can't thrive or think very well if it is not organized or appears to be tidy. this brings me to the point that when i am caking i get very stressed out because it is a disaster - yes - disaster!!! so here is a pic to prove it. i actually had to stop and laugh because i totally ran out of counter space and my littlest one started putting stuff all over the floor. i couldn't even think of what i had to do next until i found a small space and went from there.

i am almost ready...

i know i have been away FOREVER! but we moved and we don't have internet except for what we can sponge off of the wireless of some unsuspecting soul, thus making my blogging time impossible. but i promise, i am coming back to it soon and i have some fun new stuff to put up on here. see you soon!!!

for Jen

upon leaving spin class last week i was told that i needed to update my blog.... an acquaintance of mine was waiting for a new post. so this is for her! wink wink (please let me off next class.... kidding)

for this month's cake for my hubby's work, i decided that i would do a pumpkin spice cake, with a fall theme. i have been dying to try another barrel cake with leaves. i did one last year, but it was my first and i didn't love it. but the one that i was going to try, was hoping i would. i had a few more tools and a few more idea's of what i wanted to create this year. so without further babble, here it is! I DO LOVE IT!

it took me quite a few hours to make all the leaves but they looked so great! i was talking to my bro-in-law on the phone as i was caking and he was telling me that most barrel's don't have a gold band and that i could use black! he saved me a bunch of time as i already had black made up and i had no clue how i was going to make gold with just a bit of shimmer dust. so thanks Spence!!!

i loved doing the wood grain barrel. it was really easy to do and it is fun to be creative. i thought it also turned out really well. i might frame this one and put it up on the wall with the pic's of my kids, who by the way are being neglected because all i take pictures of lately is of my cakes... what a bad mom!

see, they are still ok!

one reason i LOVE fall

i was baking a pumpkin spice cake yesterday and when came to the part of adding the spices in with the flour, i realized why i must love fall so much.

it looks like food! just kidding, i LOVE the warm colors of the spices. then i thought about how i would paint my next house ground clove, ginger and cinnamon. i just loved it! what a great idea, i was planning and thinking and - "Geneva, it's your turn to change the baby's bum." fine. back to reality. but i am holding that thought...

two little boys

a friend of mine called me and asked me to make her two cakes... one with Woody from Toy Story, and one with Buzz from Toy Story. so, in true style, i spent hours looking on line trying to figure out what i would do. so many of the pictures of Woody and Buzz are of them together so it was tricky to come up with an idea where they were separate. but, i finally did.

i decided that i would do colorflow to make their images and set to work tinting the 20 different colors. i like to let my color flow dry for at least 48 hours before i peel it off the wax paper, so i carefully removed the images and set to work filling and icing the cakes.

well i got Woody on just fine and then it was time for Buzz. while i was trying to place him on the cake, i broke his number three in about 8 places. with just getting ready to take the cakes out the door, i knew i didn't have time to do another colorflow - obviously!! but for once in my cake life, i didn't panic. i knew how i would fix this one. i re-traced the inside of the three (the yellow is where it was the worst) and then refilled it. you could tell as it was drying the it was filling in the old cracks, but at least it didn't look so ghetto! here is the final project...s.

fun things for fall

i have a great idea for October's office birthday cake that i have to do for my hubby's work. this time i tried a few of the ideas out so that i am not leaving it until the very last minute.i have also been doing some mini-cupcakes. they are not that exciting to me, but my kids love them. more specifically, the "prinkles"!

about me.

i just thought that i would write a few things about myself that you may not know. of course having to do with cakes.

- i LOVE cake, but i do not like chocolate cake. if i am utterly desperate, i will eat it, but i can go without. i find this weird, because i love chocolate. oh well, one less thing to help me gain weight.

- i often fall asleep at night thinking about designing cakes. it drives me crazy when i am really tired but i cannot turn my brain off.

- i am not very good with icing. i have a hard time smoothing it out and i have high expectations of myself... like perfection. i am not perfect - i know this is not a shock. but i expect it when it comes to making something.

- while i am creating in our kitchen, i have to constantly clean up after myself. i always have to tell myself to get the cake (or whatever i am working on) into the oven and then i will have time to clean. this is a hard concept for me. i don't know if it's because our kitchen is so small and there is no room when i am caking, or if it is because i thrive on organization, or because i am a bit of a clean freak. i can have truck stop toilets (well not that bad) but dang it, my kitchen better be clean!

- nothing to do with caking, but i still don't know how to spell toilet (spell check saved my life) and i often have a problem with vacuum. yes, i am 30.

- i am not a great cook, but i can make a mean dessert.

- a year and a half ago, lining a cake pan with parchment paper was too much work and 'how could anyone ever have time for this crap'... well now i do. and i love it.

- a year and a half ago decorating a cake consisted of call DQ to get an ice cream cake. (i still love those!)

- my husband and i argue often when it comes to decorating a cake. it's messy, chaotic and our kids are ALWAYS, ummmmmm, being kids?

- i often get confused because i have 25 things going on in my brain at one time, baking, icing, leveling, filling, changing a baby's bum (my hands are like sandpaper because i wash so frequently. so don't worry, if you get a cake from me it will be e-coli free! should that be my new catch phrase? kidding!), tinting, cleaning, lunch, snacks, getting pans out, putting pans away, making flowers, people, characters... it goes on and on and drives me until i notice i am standing in my kitchen, useless and not doing anything except staring at something, usually the mess.

- i usually leave things until last minute. bad habit and i would probably have less stress if i started working on things sooner than later.

- i love licking out the bowl, except i use a spatula so i can get most of the batter.

that is probably boring and long enough so i will stop there. i really love decorating and coming up with ideas for cakes. i feel like every cake i make is a huge accomplishment and i love watching (in a non-creepy way) people enjoy my cakes. i am thankful for this God given talent and i pray that i will be able to do it until i am either perfect at it (and then continue on with decorating), or really, really old!