Welcome Cake - 10/6/09

We had 3 new employees start all on the same day here at our office so I decided to make a "welcome cake".  The flowers were left over royal icing flowers from when I took the Wilton Cake Decorating classes last year...and YES, they were still edible!  Keep them in an airtight container out of direct sunlight and they will last a very long time!  I should have used a smaller tip for the writing...what can I say, writing messages on cakes is defnitely not my strength!

For the sides of the cake I did a basket weave.  This technique is very tedious, but I love how it looks!

Brenda and Butch Rybicki Wedding Cake - 7/26/08

My mom and her boyfriend after being together for 16  or 17 years decided to get married!  I went up to MI for the wedding and also made the cake!  I borrowed most of the supplies from one of my mom's co-workers and took a few of my own things with me in my luggage.

The layers of cake were lemon, strawberry, and chocolate flavors.  The icing was buttercream (as you can see it did not exactly cooperate with me up there in MI - I didn't have my trusty Kitchen Aid mixer with me) and the flowers were made of royal icing.

Had extra batter so made some cupcakes to go with the cake.

Lessons learned from this cake:

1. Always make sure to have a GOOD mixer to make the buttercream.

2. Even the slightest bit of humidity causes buttercream icing to not come together very well.

3. When borrowing pans - make sure to have the instructions for how much batter will fit in the pan and what temperature and how long to bake for.