Alleluia Cake!

Easter this year was crazy busy! I am helping with the children's class for RCIA and that means Holy Week is I-have-something-every-night week. That said on Holy Saturday I managed to pull this off and take it for the Easter Basket Blessings at my parish.

This was a combined effort as my daughter made a little chickie and a bunny for it as well as Easter Eggs for the border. My son made one of the big flowers on the egg and I did the rest. They love making things out of fondant and I hope one day they savor these baking memories as blessed times in our life.

Although our 50 days of Easter Celebration have ended I pray you carry the Alleluias in your heart. We are the Alleluia people!
Blessings!

Bake Sale Cakes 2014

Here are some pics of the bake sale items I submitted this year for our church festival.
All my cakes sold including an Olaf cake I forgot to take a pic of...oh well! I have been using my phone camera to take pictures so forgive all the poor quality pics. They are the only kind I have lately! #poor excuse for a blogger

 These were cupcake toppers that did NOT sell...sigh. Too specific and not really reasonable. I saved them and used them for our own religious celebrations here.

 This is the white chocolate cake with vanilla butter cream. Not my best design! lol. Still fun and bright for a birthday cake or a just because cake.

 This is chocolate chocolate with a vanilla butter cream filling. I liked the simplicity of it.

These were some chocolate cupcakes I decorated in Festival colors that our parish uses to advertise. I incorporated virtues on them to appeal to my fellow Catholics. I made some allergen free cookies and some chocolate caramel cupcakes too but didn't get a good pic of them so just imagine the sweet image in your fabulous mind. ;)

Blessings!!!!

Clue Crew Cake

My daughter's request for her birthday this year was for a Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew Cake. Huh? I was thinking it would be impossible!!!! However I drew up a sketch to try and mimic the cover style of her favorite book at the time and it turned out better than expected!

She liked the one about strawberry scented perfume and the beauty shop (it's the age!!!) so I incorporated some pink cosmetic/perfume bottles and did her age in the magnifying glass. I put a fondant image of her as part of the clue crew and dressed to match the cake with a "birthday sash" on as she was planning to wear one this year.

 As you can see from the clock I was up all night working to finish this cake!!! My hubby was out of town and I can't sleep when he's gone so it was a good excuse to just finish. I do think if I hadn't been exhausted I might have added some more detail to the bottles and possibly a border around the top tier. Exhaustion won the battle!

All in all it turned out the way she wanted and really who can complain about that! The cake was gluten free, dairy free, nut free, etc. It was chocolate on the bottom and vanilla on the top with dairy free vanilla butter cream and fondant decorations.

Blessings!

Pearls and Ribbon Anniversary Cake

This cake is from a while back, but I never posted it. My dear friend celebrated her 10th Wedding Anniversary and wanted a pure white cake to make up for her wedding day cake being not quite what she wanted. This cake was gluten-free and nut-free with vanilla cake and fondant decorations. I hand rolled the pearls and then painted them with pearl dust to give them shimmer. The topper is floral (not evident from this picture) with some pearls added to it. I used a ball of fondant and then attached the flowers and pearls to it to add dimension and interest. The ribbons is not edible but everything else was edible.

I'm back to posting now, so hopefully I can post a little more than once in a year!  I have some cakes I have yet to post so I will try and catch up when I can over the summer.

Blessings!

First Communion Cake

I made this cake for my dear friend's daughter on her First Holy Communion. It was about a year ago, but I'm just getting my act together. Looking at it now the gumpaste chalice really is not as well done as I would have liked. It was my first go at trying to make one and I think next time I will get a mold instead of free handing it. The grapes and wheat were very successful and I did enjoy learning to make the drape. This was my first draping attempt.

The cake was gluten-free vanilla and chocolate with vanilla buttercream. The accents are all gumpaste/fondant/buttecream. The little hosts were so easy to make. I really enjoyed making this cake for all the trouble it gave me...honestly I'm so used to using dairy-free buttercream I think the texture and the crusting always trips me up when I work with icing that has butter. Sculpting fondant is my passion when it comes to cake decorating. I enjoy it all, but the part I love really is the sculpting.

I consider this one a good design that I may use for my own daughter's First Holy Communion cake. Hopefully if I do another Chalice I can have a little more success next time.

Blessings!

Sacred Heart Cake

 "I need nothing but God, and to lose myself in the heart of Jesus."

Yesterday was the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This devotion became popular following the Lord's revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. More information can be found at American Catholic.org...see link here:
Saint Margaret Mary

I have a very special devotion to Our Lord through this image of His Loving Heart. We did the Sacred Heart Enthronement just before our daughter was born and this Feast is extremely important to our family.

The kids made some toppers for cupcakes to share and I made this 6 inch cake for our family. It is small, but filled with love for Our Lord! :)

The cake is gluten-free vanilla with dairy-free buttercream and fondant accents. If I'd had more time and more red fondant I would have covered it completely, but time was short and I was making dinner at the same time so I left it as it is above. I painted the wooden pieces with food color mixed with vanilla extract and dyed a little red fondant burgundy to do the blood from the wound made by the soldier's lance. My son was very adamant that we not leave any detail off of the cake.
Immaculate Heart of Mary Pray for us.
Sacred Heart of Jesus Have Mercy on us.

 Many blessings to you during these two precious feasts.

Easter Cake and Divine Mercy Cake

Here are two cakes I made during the Octave...

  I threw this together at the last minute...which is obvious!!! :) I had promised my kids a cake for Easter Sunday but was soooo very busy with many things to get ready for the kids in our program entering the Church on Easter Saturday Vigil. I was also making Sacrament Cake Topper pieces (which I forgot to photograph...go figure). I did manage to get this little cake iced and decorated. It is not really a great design: but the kids do not care about such things the way that I do!

Divine Mercy Sunday occurs the 2nd Sunday of Easter (the readings for that weekend are very much about Mercy already and go so well with this theme) and since Sundays are my baking days during Easter after giving up baking for most of Lent, I decided to make a small cake again to celebrate. I really wanted Easter to be very different from Lent and the "feasting" aspect of this for us is usually tied to cakes/cookies and the like since Momma's a baker! Divine Mercy is a beautiful devotion started through a favorite saint of mine Saint Faustina. She was a Polish nun who Christ gave a mission to that she should proclaim His love and mercy to sinners that He comes to us first with love and mercy before the day of judgement. There is a lovely prayer that accompanies it called the Divine Mercy Chaplet. I took my daughter to our Parish's afternoon prayer service for Mercy Sunday and then we prayed the short prayer at home before having cake. This design is so simple but very strong in impact. The kids enjoyed deciding which "color" to eat and it emphasizes the teaching of Divine Mercy without too much hassle. I really just spread the frosting on and scraped across it to make the red/blue rays. Here's a link to more info on the Divine Mercy devotion:
Divine Mercy

For this past 3rd Sunday of Easter I made some GF/DF Krispy treats...no photos of that though...not really a lot involved! :)

Easter Blessings,
Evie