Wednesday, October 6, 2010
I am currently working on cupcakes and cookie favors for a wedding this weekend. Here are a few sneak peeks. Stay tuned for pictures of the finished product! I’m so excited!
Oh yay fondant hokie pieces! I do have to add that I was cutting these out WHILE watching us kick NC State’s butt so it made it that much sweeter – no pun intended!
Lavender and dark purple flowers for cupcakes…
Some lavender royal icing for cookie favors…
Yummy sugar cookies – the bride’s mom’s recipe. So special – I love personal touches.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
I love fall. A good carrot cake cupcake with cream cheese buttercream reminds me of fall for some reason! (Other than the fact that fall is indeed upon us).
I decided to make some fondant leaves to adorn my fall cupcakes. Here’s how:
Press together three or four of your favorite fall colored pieces of fondant
Twist
Roll into a ball
Roll out
Use a veiner or an impression mold to create veins
See? Pretty cool huh…
Then cut out your leaves! And place on any delicious sweet! Happy Fall!
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
It had been awhile since I pulled out my stamps and stationary! A good friend of the family ordered note cards for both herself and her daughter-in-law that is expecting! 40 note cards takes a little while to run through the printer and as I was doing so, I learned that I have another assistant/supervisor. Not this one that supervises the cookie decorating, but one that supervises all stationary production.
Did someone say stationary?
Why that’s my supervisory specialty…
You don’t need my help right now?
Then I suppose I’ll go back to making sure that this computer chair stays warm.
Thanks Pheebs.
Anyhow, here are the finished products! I love a fresh pack of personalized stationary! (Bear with me, I snapped the pictures with my iPhone shortly before mailing!
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Yes I got engaged and yes I promised the future hubby that I’d take less cake orders and spend more time with him, but this order was one I couldn’t pass up! Brenda asked me to make her daughter a princess birthday cake! Lots of purples, pinks and sugar pearls.
I decided to try a sugar tiara – I made a batch of my royal icing and printed out a tiara. I taped the tiara to a cake pan that was smaller than my cake:
Next, I laid a piece of wax paper over the tiara and piped the royal icing over the lines, making sure every line somehow touched another. I let it sit overnight, and viola! A sugar tiara!
To the cake, I added pink drop flowers with pearl middles, buttercream roses around the edges and more pearls all over the sides. Oh and tons of pearl luster dust! A birthday cake for a princess if you ask me! Happy Birthday Courtney!
Thursday, September 9, 2010
I FINALLY got around to loading cookie class pictures! The class was a lot of fun! I started off by explaining the chemistry of baking – the fats, liquids, thickeners, leaveners, etc. Then the fun part!
We colored the royal icing and I taught everyone how to fill a piping bag with the stiff consistency icing. Next we piped an outline onto our cookies.
Then we flooded the cookies and added lots of sugars and sprinkles! Overall? A great class! I got wonderful compliments and several people told me how much they enjoyed learning how to decorate cookies. And the best part? I feel like everyone had a greater appreciation for the time it takes to make professionally decorated cookies! Not an easy task, but someone without any decorating experience can make a professionally decorated cookie!
I should have more pictures by next week : )
I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I will be taking very few orders over the next several months… why you might ask? Well that’s the good news! Last Friday, Brandon and I got in the car to go to Atlantic City for the weekend. After we passed the exit for 95 North, he informed me that we weren’t going to AC until the following morning. About a half hour later (probably the longest half hour of my life!) we arrived at a marina in Annapolis.
Both of us grew up on the water – Brandon grew up sailing in Hampton and I a few blocks from East Beach in Norfolk. We’d talked about rings so I sort of knew this was coming, especially when he asked me to take off early that day!
He chartered a 45 foot sailboat and we went for a cruise around Annapolis! As the sun started to set, he led me to the bow and proposed with his great-grandmother’s ring. Following the sailboat ride, we were dropped off at Carrol’s Creek, right on the waterfront where a bottle of champagne was waiting for us, and had an amazing dinner! Shortly thereafter, we arrived at our Romance Suite at the Loews Annapolis Hotel in downtown Annapolis.
As you can imagine, I want to really take the time to plan my a perfect wedding. So I’ve made the decision to limit my cake/dessert orders. But that doesn’t mean I won’t stop blogging and experimenting!
