Archive for the ‘Cakes’ Category

Simple but Elegant

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Even a small, fairly basic groom’s cake can be striking. Here’s a great example!

The yellow sugar rosebud “boutonniere” & accent rose matched the many sugar roses on this couple’s cake.

Meringue Flowers

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Detail photography spotlight again!

This cake was from a wedding in June 2008.. but I’ve always loved the close up detail shots, so I figure it’s about time to share!

This was a really cool cake to do, just very time and labor intensive! Each individual petal was piped in meringue, baked, assembled into flowers and held together with more meringue, then re-baked!

The meringue flowers were made from around 7 different shades of white, ivory, silver, and pink. Rather than being a load of frosting flowers all over this cake.. it was frosted with brown sugar swiss meringue buttercream, then covered in these crispy meringue cookies!

Very cool.

Autumn Leaves… in Sugar

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Time for another “Artsy Photos” spotlight! Thanks again to my husband Michael, at Happenstance Photography. This week’s cake photo choices are inspired by our recent trip to Stillwater, and all of the changing colors outside.

This cake was one of our rare non-fondant cakes. We created a special frosting to acheive the textured “stucco” effect, and airbrushed it twice – once in chocolate, once with a deep red – for a slight gradient effect.

The leaves were all made from gumpaste, allowed to dry, then individually airbrushed with several colors of red, orange, copper, and gold.

Definitely one of my favorite Fall-themed cakes ever.

Lambeth Insanity

Monday, September 28th, 2009

I’d like to share some photos of a recent wedding cake.

Oh, who am I kidding, I’d like to SHOW OFF these photos, because I think they’re completely awesome!

Lambeth is a very old school way of decorating cakes, from the early 1900s. It requires hours and hours of overpiping intricate details – and is a challenge for anyone. Definitely a change from my normal style, but it was a challenge I was excited to take on. Not only does it feature way more piping than I’ve ever done (perhaps even cumulatively so!), but imagine piping this sucker with ADD!

Without further ado, here are a few pics of my Lambeth wedding cake:

Definitely hardcore.

The things you can make with cake..

Monday, September 21st, 2009

This cake was too cool NOT to have a blog post dedicated to it!

As always, the cake is entirely edible – the only non-cake portion is the “lens”, which was fashioned out of Rice Krispie Treat!

Sugar Lilies, and Photography

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

I came across a gorgeous detail shot of some of my custom, handpainted sugar lilies this morning, and thought I would share:




The nice thing about being married to a photographer is that I have an insane amount of photos of everything I’ve ever made.  The not-as-nice thing about that is that there are many, many gorgeous photos that never make it to the site!

The 3 basic types of photos I choose from are:

“Straightforward” – These are the photos that you see in my galleries, and in my print portfolio. Straightforward shots of the entire cake, everything in focus.

“Artsy” – You see these sort of photos on the other pages of my site. It may be a partial view, it may feature a low depth of field (background looks fuzzy), etc. As I have only a finite amount of “other” pages, and each of those only has a certain amount of text to accent, I don’t get the opportunity to use many of these photos. They sure are pretty to look at, though!

“Detail” – These are some of the coolest to look at… but unfortunately I have the least amount of actual use for them. Photos of a very small part of a cake, really highlighting the beauty of a specific technique or design element.

I think it’s about time that some of these photos get their time in the spotlight!

As always, all photos on this site are courtesy of Happenstance Photography. If you need any product or food photography done, be sure to shoot him an email!

My “Dream Trend” for wedding cakes.

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Although you wouldn’t know it by looking at our galleries, I’m a huge fan of doing marbled cakes. Not the “chocolate / vanilla” marbled interior, mind you.. but simply decorated cakes featuring marbled fondant. It’s just something we don’t receive a lot of orders for, and I think that’s a shame. It’s about time marbled fondant gets some time in the spotlight!

Not only is marbling fondant kinda fun, but it’s always neat to see how the design turns out in the end. It’s a great way to have a unique cake that is classy and elegant.. and it definitely gets people talking. What a great way to bring your wedding colors into the cake!

Here are some examples:

An example of how marbling can be used for a more subtle effect:

And, just for fun… here’s a pic of how crazy we can get with marbling the INSIDE of the cake:

(This was the cake we served at Twin Cities Pride Festival a couple years ago!)

By controlling the colors – and proportion of colors – as well as the degree to which we marble the fondant, we can achieve any effect, from subtle to eye popping!

Something to consider for your future cake orders, perhaps? :)

Pioneers of “Cake Taxidermy”!

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

What happens when a couple loves their personalized, World of Warcraft groom’s cake SO MUCH, that they can’t bear to serve it?

Well,  when the cake was created by an evil cake overlord, they can get it preserved. For real.

“Foopmallet” gained immortality 1 month after he was created, and the whole process is documented here.

We love challenges!

The Amazing Glowing Cake!

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

A big highlight of this past week was getting together with Jean Cowles of Violet’s Flowers for some design fun. Her motto starts with “Sassy Flowers”.. sassy is right! She’s one of the most ridiculously fun people in the local wedding industry, and I had very much been looking forward to this.

I’ll be blogging about the outcome of this design collaboration in a few months, but wanted to give you guys a sneak peak at something we came up with – the Amazing Glowing Wedding Cake!

In addition to the lush beauty of the Tulips, peonies, astilbe, sweet peas, freesia, and more that burst out from between each layer (and form a beautiful topper), the cake itself was designed in such a way as to accommodate many small LED lights, which gave the whole thing an ethereal glow. Teaser pic below!


Wouldn’t this look amazing at any reception hall.. after the lights are dimmed slightly for dinner and dancing, the cake would still be a gorgeous, attention grabbing centerpiece! Love it!

Thanks again to Jean for working with me on this project. I had a blast, and it was great to work with such talent! I love her eye for design and color, and would highly recommend her to anyone looking for unique and fun wedding flowers!

Coolest wedding cake EVER.

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

I’ve been looking forward to this past weekend for a very long time – it was the weekend of the Mario cake wedding!

 Cory and Tori were so much fun to work with, I love when a couple lets me run wild on a cake, and come on.. It’s Super Mario Bros! I was like a kid waiting for Christmas. Well, it was a couple days after Christmas, so.. ya. (more…)