Cake Creativity!

For the past 6 months or so, I've been trying to embrace my artistic, creative side so the need to come up with a cake for Sadie's Birthday party inspired me to try it out!  I'm not a big sweets person so I've never been too interested in doing much baking but the artistic aspect of decorating a cake sounded really fun (and intimidating) to me.  A couple friends had recently started making fondant covered cakes and gave me some tips, blog links, and encouragement.  

I tried a dry run with just fondant and no cake and then decided to make a cake for my mother-in-law's birthday which was simple but turned out pretty well. 

The cake for Chris' mom

So, I took on the owl cake I really wanted for Sadie's party and with a bit of trepidation, put it together quite successfully! It was definitely time consuming and though I enjoyed it, I don't know if I'll make another one before Ella's birthday :-)

So, I started with this marshmallow fondant recipe. The first time I made it I used my hand mixer and broke it :-(  DEFINITELY use a stand mixer for this.  I finally bought one after 10 years of wanting one!!

This is the lump of fondant post-mixing, it's SUPER easy and the ingredients cost less than $5

 

I made the cake earlier in the day so it had plenty of time to cool.  I watched youtube videos to learn how to cut and ice and stack the cakes.  It was pretty easy.  And it doesn't matter what it looks like cause it's all getting covered :-)  The "experts" say to use a thin coat of icing but I used more because I know people like the taste of buttercream icing more than the fondant so I wanted there to be adequate icing under the "pretty" fondant.

To cover the cake roll out a huge piece of fondant.  Both times I did it, I had trouble making it large enough to drape easily but keeping it thick enough to not rip when I picked it up.  

Tips: 

-use tons of extra powdered sugar to keep it from sticking, it's not hard to add water or crisco to reconstitute it if it gets too dry

-roll it out some, then flip and roll on that side, then flip and so forth.  I tried just rolling out the perfect size with out turning it over many times and the rolling warmed the fondant so much it got sticky and would rip when I tried to roll it up to put it on the cake.  UBER frustrating.  It actually took me 4-5 tries to get it rolled out and on the cake.  

-if it's humid or hot in the kitchen, put on a fan to keep the fondant cool.  I figured this out after about round 4 of the fondant sticking to the mat/counter (I tried both) and it helped a lot

-buy a special fondant rolling pin.  I used a regular one we had and it isn't long enough to do the job really well, definitely buying one of those for next time

 

Youtube videos were also helpful for this step.  You basically roll the large peice on fondant onto your rolling pin and then unroll it on the cake.  Use a smoothing tool (looks like a little plastic iron) and then I used a paring knife to cut off the excess.  Whew! This is the hardest part by far! Any big imperfections I just covered with decorations :-)

Make sure you leave some chunks of various sizes to color for your decorations.  I drew a picture of the design I wanted to make labeled with colors I'd need and approximately how much of each so I could color the "chunks" accordingly. I used gel food coloring from almart and it was really easy to just knead the color into the fondant.  Ella helped make a lot of the colors :-)

Now the fun part! For the decorations I got creative and used knives, playdoh tools, cookie cutters, wine glasses, and bowls to cut shapes.  Chris was good at helping me find the thing in our kitchen that was the perfect shape for what I needed :-)  

 

Tips: 

-you can make some things in large batches (like these leaves) but they'll start to dry out a little bit while they sit around waiting to go on the cake and become a little less maleable.  This was fine for the leaves I used for a border on the owl cake but it would have made other things tough.  For instance, I wanted the  branch the owl sits on to drape over the sides of the cake so I needed it to be super soft and maleable to drape nicely over the sides so I put it on as soon as I cut it out.

-put the cake on whatever you want to serve it on as soon as you stack and ice it. You do NOT want to move this thing after you painstakingly perfect all your details!

 

Per a tip I saw online, I used a paintbrush and water to help the fondant peices adhere to the cake.  It worked really well and was super easy to get them to stick.

Finished Product!

 

Me, finally done, messy, exhausted.  The time from starting to make the fondant until finished was about 4-5 hours.  And that's with the cake already made and iced and chilled earlier in the day. I'm sure with more experience I'll get faster but I must say, I'm very happy with how it turned out :-)

Art Love

After a huge, sudden surge in drawing coloring desire/skills a few months ago, Ella is still very into art. She's not coloring for an hour every day and taking coloring books everywhere we go anymore, though that did last pretty much all summer. She's expanding her art interests though and I'm still really impressed with how well she draws and colors!
Many Mediums!

