I invited my family and a couple friends over for Sunday the 13th to sample some Valentine’s treats, so on Saturday I went to work making the cakes.  One was simple, just a 6″ candy barrel cake.

The other was a little more challenging.  I got the idea from Bakerella, and mine didn’t turn out nearly as nice as hers.  It was her Red Velvet Cake Ball Cake.  I think it’s going to taste good though.  I did red velvet cake, and I used Duff’s red fondant.  I’m not a fan of Duff’s stuff at Michael’s, but I had a coupon for 40% off, and I hate color mixing red fondant… it’s hard to get a good red!  I was surprised though, the Duff fondant tasted pretty good, way better than the Wilton fondant!  So I covered it with fondant, and made different shapes of cake balls for the chocolates in the box.  I used the leftover red velvet cake for some, and some left over devil’s food cake from the candy barrel cake for the others.  I also tried to make a lid, by just covering a piece of cardboard with fondant.  It did work, but the sides on the box weren’t high enough for the lid to make it look closed lol  so it was really just for looks.

I used some of the leftover red fondant to cover the rest of the cookies

Then I got out the rest of the ones I did earlier with the royal icing.

Everyone should be here in about 15 minutes.  I hope they enjoy the treats!

Then I made the cake ball meat balls.  I had left over batter from the single 8″, so I threw it in a 6″ and baked it at the same time.  I crumbled that up to make the meatballs.  Then dipped them in chocolate and tried to give them a rough, meatball look!

Then I mixed some raspberry filling with a little chocolate icing so it would be thicker, like pasta sauce.  I put that on the noodles, and rolled the meatballs in it and placed them on too.  I made one look like it was falling off.

And there you have it, a spaghetti cake!  It tasted really good too!!

First I made the cake balls like normal.  I used some chocolate and some raspberry cake that I had leftover.  I didn’t have cream cheese frosting this time, so I used chocolate since it was all I had, and I think it turned out fine.  Here’s the cake balls…

I have this mold that looks like a Reese’s cup, so I used that for the bottoms of the cupcakes.  I just melted some dark chocolate candy wafers, put a little in each cup, and pushed the cake ball in.  Here you can see the cake balls in the cups…

Here they are outside the cups…

Then I dipped the tops into colored candy melts and added sprinkles and mini M&M’s.

Here’s the finished product…

I hope the gang tonight likes them!

I posted about some of my Halloween treats, but not the ones I took the Clint’s Halloween party.  This year I tried to make gross sweets instead of cute sweets.  Here’s what I came up with:

These were those pretzel rods put into skeleton finger molds with white almond bark….

Nasty looking finger cookies.  They tasted lots better than they looked…

And eyeball cake balls!

It was a creepy looking trio, but tasty!

For Christmas this year, I didn’t go all out on the cookies and candy like I usually do.  And I hardly took any pictures either.  Here’s what I have though:

This shows an assortment of what I made.  I had NFSC with Antonia74′s Royal Icing, Dark chocolate/mint chip cookies, Homemade Marshmallows, peanut butter balls, Oreo truffle balls, dipped peanut butter sandwich cookies, dipped Oreos… I think that’s it.

Here’s a closer view.  This is actually the plate of goodies I took to work the week before Christmas.

I also made a Christmas Candy Barrel cake, and it turned out so cute!  I posted it on cake central, and ended up being on the front page as one of the “Most Saved Cakes of the Day”.  I was really excited about that!  Here’s the cake…

My old work was having a potluck the week before Christmas, so I made some simple cupcakes to drop off there on my way to my new work!

I also made some raspberry cake balls for Christmas with some leftover cake I had…

I think that’s all I did at the end of the year.  I did make a friend some Dukes of Hazzard cupcakes for his birthday on Christmas, but I didn’t get any good pictures of them, just a couple on my phone.

Now…. on to the next project!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 59 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 362 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 547mb. That’s about 7 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 3rd with 74 views. The most popular post that day was 50th birthday bowling cake!.

