Special order cake!!

The fondant covered cake that I brought into school went over so well that someone asked me if I could make a cake for her daughter's birthday later in the week!  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that everyone had just assumed someone had picked up a bakery cake until they heard a friend of mine talking about it.

She requested a 6 inch cake with lots of chocolate and roses. I decided on a devil's food chocolate cake mix, whipped dark chocolate ganache for the filling, and chocolate butter cream for the cake.

Originally I had made both larger roses for the top of the cake and smaller roses to decorate the sides with, however after putting on the pattern and the top roses I decided it would look too crowded with the mini roses. In the end, I was really pleased with the end product.

The person I made it for said it went over really well at the birthday party and said the whipped ganache was wonderful.  I'll have to make one to taste soon!

P.S.  This was the last baked good I made in my studio apartment!  Yay for a bigger, better kitchen next time!

Wilton Gum paste and Fondant Class

Unfortunately I was not great at taking pictures of everything we learned to do in this class.  I learned to make roses, carnations, and mums.  I think I used both the roses and carnations on the orange birthday cake I made but we never really came back to those. 

On the last day of class we covered a cake in fondant.  I made an almond cake with strawberry filling again.  Since the class was just a few days before all the teachers came back to school where I'm serving I decided to make a "Welcome Back" cake.  I used mums because they are season (and they were the least time consuming of all the flowers). 

I loved how the fondant looked!  I was seriously doubting that I would want to use fondant for my wedding cake, but I'm now reconsidering.  It will take a few more trials to know for sure, but as of now I can definitely see the advantages.  I also cut strips of brown fondant to make stripes along the side and then twisted two ropes of green for a boarder.  The cake is on a cake board covered with marbled fondant.  Even if I do end up going with buttercream on my wedding cake, I will most likely be using this technique for my cake board because it looked really nice.

Sugar Cookies with Champagne Icing

After my last cake I had a lot of champagne icing leftover so I decided to make some sugar cookies to frost. 

Possibly my favorite cookies in the world are the frosted soft sugar cookies from Cub (I'm sure every grocery store has them). The recipe I used for the cookies was wonderful- exactly what I had in mind and with the champagne icing a definite rival for my favorite.

After having so much trouble with icing consistency the last time I used it, I added almost a cup of powdered sugar and a tablespoon or meringue powder. This time it worked great! It was easy to spread and it set up nicely so I could stack the cookies without getting hard.

I added some pink sugar sprinkles for fun! This was the first treat I brought to my new co-workers and they were definitely a success.  Plus I think everyone gets a kick out of having champagne in their icing, despite that it's a nominal amount ; ).