Hasta, Killer Penguins

According to our schedule, last Saturday was the final stand for the undefeated Killer Penguins. I'd offered to make a cake for their celebratory end-of-season party. Of course, I didn't know at the time that the end of season party would be scheduled on Mam's birthday. It prompted us to have her party the previous day. And it prompted me to take the entire week off work to complete two cakes at once.

In typical Killer Penguins fashion, they vanquished the competition.Mam scored three baskets and her teammates scored many more. The other team might have scored three total. I was glad they scored, at least.This basketball season was so much fun. The coaches were great, the girls really enjoyed each other and played really well. Not surprisingly, that meant I wanted to make a really special cake for them.

I started experimenting with making fondant figurines. I'd never tried that before and wasn't the least bit sure I could pull it off. I liked my killer penguins though...and judging by the number of people who asked me where I'd found them, I'd say other people did too.I wanted an "icy" look to the cake, so I chose not to blend all the color into the fondant and make it marble-y. And knowing I had a team and siblings to feed, I put it together just like Mam's ladybug cake.It sat like that for a couple of days, which was a pity because it didn't look nearly as marble-y by the time I got to decorating it. We had to go to several stores before we found an appropriate basketball hoop. I just couldn't imagine making an edible one of those. Store #3, which was out of them, called store #4 and put it on hold for us. I made a little lake and piped on some snow.I added borders to both layers and carefully started placing penguins. Note to self...it's much easier to have a consistent border if your cake is in the middle of the plate.As a final touch, Daddy helped me engineer a dunking penguin.Somewhere along the line, I got an e-mail saying the reservation at the restaurant was for 46 people. I briefly panicked and made a quick sheet cake...which was, um, not particularly attractive, but functional.

Driving the cake over to the pizzeria was a little dicey and dunking penguin didn't show up entirely intact, but it was easy to fix and the cake went over well. The crowd sang "Happy Birthday" to Mam and most important, she got her trophy, as the coaches described her as a "little fireball". Ah, yes. Fireball, indeed.Naturally, it turns out that the coach's schedule was wrong. The Penguin's last game is this coming Saturday, overlapping with Mam's first softball game. There won't be any more cake.

Going Overboard on a Retirement Cake

It all started with a simple, but silly comment I made at a PTA board meeting. One of the other moms there mentioned ordering a bridge for our new teaching garden...right after my update on the "Spring Celebration", which was a low-key retirement party for our principal in addition to a garden dedication. I chirped up, "We could call it the Bridge to Retirement!" I was kinda kidding, but the PTA president loved the idea and so it happened.

Of course, being a cakey kind of person, I volunteered to make a cake for said Spring Celebration, which I was also co-chairing. Silly me. 'Cause you know what happened, right? Well, actually you probably couldn't imagine the insanity that occurred after that, which included having to reschedule the whole event because of the swine flu...rescheduling it to the weekend Daddy and I were supposed to go away without the children for the first time ever! For a minute, I was off the hook for the cake because suddenly no one was interested in eating home-baked goods. But that was when the swine flu panic was still going full force. If you didn't notice, it became a back-burner issue very quickly.

And then I made the mistake of suggesting that I make a replica of the Bridge to Retirement for the cake. Then I went and visited a bunch of aquarium stores hoping to make my job little easier. No simple aquarium bridges to be found. Turns out I should've gone this route to begin with:Not bad and not altogether difficult. It was a passable chocolate replica of the sturdy redwood bridge they'd installed.

Next, I needed to try and replicate the dry creek bed that runs under the bridge. A trip to my favorite cake supplies store provided not only some really killer cake mix for the 16" cake, but some fantastic "chocolate rocks" that were just what I needed.As soon as I got all the creekbed done, I knew I'd made a mistake frosting the whole thing white. It's a garden. It's dirt! Nothing a package of Oreos (stuffing removed) and a rolling pin couldn't handle!

