Aggies Do It Better

Well, the big boy is 3 now. He requested a "Thomas" cake, and was quite adamant about it, as he is about everything. I looked around a little on the web and found 2 basic kinds: cakes in the shape of the train, and regular cakes with Thomas stuff or drawings on top. I decided to go with the latter. This one is one of my favorite ones I've made I think! (Do I keep saying that??) He really loved it. After I took these pics I wrote his name on the little sun with some food markers. I set the top tier back a little, which you can't really tell from the front, but you can from the back, so to make room for the train tracks and trains. I didn't really do anything special with the bottom, so excuse the cardboard circle! But this? This makes up for it. look at me gettin fancy with photoshop! I SERIOUSLY need to hire someone to teach me how to use ALL of it. I don't find it self-explanatory AT all.

So here we go, 9 cakes in 4 days! First, the prep work. Assemble boxes, make royal icing roses and fondants, and the frosting. All this was done on the first day. One cake was due earlier (the 2nd day), so it's not in the picture here. Skip to Day 3, BAKING DAY! I had hoped to get all of them baked, torted and filled the first day, but here's as far as I got and the end of this day. Thank goodness we have an extra fridge in our garage!! My Husband was out of town all these days until the last day, which is partly why I was a bit behind schedule. The boys were going BONKERS and I didn't have as much uninterupted time to work as I hoped. It's much harder when they are running around the house! Also? We were practically snowed in the first part of this, which didn't help. Day4: (Daddy's home, YAY!!) Finish icing the cakes, cover them all with fondant, and decorate. There is lots of chilling-in-between-time here too, but since there was so many I always had one to ...

My week of Valentine's baking wound up with these, made for a girl's night out. The only request I had was for pink and purple, maybe a little sparkles. I had complete freedom on the flavors--isn't that awesome?! I'm always dying to experiment out with new flavors. I decided on Cosmos, or Cosmopolitans. For those who don't know, it's a Martini with vodka, cranberry juice, lime. These don't have any alcohol in them, though! I used "Simple" brand cosmo mix in the batter, I like it because it's all natural-no artificial sweeteners or colors. It is a blend of cranberry and lime juices. The frosting was my buttercream base with fresh lime zest and juice. They are really good! I hope the girls like them. I kind of went out on a limb, sometimes that's risky!

This week, the final class, we spent the first class practicing a few different kinds of borders, and then a basketweave technique like you would use the sides of a cake if you were making a basket theme cake. Honestly, I thought I would be able to do that no problem, I've seen it before, but it was harder than I thought! It took me 4 times of wiping my practice board clean and trying again to "get" it. Then we had the rest of the time to decorate our cakes. I came up with a design, finally, earlier in the week, and got to work mid-week on the flowers I wanted for my cake. Originally I wanted to do an all-white, bridal type cake. White cake, White frosting. After I made the flowers, I decided they'd look better against an off-white, but not colored, background. I started out with a 9 inch vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream on the inside and a newly invented Mocha Buttercream on the outside. If you like coffee, or coffee ice cream, then you can just imagine how good...

This class we did more of the roses. This time, I actually got it! I was so proud of myself. This is putting the first petal on the rose base. Then the second row of petals. Then a 3rd (or even 4th if you want) row of petals. My icing consistency was a little soft, so my some of my petals look a little melty. But, you get the idea. Look at me!!!! Next up was violets. My icing was't exactly purple, but close enough. These are pretty cute too! Then daffodils. These are just ok in my book. They were kind of hard to make. Then, Lillies. I like these alot, and think they will come quite in handy around Easter, but I definitely need some practice. These are flowers that having a correct consistency of icing would really help.

This week in the Flowers and Cake Design class, we did a ton! The first part of making a rose with our royal icing we made at home (which is tricky! we were all having problems with the consistency of it). This icing dries rock hard and these flowers can be made way in advance, and are ideal for cakes that will have many many flowers on them. The we stuck wax paper squares on a flower nail with a template underneath it. The "rose base" is basically a Hershey's kiss shaped dollop of icing. You would think that sounds pretty easy, but for some reason, I could. not. get. it. All mine looked like drunk elf hats. You can't really tell in this pic, because they're covered with the first leaf of the rose, the center petal. But you can see how crooked they are! Frustrating. We skipped ahead a little and made actual roses with a couple of our bases. Of the 2 here, the good one my instructer did, and the "special" looking one, well, that's mine. Then we moved ...

I recently completed another Wilton cake decorating class, called "Flowers and Cake Design". The class I took before, last fall, was Fondant and Gum Paste . I was really on the fence about taking this class, mostly because as I said before, I'm not really a "flower" person. But I had such a blast at the Fondant class, and we actually made a TON of flowers in there, and I wasn't actually horrible at it, and ::stop the presses:: I liked making the flowers. So, here we are. The classes are once a week, for 4 weeks, 2 hours each. Here's what we did in the first class. Our in our kit we had this thing called a Button Flower Cut and Press set. This is something really cool and cute. There is a leaf one too but I don't have it. It's SO easy to use. You mix a little gum paste and fondant together, then roll it out. On the back of the right side there is a nifty rectangle-shaped ridge around the edge of the plate that you press into what you rolled out an...

This was several weeks ago, when we got about 3 inches of snow. Blog, meet our kitty, Meg. She is almost 13 years old and still full of p-n-v. But she is very sweet, and has been so patient with the boys. Surprisingly so! We were all playing outside in the snow, and Meg was watching wistfully at the back door windows. I'm sure she wanted to come out and experience snow for the first time, no? She came out, sat for a minute and pondered, and decided that her warm and toasty bed inside was much more her speed. (ok, i may have an old electric heating pad under a blanket in her kitty bed that I turn on at night for her.) Don't worry, she was only outside for a total of about 2 minutes. But before she ran back in she made sure to let me know what she thought of the snow!

Happy almost Valentine's Day! Since I am about to take on this project again, I wanted to blog about last year's event. I didn't have this blog back then, but if I did, then this definitely would have been on it! I'm so glad I took a bunch of photos to document it. This was the first major baking project I took on, shortly after I got my grandaddy stand mixer last Christmas. I would have never attempted such a thing without it. My husband and I got the crazy idea that I would take orders and sell Valentine's cakes at his work. It was a way for me to hone my skills and earn a little bit of dough to get more of the "baking things" i.e. gadgets and pans and things, that make life as a cake maker easier. I got to work making a "demo" (but very real) cake to photograph for the flyer that was going to be handed out. I can't remember exactly, but I think I sent maybe half this cake to my hub's work and kept the other half here for us to eat. Th...