CAKES!

For the first post on cake decorating, I'm going to share some cakes that we have done in the past year or so(since we haven't done any cakes recently). My favorite part of cake decorating is the planning. It's the brain storming for awesome ideas that can be the most fun. So who likes chess? For our brothers birthday last winter we wanted to make a chess board cake.

We thought at first that it would be difficult, but it really wasn't that bad. Chocolate for the black squares, plain white for the white squares. We were going to make chocolate chess pieces with a candy mold, but the mold didn't arrive when it was supposed to, so we had to go buy plastic pieces. Well, we have a chess mold now, in case we ever need it again. :)
  For my younger brother's birthday last year, we had a small party. And Laryssa and I, never being ones to turn down an opportunity to decorate, decked out the house with the Steelers colors, black and yellow. The cake was also decorated in the Steelers colors and logo. It turned out okay, but boy did we have trouble with this cake. The logo on the top is completely icing. The way we made it is rather complicated to explain, but here we go. First we printed out a coloring page of the logo and then placed a picture frame glass piece on top of it, taping the coloring page onto the back of it. Then on top of the glass we taped a piece of wax paper. Then began tracing the logo with icing, filling it in until it was a quarter of an inch thick. It was then placed in the freezer for 15 minutes and removed, to be flipped over onto the cake. So here is where all the trouble began. After we placed it on the cake(which is a very delicate job by the way)we realized that it was backwards. Yeah, it said "sreleetS". If you ever try this, please remember that you need to make it backwards so that when you flip it on the cake, you get it the right way. :) So we removed the "sreleetS" logo. and made a new one, the right way. :)

Just one more cake. This last one was the biggest cake we have made so far, and it took the longest. It looks rather simple but believe me, a lot of work went into that cake. Our family(aunts, uncles, cousins) wanted to celebrate our grandma's birthday last fall. And it was suggested that Laryssa and I make a cake. So we went out and bought a sheet cake pan for the occasion and baked a big cake. The actual decorating took two days with all the work split up, and I think it was like 12 hours total. Our grandma likes butterflies so we wanted that to be the theme for the cake. And to make these butterflies we used royal icing, which I mentioned in the Cake Decorating page. I won't go into all the details of how we made them because that would take too long. But they're the reason it took two days, because we had to do them the day before the cake so they could dry as hard as candy.

The flowers also were made of royal icing, just not the liquid kind. The flowers you see there are actually not two flowers. They are each made of a bunch(I have no idea how many, but a lot)of tiny individual flowers piled together to make the two big flowers. We didn't finish this cake until 1:00 in the morning. It took forever, but it was worth it!