Hello Kitty!

I love making cakes for people, but I hate it when I will not have enough time to make them super special.  My best friend asked me to make a cake for her daughters 4th birthday with a Hello Kitty theme.  I was super excited until I realized I would be out of town the 2 days before the party, and the party was coming up soon!  So I thought I need to make a cake that I can freeze.  Which meant that it couldn't be a fondant covered cake (I have had horrible results unfreezing fondant covered cakes, with moisture build up and decorations falling off).

I decided on a 9 inch round cake, that I would cover in buttercream and decorate with fondant and gum paste decorations.  The hardest part would be making sure the buttercream was smooth enough (which I can admit, even I need to practice).  I baked my 9 inch round dark chocolate cake, leveled it, filled it (with just buttercream since it was for a child's birthday party), crumb coated it, and then covered it with a light pink buttercream frosting.

OK, so it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, but it didn't turn out as perfect as I wanted either.  It seemed the more I tried to smooth it out, the more it would show imperfections!  So I got it as smooth as I could, covered it and walked away to make the decorations for the cake.

First I made a huge bow for the cake out of gum paste.  I colored it dark pink, and just playing around I created a large bow for the top side of the cake.  I then also created a small bow for the Hello Kitty that would be on the cake.  Knowing there was going to be a bow and a hello kitty on top of the cake, I decided that simple polka dots would decorate the rest of the cake.  So I cut out some circles in white, dark pink, and black.  I then cut out Hello Kitty's shape, as well as her eyes, nose and whiskers.

I know I am not doing a super job of describing how or what I did, but I was just playing around (I had a little leeway, since it was for a friend).  I then assembled the cake: Putting the Hello Kitty I created on one side of the top, and the large bow on the other side.  I then added my polka dots randomly, and completed it with a ribbon around the bottom of the cake.

All in all I was super happy with the results.  I delivered it to my friend and she has it in her freezer for Sunday's party.  So I am keeping my fingers crossed that it thaws out alright.

Pregnant Belly Cake

OK folks this is my 1st official post... so let's hope I don't screw it up too bad...

Wednesday night was my 1st experience creating a pregnant belly cake.  My cousin had seen one online and asked if I could make one for a baby shower she was throwing.  I was a bit hesitant (and told her that), but she figured I could do it (Thanks for the positive thinking Cuz!!!!)

I wanted to make a rather large cake, using the Wilton Ball pan for the chest, so I had to find a large enough bowl for the belly.  After checking out every bowl in my house and my families, I finally found an old glass bowl of my mothers that would be the perfect size for the belly!  Baking the cakes was easy,and even though I was worried about getting the big belly cake out of the glass bowl I had no problems.  One of the Wilton ball pan sides stuck a little bit, but nothing a little frosting couldn't fix.

I then leveled the dome pieces by hand (cutting off the weird bubble bump that the oven seems to always produce, and when I did that I noticed that my belly piece was not going to be tall enough.  So I quickly baked up a 9 in round to put underneath it.  After filling the cake (3 layers for the belly and 2 for the chest pieces), using only buttercream frosting because I didn't know how it would hold up and didn't feel like experimenting, I put the pieces in position on the cake board.

I quickly did a light crumb coat of frosting and let that "harden" a bit while I colored my fondant.  I then added more buttercream frosting and was ready for the fondant! 

I was extremely nervous about rolling that large a piece of fondant out and then moving it to place on the cake!  I mean what if I screwed up?  Needless to say I probably held my breath as I moved my HUGE piece of fondant and laid it over the cake.  It went pretty smoothly, except for the one side where the fondant got too thin and decided to rip!

I went into creative mode and tried to figure out how I would "fix" the rip.  I decided there would be no fixing, so I added a different colored piece of fondant over the area creating a sort of "sash" on the dress.  It worked perfectly! 

I then added my ribbons, polka dots and dress decorations (making sure to tie in my makeshift sash that I had to add), and pretty soon I had a pretty darn beautiful belly cake!

I was incredibly happy with my 1st pregnant belly cake.  I don't know if I would have changed anything in my process...  and even though the fondant ripped, smoothing the fondant was pretty easy over a dome surface.  I would definitely do it again and actually look forward to my next belly cake!  I just hope they liked it at the baby shower just as much as me.