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The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, en.wordpress.com, mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com, and en.search.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for cute display pictures, rocket cake, toy story cupcakes, bacon cake, and toy story cake ideas.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

50th birthday bowling cake! July 2010
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When are you opening a cakery?? July 2010
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My birthday cake failure! June 2010
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Mom’s 60th birthday November 2010
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Baby Shower Rocket Cake June 2010

I also made a teacup out of gum paste, using this tutorial

And some brooches made out of gum paste, sugar pearls and sugar gems.  The cameos are chocolate made from a silicon mold.

On Thursday night I baked the 10″ cake.  It was one layer of devil’s food, one layer of vanilla and devil’s food marbled.  On Friday, I baked the 8″ which was lemon with raspberry filling, and the 6″ which was raspberry with raspberry filling.  In between, I started frosting the cakes.  I finished the 10″ first.  I frosted it with vanilla butter cream in a pale green color.  I used an impression mat to make a diamond pattern on the sides.  I put sugar pearls on as accents, and large sugar pearls around the bottom.  I put a lip on the top edge with butter cream, then covered the top with the chocolate buttons.  It was supposed to look like a button tin, like Mom used to have.

Next I finished the 8″ cake.  I frosted it with lemon butter cream in pink, then rolled out some white fondant and made it look like a doily, and put it on top.  The teacup went on top of that, with the bouquet of gum paste flowers inside.

The 6″ cake I frosted with white vanilla butter cream, and attached the gum paste brooches around the sides.  I made a “60″ to go on top.

Overall they turned out pretty good.

I also made some cake balls…  Please visit Bakerella if you want instructions on how to make those tasty treats.  Or check out her new book, which is awesome!

Here’s the whole cake table spread…

I think everyone enjoyed it, and I know Mom did, so that’s what’s important!  Happy 60th Birthday Mom!  I love you!

It’s 2 layers of devil’s food, with a layer of peanut butter cookie between.  Filled with chocolate chocolate chip icing, then covered in chocolate icing.  Then you line the outside with Kit Kats broken into 2′s, and fill the top with Reese’s pieces!   Tie a ribbon around it and you’re done.  The easiest cake to make ever, and it looks so cute!  It’s VERY rich though.

So I wanted to make another Candy Barrel cake, because the kids didn’t get to taste that one, and I wanted Mom and Carl to get to try it too.  So I made the same thing, only tied off with a Halloween Ribbon this time.

And sitting on one of the cute new cake plates I got!  They were each tied with coordinating Halloween ribbon.  How fun!

I also made some giant cupcakes, because I got these cool cupcake wrappers from Sam and Jenny for my birthday a couple years ago and wanted to try them out!  They are real sturdy, you don’t have to put them in a cupcake pan, you just put the batter in and set them on a cookie sheet and they bake right up!  As soon as I saw these papers, I thought of Candy Corn, so I made cupcakes that were layered yellow, orange and white cake inside.  Then tried to do the same with the icing but it was pretty sloppy.  They were cute anyway and tasted good!

I also tried my hand at making some sugar cookies.  I tried the NFSC (No Fail Sugar Cookie) recipe for the first time last weekend and wasn’t happy with the results, so I tried again this weekend and they turned out much better.  This was only my second time trying to work with Royal Icing too.  It was a royal pain… But they turned out pretty cute… after 4 hours of icing them Friday night!!!

I used the leftover cake from trimming the Candy Barrel Cake to make some cake balls.  They were ugly but tasted great!

So here’s what the whole spread looked like together…

I had enough for the pumpkin carving party, sent leftovers home with everyone, took some to work for Heather, and took some to Dallas for Mom and Carl to try.

Happy Halloween everyone!

The one on the left, I painted a little green pearl dust around the center.  In the tutorials, it said it makes the daisy look more realistic.  Look at all the horrible edges though!  I learned I have to wiggle the cutter back and forth before lifting to get a good clear cut all the way around, with no jagged edges!

