Featured in CakeCentral Magazine (June 2013)

A Beatrix Potter Baby Shower Cake - The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

 

I was completely surprised to be asked if I could to submit a cake to be possibly featured in an upcoming issue of CakeCentral Magazine.  Who could possible pass this up!  Well, I almost did.  I received the invite on a day that I had gotten hit really hard with the flu bug.  I briefly read the email not thinking anything about it and went right to sleep where I stayed for 4 days fighting a high fever.  It wasn't until later that I sat down and reread the email that it actually hit me...Cake Central had invited ME to submit a cake!  Me!  Oh my! and it had to be professional photographed and submitted by a deadline that was now less than 2 weeks away.  I pondered whether I could possible pull it off while being sick all while trying to figure out what was I going to do, am I even qualified to do this, how, when, where, who, ahhhh!

The theme I was given was a Beatrix Potter Baby Shower and the book was, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.  Beatrix Potter is the illustrator and writer behind the Peter Rabbit series of books.  I absolutely love her work and I was excited to take one of her stories and turn it into cake.  The design I came up with for the cake was my interpretation of the story - the top tier showed one of the baby bunnies sleeping under the lettuce plant after filling his belly up with lettuce (food coma or as Beatrix Potter called it, soporific) and the bottom tier showed farmer Mr. McGregor's window (the one the Flopsies used to peek in through) and I added mommy and daddy, Flopsy and Benjamin Bunny, walking along the farmers home.

A week went by in trying to fight off the flu and now I was on a tighter deadline.  With my head in a fog, and a flu that just stuck to me like glue in what seemed to take forever to get rid off, I was now on a mission to get this cake done.  And it never fails....Why is it that when you need something, you can't find it but when you don't need it, they're everywhere?  I had to go all over town to 3 cake supply stores to find cake dummies in the sizes I wanted.  All I wanted was a 6 x 4 inch round and 2, 8 x 4 inch round dummies!  Nothing complicated, nothing out of the ordinary.  Then, make another run to Home Depot to grab a pale of Patch 'N Paint (it's the stuff you use to spackle and patch walls with) and rolled up my sleeves to attempt prepping my first cake dummies.  Just a month prior, a fellow cake club member gave a demo on how to prep your cake dummies using Patch 'N Paint like buttercream to cover your cake dummies with, let it day a couple hours, sand it down smooth, rub in a light layer of shortening all over it and then roll out and smooth your fondant over that.

Sounds easy right?  Well, real cakes are heavy and stay put when you ice them.  Cake dummies on the other hand, are really light and move all over the place.  I rolled up packing tape to the bottom of the cake dummies and onto a board to help them stay grounded and just held the top of the dummy down with one hand while I iced and turned the cake with the other hand.  What a challenge that was!  The Patch 'N Paint is awesome and has the same texture and workability as buttercream.  It's super light weight too and dries within hours.  Just look at how neat it looks after sanding it down smooth.

A blank, white canvas....

It looks like buttercream without the extra effort and ingredients to actually make the buttercream.  I'm really loving this stuff.

For the cobblestone base, I rolled out balls of white fondant and smoothed them one by one next to each other around the board.  After it dried, I dusted it over with an assortment of 5 petal dusts to give it some depth and the illusion of a real cobblestone floor.  What's an English garden without cobblestone?

The baby bunny was hand molded out of marshmallow fondant that I mixed with Tylose to help it dry harder and faster.  I used scissors to snip the fur pattern around his body.

I cut out the lettuce leaves free hand (didn't have a cutter that was large enough for these) and veined them using a large orchid viener.  They were originally made in white then dusted with yellow and green petal colors to look like lettuce.

The larger lettuce head is what I assembled with the leaves I had made a day prior then at the last minute, I decided to add a couple small ones along the base of the cake.  I used rose petal cutters to cut these since they were smaller and dusted them the same way as the large one, assembled them and let them dry overnight.

The fondant name plaque was hand cut from a paper template I made and I added the ribbed texture on it by pressing down a skewer every 1/8 inch across it.  Upper Case and Lower Case Tappit Cutters were used for the "Baby" font.  I added 2 trees to either side of the cake and made each leaf on the tree one by one...

well, each leaf is actually a 5 petal flower molded and pinched in the middle to look like a cluster of leaves.  I wanted to illusion of leaves but without the work of having to make each and every single leaf  - cool right?

I used 5 different colors for the leaves to create some depth and made well over 200 of these blossoms for both trees.

They came out exactly how I wanted them to look.  I absolutely love how they turned out.

Mr. and Mrs. Bunny were also hand molded and I used a pair of scissors to lightly snip the hair markings around their bodies.

Aren't they just cute walking along the cobblestone path?

And here it is...3 pages in the June 2013 issue of CakeCentral Magazine (Volume 4, Issue 6).  What an honor and an adventure that I would do all over again in a heartbeat.

A special thank you to Bryan Ramsay (www.bryanramsayphotography.com) for making the time for my last minute request and for taking the beautiful photographs that made the cake magazine worthy!

We had to wait quietly for 3 whole months to find out whether the cake made it into the magazine or not.   It was torturous not being able to talk or share the photographs with everyone but now, I can finally show them off.  Hope you enjoy them.

See other pictures of the cake here:
Sugar Sweet Cakes and Treats Facebook Album
Sugar Sweet Cakes Google+ Album
Cake Central Album:  AngelFood4

I also got picked for Cake Central's Cake Decorator Highlight piece in June.  Read more about it HERE and find out a little more about me.

