"Basketball Star Cake" - 8/12

Here is a 50th birthday cake for a lady who was a big basketball star in high school.  The school colors were blue and white and I incorporated her name, high school, jersey number and mascot by writing them on the larger blue stars.  The cake flavor was raspberry with white chocolate icing, all covered in marshmallow fondant.  The bottom was an 8" square, the net portion was actually two inverted 6" ball cakes and the basket ball was the other half of a 6" ball cake. 

The basketball and base cakes were quite easy to make, gave me no problems at all, but the net portion was just one headache after another!  I had initially made black fondant to cover it in, but after rolling it out and trying to cover it from the top, it started cracking and ended up completely falling apart and in the trash.  Fortunately, I had enough white fondant left and figured I would just get some of Wilton's black food color mist to cover it.  So after I finally got it covered, this time wrapping the fondant around the sides instead of from the top, I sprayed the mist on, only to find out that it was more of a brownish color than black.  Not a big deal, but when I tried to pipe the net, I just could not wrap my head around the pattern of the strings and they kept breaking!  So I did the best I could in the time I had left and overall, I think it turned out pretty well.



"Red, White and Blue Wedding" - 7/12

Here is my first 4-tiered cake that I made for my Pastor's son and his new bride for their red, white and blue themed wedding.  They wanted a very simple, all buttercream cake with some fondant roses on the top.  The top two tiers were red velvet cake with cream cheese icing and the bottom two were chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream. 

For my first 4-tiered *buttercream* cake, I was just thrilled that it was still standing by the end of the ceremony!  After a long, sleepless night, awaken by dreams of stacking this cake, the next afternoon I was actually able to enjoy a piece! lol  At the reception, I also received many compliments of how good and moist it tasted!  One of my friends even said that the chocolate cake tasted like an Oreo:)







"Storybook Castle Cake" 6/12

    

This storybook castle cake was completely done in buttercream.  The more I do buttercream cakes, especially sculpted ones, the more I come to dread them, simply because they are so unforgiving!  Both the book portion and the castle portion were a deep dark chocolate cake, which is one of my moister recipes, filled with chocolate ganache.  With the cake being so moist it was already hard to sculpt, but I think the hardest part was getting the castle onto the book without messing up the buttercream and the brick texture I had tried to make on it.  Anyhow, the flaws were able to be covered up with more buttercream (grass and bead border) and turned out fine.  The purple looks a lot bluer in this picture, but the turrets were covered in purple cake sparkles and really "fancied" it up!