Counter-Strike Cake

Soooo - here's the cake for my bro's 17th birthday. He plays CS like days at a time... which really isn't that great... but he's pretty good at it. haha :) I enjoy to play sometimes... but I tend to rush instead of strategically play... haha :) But it was easy for me to make the cake since I actually knew what was going on... haha ;)



So, this is the map: Dust, and Bomb Site B, and 4 terrorists, and 4 CTs. The lil guys are all made out of fondant - It took me a few hours to do those guys and then the boxes are just wood squares covered in fondant and then the there's more fondant for the wall and floor and graham cracker crumbs everywhere. :)



I tried to do a "spray" for his happy Birthday sign - but I don't have an air brush so it just looked like a sign ... hahah :) Oh well...



It was cool - after i gave him the cake, and he ooo-ed at it, he took it apart and placed the lil guys in new places and took some new pictures. hahah :)

Anyways - this cake was pretty easy. Much faster than my 3-D cakes.. but still fun :)

Here's a picture of the lil guys before they got smushed through the luggage:


Several pictures above were taken by Eddie "Double-A" Liu. :) Thanks onii! :) And for the use of your kitchen!

Vegas! Anniversary #2!

Hurray for Vegas! We went for our second year anniversary - We got to stay at the Luxor - which was alright. It was just a couple hotels from the Monorail which made it a lil inconvenient - BUT it was better than walking everywhere :) Hurray for Monorail!

Sooo... we went to the Star Trek Bar and did the Backstage Tour which was AWESOME. And we went on both rides. At the bar - I had my fav - Deanna Troy's Chocolate Obsession and 3 Phaser Shots - Tulaberrry Wine (my fav), The Royale and the Borg Queen.

And that's Keith w/ a polished off Mini Borg Sphere and Mini Warp Core Breach.

We saw Blue Man Group - which I loved sosososoosossoososoSOSOOSOSosooososososos much!!! I wanted to take them home with me!! it was AWESOMEEE!!! I didn't want them to stop! Ack! =)

Then we saw Cirque de Soleil's O - which was pretty awesome with really awesome music but Keith was not very impressed by the clowns and kept falling asleep =P

Then we had Champagne Brunches - where I tried to try as many desserts as I could and Keith had as much champagne as much as he could haw ;)
We also went to the wax museum and took pictures with Johnny Depp, Frank Sinatra, Ben Affleck, Patrick Stewart and stuff... they were kinda creepy. haha :)



Other than that - not too much gambling since we didnt want to do too much moneys - we were busy spending it on food and fun. haha :) Plus getting carded a lot sucked. =P haha :) And found that Circus Circus has gotten a bit run-down since I was last there (when I was like 10).

Keith's Bday Cake

Sooooo - this one took me a while! It had so many lil pieces I had to like create! =P But it was really fun! Compared to the dragon cake - this one was WAY more intricate - like I actually had to draw this one out before I started making it because the web has all these pictures of r2d2 - but like almost all at the same angle. From the front! haha ;) Plus this one had different colors - where the dragon cake was just green.

But yah =) Way fun! I used silver dust (edible) for his head and fondant all over. He's pineapple & yellow cake on the inside with buttercream. :) He turned out taller than I expected... But yah - I had to rush towards the end since Keith was almost home. haha ;) So please don't look at the lumpy arms and squiggly royal icing lines. =P

(r2 from the back) So yah - r2 was Mmm... 5 layers of cake - 6'' rounds and the top of his head I used a bowl to form his head using some homemade rice krispies :) Good thing I had the right sized bowl! :)





Anyways - Keith liked it! So I'm happy. :) Happy Birthday!! =)

Halloween Cupcakes!

So this was pretty fun... here are a few of the cupcakes Keith and I made for the Halloween party at my work! I did a few.. but then Keith did most of them. It was super fun! =) Getting lotsa different kinds of candy was fun - but man!! i couldn't find any candy corn! Everyone already went through all the stores and swiped them all! Sheesh! we were totally candy-corn-less.

