Birthday Cake Catastrophe

Now that Camron's SURPRISE birthday party has come and gone, we can post pictures of the disaster that was intended to be his birthday cake! We know now what went wrong (so we can avoid this in the future), but we were so discouraged when we discovered what had happened! The cake split in two!!

Of course, the party was still a huge success! We had a last minute substitution cake from one of the more professional bakeries in town and the "30" cookies that Mallory and I made last night... And, Davenport's Pizza is always wonderful! It was a great time!!

-Laura

Baby Girl Cake

Tonight we attempted what was supposed to be our easiest, simplest, most straightforward cake yet... Unfortunately, it was anything but a success, I'd say... More of a huge disappointment that left us both feeling like failures!! More on that later... probably in another post...

On a more positive note, here is a picture of our most recent success - completed on Saturday. It's our first baby girl shower cake, and we had a lot of fun with it. Thanks to all of our preparations for "Fun Week", we had all of the fondant in the fridge and ready to go... We only had to do the baking (a yummy new recipe) and decorating - cutting the time down to only all day Saturday instead of Thursday and Friday evenings, too!

Unfortunately, we only have the one picture because my camera batteries were dead. We were lucky to get this one!

-Laura

FUN Week!

The first week of November will be called "FUN WEEK."

Why you ask? Well, we have 5 or 6 cakes planned for that week!

Laura and I just started calling that first week in November FUN WEEK today...we were previously referring to it as "Week of DREAD" and "Our Last Week of Friendship" and "Week of No Sleep." We considered quitting, but at our last staff meeting we decided to try to be a little more positive. So now, through clenched teeth, it will now be referred to as FUN WEEK! WOOHOO!!!

If you're one of the few people who were lucky enough to get a spot during this week, feel proud. You will go down in SWEET LIFE history.


Congratulations recipients of FUN WEEK cakes! We will now refer to you as The "Many." The Proud. The Recipients of Fun Week Cakes!

-Mallory

October 11th- The Day of Nine Colors

Nine colors. Unbelievable. Laura and I made NINE batches of fondant. Seriously? Wow...this realization makes me quite proud...

I knew there were several colors...but this explains why she didn't leave my house until EIGHT at night!

There is an abundance of light blue and pink, tomato red, white, black, navy, burgundy, dark brown, and reddish brown.

Making fondant is probably the best part of the whole process. It causes little to no yelling, only a moderate mess, and COOL colored hands for a day or so. Cool colored hands get you attention everywhere you go. People ask "WHAT have you been doing???" Also, the prep (buying the TOP SECRET ingredients) leads people to ask "WHAT in the WORLD are you MAKING?!?!" Laura and I had SO much fun talking to complete strangers that day about our cakes.

October 11- the "Day of Nine Colors"- will forever live in my memory as a day of happiness and success. Long live fondant, long live CAKE!

-Mallory

Auburn Cake -- WAR EAGLE!!!

As I mentioned in our last post, we had a second project this weekend... An Auburn cake!! We started it last night while we were working on the doxie cake. (Come to think of it, this might have been a big part of why we were overwhelmed by the doxie cake. We are definitely going back to one cake at a time after our experience this weekend.)

Being two fairly recent Auburn graduates, we've had an Auburn cake high on our list of "want-to's" for awhile, but the past couple of weekends have just been way too busy... In honor of Auburn's first SEC game, we decided that we couldn't put it off any longer!

We had decided that it probably had no chance of looking decent, but we thought it would be fun to try it anyway. In my opinion, this one wound up being our most enjoyable project yet! Maybe because we had set our expectations pretty low, and maybe because we knew it didn't really matter if this one didn't turn out to be our best we were really relaxed about the whole thing!! Not having that stress hanging over us let us really enjoy each part of the process.

Cutting the AU shape out of the cakes went SO SO SO much better than we had even dared to hope! Covering it with the buttercream and fondant was a learning experience, but still went pretty well... Let's just say that next time it's going to go even better!! We were thrilled with the colors of the fondant (it changes a little after it goes into the fridge so there's no way to totally control it) and the texture wound up being perfect for the sharp little corners of the "A"!!

You can probably tell from the smiles on our faces and the lack of powdered sugar and cake crumbs in our hair and all over our clothes how excited we were to have finished this one!

-Laura

The Making of a Doxie Cake: A RUFF Night

Beware of Dog: Very Long Post Ahead

So... Earlier in the week we talked a big game about a weekend filled with three (3) projects. Yes, we actually thought we would not get sick of cake, sugar, fondant, more sugar and each other after three projects!! We were officially WRONG.

It all started on Thursday evening with several hours of fondant preparation... We have learned how to perfect the fondant coloring process, but it must be done atleast a day ahead of the cakes. This particular evening we made three colors... big mistake... late night #1.

Last night we got started on two of our projects and finished one of them (as was the plan for last night). The other one (not two) we will finish today, so check back for pictures of that cake soon!! But back to the one we actually completed... It's a dachshund cake for Bethany's friend's party today...

It started out really well... After a lot of planning and drawing and more planning, we got the shape cut out of the cakes pretty easily. This left us feeling way too optimistic about the rest of the project...



Of course it went downhill from there... It was hard to get the buttercream to stick to the intricate little pieces of the cake, but the buttercream is a very important part of the process... (The fondant won't stick without it, and you also need some icing that tastes good since the fondant is just for aesthetics.) Then we had to actually get the fondant onto the tricky little guy (or girl as we think he transformed into as we decorated) which was another challenge... If you read the post about the onesie cake, you know that the fondant used on that cake was a new recipe, and it worked so much better than the old recipe. Apparently, either that cake was a fluke or this one was because we followed the same recipe and it did not turn out the same way!!

In the end, we are so glad that we made the doxie cake... We think it turned out to be really cute, but we were definitely questioning this cake-baking-and-decorating hobby of ours during all of the middle hours... Mallory was ready to call it quits for good until she got some supper into her system... At one point she even said, "Can you just please not be friends with Bethany anymore so that we don't have to finish this?"



We have decided to take it back to basics for awhile until we have gotten the fondant-making down to more of a science... but I don't think we'll be quitting all together anytime soon!!

-Laura

This Weekend

This weekend will be a VERY BUSY, VERY EXCITING, and VERY SWEET weekend! Check back next week when Laura and I have finished THREE projects. . . that's right! THREE!!!

Have a GREAT week!

-Mallory

P.S. Check out Abby's new blog for the Lili Pad. . . the CUTEST children's clothing store EVER. . . http://lilipadland.blogspot.com/