Doc McStuffins Cake

Disney has a new show perfect for little ones that want to grow up to be doctors just like Elizabeth does.  So for her 6th birthday, she wanted a Doc McStuffins themed party.  Here is the cake I made for her including some photos on how I made the Doc McStuffins figurine - she's made mostly out of gumpaste and her clothing is a mix of gumpaste and fondant.

I've been playing around with different ways to make faces and this has been my favorite technique thus far - I also used it on the Strawberry Shortcake Figurines I made a few weeks ago too.  Here are some step by step photos that I was able to capture....

I was digging through out my pantry looking for something to use for the inside of Doc McStuffins head.  I've used styrofoam balls before but kids, no matter how often you tell them not to bite into the head and that it's not edible, still manage to sneak in that bite.  I've also used rice krispie treats before but it was after midnight and I really didn't want to go through the entire process of making a tiny batch just for the head.  So alas, I found this tootsie roll pop in our candy stash - it was the perfect size!  Now the head is entirely edible except for the popsicle stick inside it - ha hah!

Step #1: Cover the Tootsie Roll Pop with fondant and mold it into a round ball.  Then add the features - forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin.

Step #2:  Cover the lollipop with a piece of skin-toned fondant, smooth out the seams along the back of the head (the hair will hide it) and mold in the features of the face.

Next Steps:  Define the nose, add the eyes, lips, and hair. Use a toothpick to add the freckles and dust the cheeks and eyelids with pink luster dust.

Note:  I like to use small sewing pins to hold up the fondant while it dries.  You can see one that I used with a yellow head for the bangs.  I also used 3 sewing pins to hold up the ruffles along the skirts bottom.  They work perfectly and only leave a tiny little pin hole behind.

Since this figurine needed to be 5 inches tall, I had to add another popsicle stick to the torso section.  I twisted the Tootsie Roll Lollipop stick around a longer popsicle stick and used white floral tape to keep it all held together and secure.  I then covered the entire mid-section with a piece of white gumpaste and built the clothing up over it.

From this stage forward, I forgot to take more photos of the process but hopefully you can see what was done.

We had cupcakes that I frosted with pink buttercream and I added a dash of glitter to make them sparkle.  I also made little pink fondant hearts and added them over some wafer cookies to look like bandaids.  The birthday girls mom setup the dessert table with little cups that held pink and white licorice candies that resembled pills and a glass canister that held large marshmallows to resemble cotton balls.  It was a super cute party!

 

(photo courtesy of Tuan Le)

(photo courtesy of Tuan Le)

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Strawberry Shortcake Cake with Lemon Meringue

A Strawberry Shortcake Cake with Lemon Meringue.  The cakes were a 6 inch and 8 inch round, Strawberry Shortcake with fresh strawberry Italian Meringue Buttercream; I even flavored the MMF (marshmallow fondant) with Strawberry Flavoring LorAnn Oil - it smelled so deliciously good!

Here's a closer look at Strawberry Shortcake.  She stands at almost 5 1/2 inches tall and is constructed out of gumpaste.  The clothing is a mix of both MMF and Gumpaste.  I dusted the cheeks with pink petal dust and also painted her entire outfit in both red and pearl luster dust that I diluted with vodka.  I hand molded the strawberries on the top of the cake and used an assortment of different blossom and rose calyx cutters for the green leaf on the strawberries.  The green petals were hand cut free hand. 

Lemon Meringue is also mostly made out of gumpaste with some of her hair and clothing being a mix of gumpaste and MMF.  Both of the figurines had one long popsicle stick that went from the middle of their heads and straight down into the bottom of the cake.  On the actual cake, I insert regular drinking straws down them, trim them so they sit flushed to the top of the cake and then slide the figurines down them for added stability.  An added bonus when inserting them this way is that when you cut the cake, you get a clean popsicle stick to hold the figurines with instead of one coated in cake and buttercream.

A closer look at the figurines while they were drying.  Note all the push pins in Strawberry Shortcake used to help hold up the hat's rim and her skirt as they dried overnight.  They work perfectly and only leave behind a tiny little pin mark.

This is such a cute photo of the birthday girl being cute and silly as the cake was being photographed (by Brian Ramsay Photography).

And my favorite shot, Serenity taking a bite off Strawberry Shortcake's face....priceless.

Photo's provided by Brian Ramsay Photography.

Korean Hanbok Dol Cake Toppers

I love making these figurines and luckily, I had the awesome opportunity to make 4 of them last year.

Each figurine is made out of gumpaste and stand at 4-5 inches tall.  All the little details on the hat and shirt are hand painted in gel colors and gold luster dust.  I also add pearl dust to the clothing to give the illusion of silk cloth.  To see how they're made, take a look at one of the 1st Hanbok Dol's I made HERE:  My first Hanbok Dol Figurine.

Ci's Hanbok Dol Figurine (June 2012):  My 2nd Hanbok Dol Figurine and custom made to match the little, birthday's girls traditional Korean dress:  She stood at 5 inches tall.  I also made a couple dozen flower blossoms and butterflies to decorate her own cake with.

Maddison's Hanbok Dol Figurine (Aug 2012):  She's a replica of the very 1st Hanbok Dol Figurine I made a little over a year ago but instead of standing at only 3 inches tall, this one is 5 inches tall.

Jenn's Hanbok Dol Figurine's (Nov 2012):  2 Cousins celebrating their 1st birthday together.  Each one was custom made to match their traditional, 1st birthday Hanbok Dress.  Each is 4 inches tall.