Chalk


Photography


Painting Pottery


Painting with Aunt Marissa's (non-washable!!) paints (no stains were made)


And an upgrade to the 64 count box for coloring :-)

September so far...

Here's a little of what we've been up to lately...

A LONG Crab feast at my Aunt and Uncle's Bay house-SO tasty

We took Ella to a "Paint your own Pottery" place and she LOVED it! She now has her own self-designed hot chocolate mug for the winter :-)

Ella started school! This was her first moment in the classroom (I snuck in) finding a seat with her buddies from last year. I totally cried once I got in the car-SO hard to watch her grow up and become independent.

Ella and her buddy entranced in the circus

The tight wire guys were incredible.

And of course, elephants :-)

And here's a crazy video of the motorcycle guys who started off the show. Enjoy!

Stroller Art

I rarely write a blog post right after something happens for lack of time or motivation. However, we JUST got back from our walk/run and I'm SO impressed I had to share.

So, Ella brought a coloring book in the stroller on our walk this time and here's the result!

I'm totally in awe. In the LINES. Colors that make SENSE. It was VERY recently that all her pictures looked like this one:

THIS is what I mean about her having some kind of developmental growth spurt in the last few weeks. I'm so proud of her and it's so much fun to see her SO proud of herself!

All of a sudden...

Ella has never been into coloring or drawing and all of a sudden she can sit and draw for long periods of time! Ok, so it's like 15-20 minutes, but that's a long time when you're 3. Chris and I have been genuinely shocked at how quickly she's begun to draw things that a week ago she said "I don't know how! You draw it for me." It's so exciting to watch.


This is a picture of Chris with "Dad" written at the top :-)

A self-portrait :-)



Me! And check out the flower on the bottom right. She refused to draw a flower earlier that day because she said she never had and didn't know how. That's pretty darn good for your first flower in life!! We're loving this blossoming artist phase!

Street Fair!

We've been to a lot of fairs, carnivals, festivals etcetera in our 3+ years of parenting. It's usually a fun way to spend an afternoon and great family time. Well, this past Saturday we intentionally had nothing planned with friends/family just to get some time together. Chris randomly searched the internet to see if anything cool was going on and we ended up at THE MOST FUN FAIR we've been to! There was really good food: I had Indian food for $3 a plate-where can you get that?, Chris had his fave: pizza, and Ella was extremely happy to have vanilla ice cream. By the way-how am I, the queen of condiments and a lover of BOLD flavors raising a kid who wants something as plain as vanilla? I practically begged her to try something else and read the list of flavors twice, but I digress...Anyway, super fun day and here are the pics to prove it!

We got a kick out of this lion statue and decided to growl back

Checking out the fountain

My master gardeners

At least she was looking at the camera, that's rare. Maybe next year she'll smile at it.

Glitter Art! (I thought of you Erin O)

Mid-snack kiss

There was a steel drum band on stage in this pic, after that we watched a jazz/ballet troupe of little girls and a Persian Dance group (they were really good!)

Heading home with hands full of sand art, plants, puppets, animal footprints, a handmade fan, full tummy's and ready for bed!

Artsy-Craftsy

We've been rather crafty lately. We made necklaces at a new bead place in town today, puppets yesterday, and lots of play doh this week. I'm hoping to continue with this trend because we both really enjoy these projects so it's good bonding time.




A couple days ago when we were playing with play doh we were making animals and Ella was putting each one on a circle on the placemats we were using and calling it our "zoo." I just kept cranking out the animals and giving them to her until I noticed the zoo was getting smaller not larger. I asked her what she was doing and she explained that she was squishing all of the animals now to make dumplings. I had never heard her talk about dumplings before but I asked some questions and eventually found out that she learned how to make them from "Yeh-Yeh" (the grandpa) one of her favorite shows "NiHao Kai Lan." We talked about how Aunt Ping is from China just like Kai Lan and she agreed that Ping makes very good dumplings too. We spent about 30 minutes having our "dumpling party" with her play doh creations. That girl cracks me up!