Happy Birthday Mona!

I love Saturday mornings.  The hubby is snoring away, Pepper is on one side of me and my coffee is on the other.  Even better, this Saturday morning is one of those rainy, stay at home kind of weather.  It's so nice to just hear the rain plattering on the roof and sitting in semi-darkness because of the gloomy sky.  So what's better than quiet time with the family and a cup of coffee?  Well, catching up on the week and writing a new post, that's what!  My dear friend Susan contacted me about doing a cake for her mother's birthday.  Susan and her brother were planning a surprise dinner for their mother, Mona, at The Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown San Diego on Monday.  Of course, I was invited to attend the surprise party, which made life easier on the planning aspect, since I can just bring the cake with me!  Susan mentioned chocolate cake and enough to feed roughly twenty-something people.  The design elements were left entirely up to me (which I completely love!) so I went with flowers and butterflies.  Purple is Mona's favorite color, so I wanted to figure out a way to incorporate purple into the cake, since I was stuck on the idea of white lacy butterflies!

So, I decided to make a two-tiered cake!  The bottom cake is chocolate with a chocolate hazelnut buttercream filling and the top tier is red velvet with cream cheese frosting.  Both cakes were covered in fondant (since I really love the look of fondant cakes...ok, ok...I also admit my frosting smoothing skills aren't quite up to snuff...I'm working on it!).  I also decided to try my hand at making those loopy bows so that it can sit on top of the smaller cake.  I have learned quite a lot when I made these bows.  Apparently, Duff brand fondant....never, ever use except for covering cakes.  You know how you can use fondant or gumpaste to make flowers and figurines out of?  Well, Duff brand is just to soft and pliable to ever dry.  Like, ever.  I cut out strips of plum purple and also had strips of lavender purple (which I mixed Duff brand with Wilton).  I shaped the strips and waited for them to dry.  One week later (yes, seriously!), as I was trying to put the bow together, the plummy purple loops kept getting squished because it didn't completely firm up!  To fix this, I re-cut strips of plummy purple (after I mixed it with some gumpaste) and had one day to let it harden out so that I can use it.  I also finally got some tylose powder this past week too!  (After this whole nonsense of taking a week to somewhat dry, for future usage, I'm going to make sure to knead some tylose powder into that fondant!)

These bows were actually pretty awesome.  They were really simple to make but looked really nice!  I thought they sat on cakes very well, giving a very celebratory feel!  So, I had mentioned I made flowers and lacy butterflies for this cake too.  I wanted to create a design with the butterflies in mind.  I really love the lacy butterflies that I bought during my road trip and wanted to use it.  To me, it reminds me of weddings but I wanted to use them now, for this event!  So, I figured flowers and butterflies will make the cake more spring-like and little less wedding-ish.

See, aren't the butterflies adorable?  They looked (and were) super fragile.  Each piece on the cake was individually hand crafted by yours truly and I just think nothing is more special than hand-crafted gifts.  Every single piece is different from the other...they may look deceptively similar, but I find great joys in knowing they aren't!  I also decided to make the "Happy Birthday" banner at the bottom of the cake at the last minute.  It has also come to my attention that I definitely need to improve upon my writing skills.  Time to bust out those third grade cursive writing pads and repeat as necessary! Overall, I was pretty pleased with this cake!  It's becoming more and more easy for me to do cakes (as I used to prefer cupcakes and will make cupcakes instead of tackling cakes) and I find that I actually really enjoy doing cakes....or perhaps it's just the whole baking thing as a whole!  But it never ceases to amaze me what I can do, and I never thought I'd ever do cakes!  So every single cake I make, I am extremely proud of the turn out.  I'm waiting for that one day when churning out a cake is just as simple as churning out cupcakes!  I think I'm almost there, but a few more cakes won't hurt!

Happy Saturday and St. Patrick's Day everyone!