Tropical Storm Fay Cupcakes

Well, here's life and cake together again: It's been a soggy, blustery week here in Orlando, and I was looking for an excuse to play with chocolate. So I decided that I would whip up some "FAY CAKES" in honor (and in the vein of comic relief) of our ever-lingering tropical storm.

I'm preparing for cupcakes for my 2 year old twin cousins' birthday, and I wanted to see how making the chocolate shapes worked out. I was just playing around, but it's pretty fun Fun and easy! Next time I will take a little more time, and I'm not crazy about melting in the microwave. But for a one hour project this was fun.

And yummy too.

It was nice knowing you Fay.

Welcome Baby Harris

My mother's best friend was hosting a baby shower for another good friend of hers. She gave me the invitation to match, but otherwise pretty much gave me artistic freedom. We discussed something more elegant, with some touches of baby. So, I decided to go for a bouquet of blooming flowers with some "baby" elements tied in. I created a garden of flowers from gumpaste/fondant, and used a mold to make the tiny baby feet and storks and diapers and wired those in as if they were blooms as well.

Color is hard. Colors don't always come out exactly the way you want, and if you're off too much in one direction, you've got to start over. So much to my delight, on my first try, I matched the green from the invitation both in fondant and in buttercream!

I could have taken the easy way out and covered the cake in fondant, but I'm still determined to master buttercream, so I stuck with pink buttercream.

This was a yummy cream cheese poundcake with lemon curd and lemon buttercream.