Anyways, so we just used marshmallows, jelly beans, reese's pieces, red licorice, Reese's mini cups and Good and Plenty's... good enough. haha =) Anyways.. way fun! =)

Gary's going away cake...

So one of my really good friends is leaving today to go to the other branch of our company up North. The booger. Definitely a very sad day. =( Anyways, he loves dragons - and asked me to make him a dragon cake before he left. So here it is.

The head, horns, neck and part of the tail are home-made rice krispies treats, and and then molded by hand. And then covered in buttercream and then Green Marshmallow Fondant (MMF). Keith did all the kneading and stuff for that. =) It's quite an arm work-out.



Then the rest is cake! I just made some round cakes and shaped them into his back and made some square cakes and cut them up to form the rest of his tail. Turned out to be a pretty big cake!

He has another foot made of rice krispies too, but it's hard to see. Also the wings are made of gumpaste. Sooo.. the cake got devoured at work.. It was a white cake with sprinkles (in the batter) and buttercream - yum! I figured dragon meat should have colored polka dots inside. =) Also just used a rose-petal cutter to put imprints of scales on the fondant and brushed on some gold luster dust.


It was a fun cake to make! Definitely gotta do more of these 3-D cakes. Way fun! =)

Grandparent's Cake

hehe - so I made a cake for Keith's grandparents since their birthdays were close. I made some figures of them out of fondant and stuck them on a cake in a garden of love. hahahah =) Cheesy. Anyways, it's also a yellow cake with whipped cream and strawberries and the outside is buttercream dream. I'm still looking for a better buttercream recipe but still haven't found it! Ack! Oh well...

I made a few other heart cupcakes but they got eaten before I took a picture. hahaha =) Maybe next time! =)

Cake Crazy

Okay - so shame on me for not posting in forever and not putting up my cakes as i go along... So, here are the ones i have worked on lately:

Yellow Cake covered in Whipped Cream & filled with strawberries & stabilized whipped cream:
















Here is the cake I made for my mom for Mother's Day - which turned out to be a much denser chocolate cake than expected because there was pudding in the recipe. But it was still okay. The chocolate hearts were fun to make :)

Next is a chocolate cake I made with chocolate frosting and toffee sprinkles on the side which were hard to get on. The frosting was a lil more ... i guess bitter than I expected. The cocoa was very strong. I'm still looking for the perfect chocolate icing recipe...





Also I tried to make lil mini chocolate cakes filled and frosted with ganache, but I found that these cakes were so rich, they should have been eaten in even smaller portions. But sooo delicious. *slurp*

Then we did a cupcake-cake for our upstairs neighbor. I, unfortunately, didn't have any idea what he was really into or anything, so I just formed a cloud out of the cupcakes. hahaha =) Oh well.. it was fun to make...

















Here's a raspberry cake made from the recipe off of my cake flour box. haha - it looked pretty easy and tasty. Turned out pretty raspberry-ey... haha :)



Then my friend at work wanted me to make him some sweet and sour cupcakes, so I remembered this recipe for lemon angel food cupcakes - and they turned out pretty sweet & sour! Not too bad... a lil sour... so it's a lil different that normal - but not too bad. ;) I just topped them with a few flowers I made a while back, out of royal icing.. =)




Here are some cheesecake-cookies. They turned out pretty good too - and they're super easy to make! Topped them with some fresh whipped cream, strawberries and a chocolate heart. =) Delicious!






So this was me just fudging around with some MMF (Marshmallow Fondant) (since regular store bought fondant tastes super gross), and ribbon insertion (which uses real ribbon). Actually, this was just a practice cake for my grandma's birthday cake - I was just trying to get the ribbon insertion and color of the MMF.


And here's my grandma's bday cake. The chinese writing was easier than I expected! :) And I added some edible pearls, around the writing, and some roses, and some royal icing decorations on the top. The green candle kinda makes it look like the top of the cake is sprouting something.. but it's just the candle. haha =) The hardest part was probably working in a kitchen I've never worked in before, and lugging all my cake gear to New York. haha =) But it turned out all right! =)


And that's it for now... Actually, there's one more cake I made, but I'm still waiting on the pictures! I'll post that as soon as I get them! Yay! Done for now! =)

Winter Cake for Keith

haha :) Here's Keith's wintery cake i made for his work.