Brandon and I are working on a custom wedding website (since he’s the tech guru) and I will be writing a wedding planning blog. You can check it out here!
I’ve had so many people ask if I’ll make my own wedding cake… I’ll certainly say I’ve thought about that forever, but that’s a whole other blog post!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Ever tasted a macaron? No, not a macaROON. A sweet confectionary that comes in so many different colors and flavors. After my cookie class, I will FINALLY have a lull in orders until a couple weddings in October. I ordered my almond flour a long time ago and it looks like I will finally get a chance to make them. Woohoo!
pictures from: wedding chicks, nature study, sunset peanut-chocolate macaroons
Here is a recent order for a wedding shower cake – genuine buttercream with white fondant flowers. This order called for a lot of buttercream so I obviously made a huge batch. One thing I learned was that the proportion of meringue to butter doesn’t always translate in a big batch. While this batch turned out tasty as ever, the butter color was stronger that usual. However, I do pride myself on a genuine buttercream and that is exactly what I got!
I’ve been out for a couple days which has given me a little time to prepare for my cookie class – in other words, bake tons of cookies. The dining room table is an excellent place to let the cookies cool. Little to my knowledge, the adjacent couch is also a perfect perch for Riley… I’ve noticed whenever I transfer cookies from the oven to the table she becomes vveerrryyyy interested and I can understand why.
I’ve named her my little cookie supervisor… she’s very observant.
Who knows… maybe she’ll start guest blogging. I’m sure she’d be good at figuring out who the pupcake thief is!
Stay tuned for my info on my cookie class!! I’m so excited!!
It has been a very busy week! I just finished up a large order of blue crab sugar cookies and I’m working on the final plans for a cookie decorating class I’m teaching here at work!
The cookies are for a wedding this weekend. The bride-to-be wanted crab shaped cookies, iced in a medium blue royal icing with her wedding date on them. So cute!
Next Thursday I will teach my first ever cookie decorating class! Sallie, our HR Director, is organizing a series of Employee Talent Showcases here at work. I’m so excited to teach 24 of my coworkers how to make professionally decorated sugar cookies. I’m working on my Cookie Decorating Handout…
I’m going to be super busy baking cookies and whipping up gallons of royal icing this weekend! Although the best part was ordering pounds and pounds of jimmies, nonpareils and sanding sugars. Remember that appreciation for color I have? Yea, this is like overload!
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
… an incident that will live on in this office forever…
Remember the pupcakes that I made for a doggie birthday party?
.. yea those. With the grilled chicken treats and beggin’ strips? Well there’s a small detail I left out – sort of on purpose because I was so mad. Let me re-tell the details of that day:
So I come into work early – as usual. These dog cupcakes were an order for a co-worker, Mike, so I conveniently placed them in the office fridge. I was so excited about these that I left the sticker off the top of the box so that my co-worker could take a peek! When he arrived shortly after I did, he opened the box and checked out the order and gladly approved. I finished up a trade that I was processing, grabbed one of my Kara’s Cakery stickers and went into the fridge to seal up the box.
When I opened the fridge door, I noticed that the top of the box was slightly ajar – not nicely tucked in. I checked the box and to my horror found one doggie delight cupcake was missing… Why would Mike want to remove a cupcake? I wasn’t sure but I figured I’d ask him anyway. To my surprise (and his too as you can imagine) he didn’t touch any of the cupcakes. Within the small window of time between him taking a peek and sealing the lid, someone had wondered into the pantry for a coffee or something, spotted the box and decided to partake in what they probably thought was a scrumptious cupcake.
Now the rest is really up in the air… followed by a very stern All LAN users email (and apparently a good laugh for the majority of the people in the office – who some actually thought it was a joke). Who did it? Did they actually eat a dog cupcake with a grilled chicken treat on top? Did they take a bite, realize what they’d done and throw it away? Or did they enjoy it (god forbid!) and regret it when they saw the email?
To this day, I have no idea who the culprit is. But I bet they will never steal a cupcake from an unmarked cupcake box again! And you better believe I seal those boxes like there’s a million dollars inside! Maybe they should think twice about stealing a cupcake that doesn’t belong to you… I was so mad for a week or so after that. Luckily, the customer found it hilarious as I finally did.
