Upcoming: June

I don't believe there are any birthdays in June that I will be making a cake for, because I will not be seeing the birthday people (sorry mom).  I may make a July birthday cake early for someone going to Indonesia for the summer, but that might be it.  Instead, I might make something just for fun or post some pictures of older cakes that I have made.  I also have been looking at cake decorating classes that I can take and I may be making cakes to practice that or just post some pictures from things I've made at the class.

Mrs. Helgevold's Sunflower Cupcake Birthday Surprise

I wasn't planning on making any more cakes for a while, but my room mate's mother came up to visit her.  My room mate has been sending her pictures of all my cakes and stuff and she has been quite amazed at what I've made.  While visiting, she happened to mention that her birthday was next week and that she liked chocolate cake with white icing.  Well, this was just too easy of an invitation, so I had to make her something.  I went through my cupcake book and with some input from my room mate, I decided to make her some sunflower cupcakes.  I hurried to the store to get supplies and started making them while they were shopping elsewhere.  Part way through, they stopped by to drop things off, but she had no idea they were for her (and still doesn't yet).  They soon left and I finished up the cupcakes.  Here is the end result:

For everything you need to know about how to make these, check out the book Hello Cupcake by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson.

Decoy Cake

In all the madness that is planning a space themed party, one of my roommates let slip that I was helping my friend John make a cake.  She did not mention that it would be the Saturn cake of my previous post, so we decided to be sneaky and make a decoy cake.  I, however, did not take part in the actual making of this cake.  This was all John's handiwork, and I, having to play the part, took some of the credit for making this cake.  

And here is the decoy cake, a nice carrot cake rocket ship with accompanying cupcakes with Wall-e and Eva on them.  Very tasty, however, John does recommend that carrot cake is a difficult cake to carve with, because it is too moist.

So after John's actual hours of work and my fake ones, the decoy cake was in place.  Our friend loved the decoy cake and had no idea what was in store for her come the actual party.  I believe John even left out some "secret documents" for her to find to support the decoy cake.

Saturn Cake and Aliens

This past weekend was the combined birthday party of two of my friends.  They decided to have a space themed party and decorated their place accordingly.  One of them came to me to ask if I could help make a Saturn cake, because the other friend really likes the planet Saturn.  Also, while looking through my cupcake decorating book, he saw alien cupcakes, so I decided to make those for him to go with the Saturn cake.  The most difficult part of the cake was making Saturn's rings.  We decided to try poured sugar and our preliminary tests worked out well.  However, they didn't work so well when it came down to it, so we ended up doing a sort of lollipop rings coming out of it.


This is the first attempt at rings, and as you can see, it cracked and without a real torch, we could not fix it.

Here's a picture of my friend carving the cake into a sphere.  We used a foam half circle for the base and put parchment paper to keep the foam out of the cake.  The black goo in the bowl is our deep space to cover the base to hide the pan.

Next we marbled some white fondant and put it over the cake.

Here's a side view.

Here's some lollipop rings for the cake.

Once the rings were in, they didn't want to stay which made it difficult on us.

Next,I made the aliens to go with Saturn.

Stacking a doughnut hole on top of half a marshmallow to make the alien.











The final alien completed.

Now a whole herd of them getting ready to invade.












The final product: Saturn cake and aliens.