It was the first time for using crimpers which was kinda fun! :)









And I made a lil snow-keith, snow-vivian, and sno-dallas. hahahh :) Wooot :)





Fun fun fun! :) can't wait to make more!!
WoohoooO! :)

My final - the wedding cake!

So this was my last cake of the Wilton Series! The wedding cake! It turned out alright.
The pattern was a lil hard to do at first since I was trying to trace it on - in the end I just ended up eye-balling it and making various flower patterns. :) The ribbon is a real ribbon and Uh - yah.

Anyways, so yah, I made those fondant roses on top sprinkled in with some blue flowers - just cuz i love blue! hahah :)

Um - the bottom cake was sooo super yummy - a dark chocolate cake with non-dairy whipped cream icing and the top was a carrot cake =P Yum!

So yah - that was it. Hopefully I can take the gumpaste flowers class later on! :) and I get to learn how to make even more flowers!

I can't wait to make more cakes! Keith says I should make one for next week for his work - haha :) Woohoo!! We'll see what I do!! My friend in class made these awesome pillow cakes - It inspired me to start getting creative too! Wooooot! :)

My First Fondant Cake

So this is my newest cake with fondant (which tastes gross unless you make it from scratch with marshmallows). This one wasn't that tough to do - except for the quilting effect cuz I had NO CLUE how to do it. The ribbon and the blue was pretty easy except some cracking at the corners. =/

But yah, it took me the longest time, debating whether or not to do the quilting effect cuz I didn't want to ruin how smooth it was . But in the end I did it and I'm glad I did. haha :) It turned out alright - And it was pretty fun. :) Totally just took a lil square piece of paper and put diamonds every where right before I went to work. ahahah :) I'm crazy.




Anyways, not much to this cake. Yup. Next up, the finale - the wedding cake. :)

Cake 4 - Flowery

So this is my fourth cake with a basket weave around the sides! I think it turned out alright. Made all the flowers before hand - royal icing. These were kind of all my bad stuff though - I picked out all the warped flowers and warped ladybugs and stuff since this was my practice cake. hehe :)


but yah - you can see pansies, roses, rosebuds, violets, apple blossoms, daisies, daffodills, rosettes and mums! Kind of a springy look =P Oh well. ;) Maybe it'll be good for Easter next year! My friend in class made this super awesome fall one with fall colors - wine, oranges and purpley roses with gold luster dust and made some awesome fall leaves with a really cool monogram. Sooo neat - i'll have to try it! :) Anyways - that's all for now!

Next is fondant class so like wedding cake style cakes! Wooohoo!! :)

Cake #3

Meh - This one was just a practice one since the one I actually made in class, I had to hand off to a friend that drove us to the airport right after my cake class - I couldnt' get any good pictures of that one, so I just made a new cake (kinda crazy looking) to practice my technique. Also, I kinda made this one in a hurry since it was like 11:30 pm. and I wanted to get it decorated by 12.

I tried the Reverse Shell border (which I think would've looked better if I had use Medium icing instead of Thin - which is called for but I was rushing). Then I tried to make leaves with this one tip, but I forgot and used Medium instead of Thin for the leaves and the icing clumped in teh tip and wouldn't come out right - so I ended up fudging it and just using this other tip that I've never done leaves in. =/ Oh well. this is what happens when I'm rushing =P

Then I had to rush doing the smoothing of the cake. =/ so there were some lines at the top and are some holes around the side - gah. =/


The roses turned out okay - I need to figure out how make them smoother tho - i think I need to add more piping gel. But also, I think I want to make the inside bud the same color as the base.

Then, I did some rosebuds along the bottom and rosettes at the top. Meh. First time for a purple cake! hahahahah :) I thoguht i would just have some fun - this is what happens. haahhaha :) Guess I shouldn't have tried it on a rush job. Oh well! :) It was fun! Can't wait to make some more!

We're learning royal icing & color flow icing to make those cool flowers now! We'll see how it goes! :)