I made this cake for a friend's graduation party. It is two layers of vanilla cake with buttercream frosting. My friend asked me to make the buttercream a teal color, as that is her favorite color. Her color requests for the flowers were salmon, yellow and white. I made the flowers out of royal icing in those colors and then hand painted each one to give them some rich detail. This is the biggest cake I have made so far. It was half a sheet cake, and it took up the entire oven. It was also pretty heavy and a little awkward to turn over. "Que Sera Sera", (can't you just hear Doris Day singing? what ever will be will be....) has special meaning to the graduate and she thought it would be nice to have it written on the cake, I thought so too. I am so happy to say that everyone (including me) really liked the cake, especially the graduate and her family.

Dad's Birthday Cake

I made this cake for my father's birthday party. It was a yellow cake (because he does not like chocolate cake) with strawberry jam on half of the middle. When my dad was growing up, his mother always made cakes with strawberry jam in the middle and it is his favorite. I only did it on half (the other half was chocolate butter cream) because my mother does not like jam on her cake and I aim to please. The icing is chocolate butter cream, and I cannot remember where I got the recipe, but it was very, very good. I piped it with a darker chocolate and did some smaller piping in even darker chocolate. I swore I wouldn't make another square cake, but I guess I needed to practice icing around corners. The flowers are hand made by me, some are fondant, others are made of royal icing. It was so pretty, it was hard to cut!

This is the final cake for my Wilton 3 class. The roses on this cake took me ten hours to make and the quality of them improved along the way. Ah, the fondant, a little easier to work this time. Doing it at home made the difference. I rolled it a little thinner than the last fondant cake so the taste wasn't so overpowering. There is butter cream under the fondant and in between the layers. The piping is also butter cream. It was fun assembling the 2nd tier, a little bit of architecture with the Doric columns. The bottom layer went to work with my husband, we kept the top to eat at will. It was quite good!