I had a little bit of white fondant left over from Smunch's birthday cake and used that to fashion a green water pump. I also had some colored fondant I used to make more flowers to make everything more garden like.In a final act of decorating inspiration, I decided to try and make it look like water was coming out of the pump. To my astonishment, it worked...really well!I also used the green fondant for the stars on the side of the cake. I know they look kind of odd on this garden cake, but they are a take on the school logo and were actually more appropriate than you'd think.

The worst part of this cake was trying to write on top of Oreo crumbs. They're somewhat loose, so it's crazy difficult to pipe letters onto the top and make them look neat. In a way, that was good. It meant I couldn't get too creative with the message. It had to be short and simple. Now you have to imagine that I took this giant cake to a school-wide event. The kids were very impressed...so impressed that I ended up having to post Daddy as a sentry to make sure no fingers ended up in the frosting before it was presented to the honoree. He fielded a number of questions. Who made that? Are those real rocks? Is that real dirt? What did you use for the water? And he did it all with good humor...especially considering we'd had to reschedule our trip for this shindig.I'd say it was a grand success. Of course, it wasn't big enough for everyone. And the potluck portion of the event didn't go particularly well. We totally ran out of food. I hid the cake away until the end and those whole helped out or stuck around for a long time got to eat it. That seemed fair, considering. I sent the bridge and a big chunk of cake home with Mr. Celeste. It was yummy...which was fortunate since I never got any dinner!

Today's Offering

So, I finished my cake decorating class, but why stop there? It's hard to impress anyone in my family with a cake anymore, so I have to foist them on a hungry blogsphere instead. This one looked lovely, but there were no gasps of admiration...except for those from our dinner guests who probably went overboard in their compliments. They're automatically forgiven for that because they took some cake home with them.It turns out that while whipped chocolate ganache makes a scrumptious filling for cake, it makes a seriously unattractive frosting. And I'd meant to put the flowers in the middle since I wasn't going to write anything, but I totally spaced and put them on the side. Still, this turned out rather pretty, don't you think?

And, "they call me mama", I guess you're wishing you'd made good on your threat not to visit again, huh?

Who needs Whole Foods and Draegers anyway?

Cake Graduate

As some of my readers are painfully aware, I've been taking a cake decorating class at night for the last several weeks. It was only a four-week course and if you've been following my cake-decorating career, you may wonder why I'd want to bother with a class, especially a beginning class. But I learned a ton of things I've always wanted to know and had a lot of fun, even with a nasty commute-time drive once a week.

I learned how to make a cake that's a nice shape. Theoretically, I learned how to frost it completely smooth. I learmed about different frostings and decorating tips and what to do with them. I knew a lot of that stuff, but there's always more to learn. And first and foremost, I learned to make ROSES...which are really a lot of fun once you've got a clue how to do it. For our "final project" we had to make a 3-layer cake, fill it and frost it, then bring it to class for decorating. I made a chocolate cake with a killer whipped chocolate ganache filling and frosted it with a basic white frosting. I'd made my roses ahead of time and I also made a bunch of these cute little "drop flowers".I didn't really have a clue what I was going to do with all these things. I just had fun making random stuff. I didn't use it all either. I was trying to use some of the techniques we'd learned without going overboard. I got this whole thing put together pretty quickly and decided to take a picture before I went and ruined the whole thing with some crooked, weird-looking writing. Good choice!It was a pretty little cake. As a devotee of Cake Wrecks, I can say for certain that this doesn't qualify as a "wreck"...although the garland around the sides was questionable. Once I wrote on it, I wasn't so certain.At least I spelled everything correctly. Still, Cake Wrecks doesn't take kindly to crooked, ill-spaced writing. I'll have to be more careful about that next time! I was still pretty proud of my first cake class cake. There were lots of other cool cakes there too...and some that were really too bad to even make Cake Wrecks. I didn't take pictures of the wrecky ones, but here are some of the other cool ones.