Hannah's Puppy Cake

When I asked our niece, Hannah, what kind of cake she wanted for her fifth birthday she was quick to tell me she wanted a puppy cake. Everyone who knows her knows that Hannah is so cute that you really have no choice but to give her exactly what she asks for. So I did.

Puppy cake breakdown:

The body was made using a standard Barbie dress pan.

The head and paws were formed from cereal treats

And everything got a coat of vanilla buttercream prior to being covered in fondant. The details are also out of fonfant.

Hannah took great joy in eating the tounge. I took great joy in knowing that she loved her cake.





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Darth Vader

Darth Vader, need I say more?
Unlike many of my cake creations I was confident of my ability to bring one of sci-fi's greatest villians to life in the form of cake. And I was thrilled with how he turned out.

I confess to having a geeky side to my personality, and I actually like the "Star Wars" movies a lot. But my appreciation of the films is miniscule when compared to my husbands love of them. I knew going in that Ben would be a tough critic of this particular design. So I knew the cake was a success when he threatened not to let it leave the house.

Darth Vader breakdown:

Cake: 2 eight inch round layers with the dome layer on top.

Icing: Dirty iced with vanilla buttercream. Covered in fondant, airbrushed black.

Embellishments: the helmet flair and the "mouth" are made with rice crispy treats.


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I love the 80's

If the 80's decade played out for you anything like it happened for
me then you spent more time than you should have desparately trying to figure out the Rubic's Cube. You know, without peeling off the stickers.

When a friend of mine asked me to make a Rubic's Cube cake for her brother's rehersal dinner I wasn't really expecting it to be all that difficult. For some reason, despite my top of the line education, I completely neglected to remind myself that a cube is just that; a cube. All sides are equal. It's height is the same as it's width and depth.

I did eventually remember this troublesome mathmatical fact, but not before I had put the fondant on the cake. It wasn't until I started trying to place the colored squares on the cube (well, the cube that wasn't actually yet a cube) that I realized I was going to have to shave part of the cake off and redo the fondant. After that minor fiasco it was just a matter of painting the squares. It should also be noted that when you are making a Rubic's Cube cake even though you will never see the underside of the cake it must be taken into consideration when adding the colors. I remembered just in the nick of time to save my Rubic's Cube from a missing color.

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Maura's Birthday Castle

Maura turned five last week. And every little girl deserves a castle on her birthday. I love making castle cakes. They're actually quite simple. This one was three 9 inch layers covered in fondant "blocks" with matching buttercream piped between the fondant. The towers were made out of rice crispy treats. I made these the night before so they would have time to set up before I coated them in a thin layer of buttercream and wrapped them in fondant. The tops if the towers are the standard upside down ice cream cones that I decorated with fondant. The final touch was the flower vines, loved them on the Dragon Castle and I love them on this one too. Hope you like it!

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Lego my Legos Cake

**I have gotten several hits from a reader in the United Kingdom on this particular posting. I can only assume you are planning on recreating this cake. If you would like any help from me you are welcome to email me at cakesbyamybeth@aol.com. I'd be happy to give you some pointers. Have a great day. Amy**






My son, Wil (previously mentioned in the "Luau" post) turned six in August. I can't remember a time when Wil didn't love taking things apart and putting them back together. Puzzels, train sets, forts constructed out of kitchen chairs and blankets, and of course the childhood staple...Legos.

Give my boy a box of the tiny plastic blocks (sorry, I have a horrible habit of unintentional rhyming when I talk, it apparently translates into blogging too. I'm gonna have to watch that). Anyway, let's just say Wil can spend hours playing with Legos. So I wasn't the least bit surprised when he told me he wanted a Lego birthday cake.

The cake is pretty easy to construct. I made two half sheet cakes. And using templates I made out of card board, I cut three different sized blocks with at least two of each size. The individual blocks can be of varying lengths but it is very important to make certain they are all the same height.

Once the "blocks" are covered with fondant you might want to give them a chance to set up then stack them any way you want. I made the "dots" out of fondant using a small round cutter.

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Luau!

I love this cake. It is one of my favorites. Often when I'm trying to determine a design concept for a cake I'll take inspiration from pictures of other peoples' cakes. However, as I'm sure you can imagine, when you Google "pinapple cake" you only get picures of pinapple upside down cakes. With the exception of the occasional Spongbob cake I believe I may be the only person to ever make a pinapple shaped cake.

It all started when I began planning my kids' birthday party. Gracie (turning 7 at the time) and Wil (turning 5) were both born in August. Wil the second and Gracie the twenty-eighth. So my plan that year was to have a joint birthday luau in the middle of the month. Because I didn't want to bake two different cakes (been there, done that) I was trying to come up with a gender nutural tropical cake idea and when "pineapple" came to mind I couldn't not give it a try. The cake itself was pretty simple. Four layers carves into the general shape of a rather large pinapple. When I had the shape right I put light green buttercream on one side of a piping bag and yellow/orange on the other side. I then piped the individual "squares." Once the buttercream had set up I went back with a soft paint brush I painted between the squares with brown food coloring.

Now, on to the hard part. The leaves. It was a nightmare trying to figure out how to get them to stand up. In the end after much trial and error my sister, Thilia and I found a way to hang the leaves upside down and flair them out so they could harden. It was worth every frustrating minute. This was the second time I was completely satisfied with how the cake turned out.




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