World of Cake Freelancing: Recent Cakes

Hello there! We're back! We just returned from a two-week trip to Toronto and Deep River to visit family and friends, and I'm only just getting back into the swing of things. Blog neglect inevitably occurs every once in a while, but I fully intend to make it up to you with lots of new craft updates, including baking, jewelry, pottery and knitting.

Lots has been going on with my freelancing work (love saying that!). The past month has been chock full of kiddie birthday cakes and wedding cakes. The first one I'll show you is a chocolate truffle cake we made a few weeks back. Each tier is covered in fondant, and the lines were pressed in with a ruler. Since the truffles were a bit tricky, we attached them on-site with buttercream and reinforced rogue ones with toothpicks.

The cake with the dark secret...

Alright, now get this: the only part of this cake that actually has chocolate is the truffles. The chocolatey-looking fondant is just plain ol' white fondant dyed brown. Crazy! Puzzling, isn't it? As a guest I think I would be quite distressed that this decadent-looking cake was a chocolate imposter! To be fair, I should add that they also ordered a ton of chocolate turtle brownies for the reception, but why you'd want a cake to appear chocolatey, but not taste chocolatey is beyond me. The cake would have been a much richer and uniformly deep chocolate brown with real chocolate fondant, but instead I dyed about 3 pounds of white fondant that left me with aching arms for the next 2 days. Yes, it's true, cake decorating builds the muscles.

Our second cake today is this cute, colourful polka-dotted number, which was a buttercream cake with cut-out fondant designs. It seems that the new trend in children's birthday parties is for loving (or Martha-Stewart-obsessed) parents to spoil their 1-year old with a cake that it more appropriate for a wedding. See below:

This cupcake tower with a 6" top tier was based on a picture that the customer brought in. Aside from what's on the stand, there were more cupcakes in boxes! This is some big party they are planning! I don't think my first year was celebrated in such style...although I wouldn't have remembered it anyway.

There was another weekend where a family ordered this adorable monkey cake for a toddler's birthday. Then I found out that the monkey was just the smash cake (also a new trend - a cake for the child to mangle for the photos, while the guests are served other cutely decorated cupcakes). At least it generates business, I guess.

I'm too cute to be smushed to pieces!

They also ordered monkey cupcakes which were fun to make, but very fiddly. I spent a good half hour sawing off bits of big vanilla wafers and cutting mini wafers in half for the ears. Thank goodness it was only a smallish order. I probably wouldn't be calling them cute if I had made hundreds of them.

Planet of the Apes, in a non-scary delicious kind of way

To finish the post, here is a a simpler, more reasonable 1-year old's cake that was modeled after the party invitations. And of course, it was accompanied by a mini smash cake:

Woops, I should be running off to work now - more to come later!