While making the daisies for the cake, I made some other flowers and shapes to put on some cupcakes for Julie and Jenn to take home to their kiddos.

Some flowers…

A rose…

A fish for Pete and a rubber ducky for Sam.  I made the duck by pressing fondant into my rubber duck candy mold, then coloring his beak and eye with food writers.

Some shells for Pete and Sam as they were going to see the Oregon Coast.  Made the shells by pressing fondant into candy molds, then brushing with pearl dust.

A little arrangement flowers and leaves.

Hello Kitty for Katie and a baseball for Zach!

So this is how the daisy cake turned out… It was 2 layers of devils food and 1 layer of raspberry cake, with raspberry filling.  Frosted in buttercream, with fondant ribbon at the bottom and sugar pearls, and fondant daisies on the side and top.  It tasted great!

And here are the cupcakes:

But I wasn’t happy with those flowers.  I had read that using gum paste gives a better result because you can roll it then and it hardens up, so I had to give it a try.  I started with roses.  I watched Edna’s tutorial on You Tube.  They are great!  I linked the first one, but it’s a several part series.  Watch them all if you want to learn how to make roses.  She uses some tools, but tries to keep it simple so anyone can learn.  I used her technique of using a round cutter for my petals.  So here’s my progression of the rose:

The base… You make these on the wire, then let them dry hanging upside down overnight.

The next day you add 2 petals to make the rosebud.

After that dries, you add 3 more petals for the small rose.

After that dries, you add 5 more petals for the medium rose.  You could add more petals from there, but I didn’t have a circle cutter that was bigger, and you would need bigger cutters for the next round.  I decided they were good at that point!

Next I bought a kit to help me make Calla Lillys, and I tried to make those.

They were fairly easy to make and looked really real!  I made the centers one night, and covered them in yellow sugar.  Then formed the flower the next night and put them together.  I even did some veining, which you can’t really see in the picture, but it made them look pretty realistic!

Next I worked on some yellow roses.  I bought a new ball tool, so these roses were MUCH easier to work with than the burgundy ones!

I was making these flowers to go into a fall bouquet on top of a cake for Jenny’s Mom’s birthday, so I made some more daisies, sunflowers, and some small orange flowers too.

This is finally what I came up with for the mound of flowers for the top of the cake.

I took the naked cake over to Jenny’s and we filled and decorated it there.  Here’s how the cake turned out.

I’ve learned lots while working on these flowers.  I can’t wait to make more because I got some advice on Cake Central that will help me make them even better next time!

I wanted to do the “Ribbon Rose Rendezvous Cake“  and Jenny wanted to do a variation of the one of the cakes in our course book.  We made up all the butter cream we would need for the next day, and colored it too.  Then we laughed at Cake Wrecks for a while before she went home.  (Absolutely hilarious… check it out if you haven’t!)

On Thursday we rushed over to class and were surprised that there were only 4 of us in class!  I guess some people weren’t able to make class that night.  It was great though, because instead of Jenny and I both being squished into one table, we each had our own table!  woohoo!  Our instructor showed us how to do writing on cakes, and showed us the ribbon rose again.  Then we started practicing.  Once we practiced for a while, she said we could start decorating our cake.  I decided to use my practice roses for me cake.  Good thing too because we barely got done in time as it was!

So I started off making a mound of frosting on my cake, then placed the roses on it.  I ended up having to make a few more roses to get the design symmetrical.  Then I made little clusters of white dots on the cake.

Next I added some leaves to cover the white mound under the roses.  I wish I would have made the leaves a little bigger.  They look tiny compared to the roses!  Then I piped a quick shell boarder around the bottom and covered it with the white rosette border.

Here’s Jenny piping on her rosette border.  It looks red in the picture but her roses were actually light pink, dark pink and yellow.

Her yellow and pink rose turned out so cool!  This picture doesn’t do it justice!

Here’s her finished cake.

We both had fun with the class, and are planning on taking the other 2 classes sometime in the fall or winter when things aren’t so hectic!!