Christmas Birthday

 Just posting a couple small cakes to remind me I haven't been updating my site!  (For over a year now... yikes!)  If you haven't found me on facebook, look for "cakes by michelle" and then choose carefully... there are more than 12!!  The link on this page might help.

My grandmother has a Christmas Eve birthday and you can imagine how her childhood went!  Every year (at least those WITHOUT a blizzard) we have soup and cake on Christmas Eve to celebrate Grandma Rose's birthday.  Then we proceed to open presents, which, yes, blows over her birthday yet again, but we try!!  I make her a cake that has NOTHING to do with Christmas, usually doing her favorite:  Tweetie!!  This year I played with some fondant; something I really need to use more.  It makes such a pretty cake.  It just tastes horrible!!  For my wedding cakes, I just smooth everything out of the frosting so it looks like fondant.  One of these days, I'm going to try it!  This one was not so successful because I didn't have enough to cover the cake and I couldn't find my smoother!!  I just pulled up grass to cover my shortfallings and it looked fine!

The really strange thing is that my other grandmother also has a Christmas Eve birthday.  It's really been hard growing up... as the family expands it's just impossible to get everyone together.  Would love to gather together at Grandma's house like we used to do.  It was so easy for us as kids to just hop in the car and go to Grandma's house... I had no idea what it took to put all that together!!  Reality really bites sometimes.  Just not ready to let go of all of that, even though new memories are constantly being made.

The other small cake is just our annual cake I make for the kids to sing Happy Birthday to Jesus.  This year we almost forgot, so we gathered around the cake and sang, but were too full to have cake!!  Since the next day was Sunday, I took it to the Kindergartners' Sunday school class.  I think they were okay with a forgotten cake!!

Extremes

I had one princess and one hunter cake this weekend! The princess was to be Cinderella, but I could do whatever I wanted. I had just found some little fondant cutters on sale, so I decided to make the scene where the little sparrows were making Cinderella's dress. I had a lot of fun with that one.
The little boy wanted a deer hunting cake, but I could not find a deer for him anywhere. I ended up doing a camo background and found a tiny cap gun to put on it for him. I did his borders in safety orange. He was still impressed!

Tastes like Chicken...

Ok, have to finish this so Nic can see it. He's down in Arizona where it's warm, so I have no idea why I even care, but I guess I must love him.

This was actually a 50th Wedding Anniversary. The original wedding had been quite small, so someone brought a bucket of KFC to it for lunch. It has long been a family joke that KFC catered their wedding. I met the kids at a party we catered and we were just brainstorming the cake after they found out I do cakes. Someone said it would be cool to do this, and I was sure in! That sounded like fun! I didn't slope the bucket as much as I planned, but the trip it had to make made me a little nervous. I'm much braver with cakes that just stay at my house! Anyway, it doesn't show up, but there are some black sugar sprinkles on the chicken for pepper! It really turned out cool and was a total hit at the party!

Fall Roses

I had a 50th Anniversary cake this weekend. A three tier main cake and four sheet cakes. That took the whole dining room table, but I had just found it for Thanksgiving, so that was a bonus! They had used some muted fall colors for their wedding, so we used some of the same for this. The couple had five daughters and one of them got some hideous green napkins, but they said it looked better with the cake. I had matched the green perfectly, but it was making most of us sick, too! It was something of a strained-peas-green. But anyway, once it all came together, it did look quite nice!!

50th Anniversary, June 2008

This was a really fantastic 50th Anniversary cake I did this summer. It was a 3 tier with sotas... which I said I'd never do again! It takes a few days for my hand to recover! But it was for a really special couple. Pretty much my first employers and they've taken good care of me ever since. We just lost her a few weeks ago to a 22 year battle with cancer. She fought long and hard and will be missed by many.
Her original flowers were daisies, which I had a lot of! I gathered up a whole bucket full from my garden and found that they had no other plans for the cake table, so I used them all!
I also had daisies on the chocolate sheet cakes. Those were very striking as well.

Yes, I have a great many other cakes to catch up as well, but this is a start!

... bring May flowers!!

Daisies are coming!! Kendall's cake has been pink roses for the last two years, so she deserved something new. I really love daisies, but couldn't do them at home the way I could at work... until I got my airbrush! It was Kendall's mom that got it for me, so I knew I had to use it on her, but I forgot until now how much I like putting the white daisies on the blue airbrushed background. Hope she likes it!!

April Showers

A little more fun with the airbrush! My storm clouds didn't come out like I wanted so I covered them with some grey and white frosting ones. The residents loved it.

Michael will be leaving the Ambassador soon, but I have already heard that I will be able to continue making their cakes. I'm really excited about this. We have really fallen in love with them!!