Hallie
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Buttercup
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Ashton
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Greg
50th birthday cake for the marathon man!
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Wii Miis
Wii Cake for my brother-in-laws 15th!
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Alec
I watched the third Harry Potter movie to get some inspiration for my Harry Potter cake. I've read the books, but I needed it fresh on my mind. I didn't take anything from the third movie directly, but it got the wheels turning. Harry travels to and from Hogwarts every year with a rather large and old suitcase, and I wanted to replicate that look. I learned that the best way to make fondant brown is to color it with
cocoa powder, NOT to add brown food color (you have to add A LOT of brown to get the color this dark, which alters the taste and texture of the fondant). The books...
Magical Me and
Potions... were just made in a simple 9x13 pan, trimmed to the size I wanted. The Harry Potter lettering was made with gumpaste and then painted with my new airbrush!! That's what gives the lettering the 2-tone effect. Finally, Harry is made of gumpaste with a glass globe (from a light fixture) around him to give the "Divination" feel. I found the
fabulous cake board at Roberts Craft Store. I just love the wood edge. The cake is a simple cake from
Martha Stewart and the filling was buttercream and a
strawberry cream cheese frosting (just use strawberry cream cheese instead of the plain kind)...
yum!!
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Anne
Inspiration for this cake came from
Real Simple Weddings. The cake turned out beautiful (I thought). The fondant draped over the cake perfectly, the ribbon cooperated, and the flower, which was made of gumpaste, turned out awesome. However, the cake itself... chocolate with buttercream filling... was way dry. I checked out my trusty cake book and found that if you brush your cake with a
simple syrup before freezing it, the moisture stays in the cake much better! I tried this technique on the Harry Potter cake and it worked great! It can really add a lot of sweetness to the cake though, so you have to balance the syrup with the sugar content of the cake so that it's not too overbearing.
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Madison
Coconut cake with raspberry filling and buttercream frosting.
This was my first cake where my client wanted buttercream instead of fondant (the coconut cake was BC, but any flaws were easily covered by the coconut!). She wanted a look that was as smooth as fondant, which can be REALLY hard to do. I made sure to practice a lot before I did the real cake, and after trying multiple buttercream frostings, techniques in applying the frosting, etc., I finally figured it all out. I found my
buttercream frosting on youtube and I frosted my chilled cake (chilling the cake is very important!!) with an offset spatula and smoothed and leveled the frosting as best as I could with my
bench scraper. It's very important to get a crusting buttercream (frosting that gets semi-hard... a little crust on the outside) and chill the cake in between each round of smoothing. The last step is to use these
fabulous paper towels...
Don't try to use any other brand!!
Viva paper towels are the only thing that work. You can also use a high density foam roller brush, and I usually use a combination of both. Instead of describing how to do it, I'll just post a couple of videos that I found really helpful.
The Upside Down Method
Edna's Method
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Carly 
I made this cake in just 3 hours! The stripes aren't perfectly straight, but for a rush job, I thought it turned out decent. Lindsey was throwing a baby shower for a friend, so I thought I would whip out something cute really quick.
This was definitely a trial and error cake. The "straws" are made of white chocolate... they break really easily! I wouldn't recommend trying to make a cake like this unless you REALLY love the look.
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Jane
I love this cake. Green and white is my favorite color combination. The piping was a lot more fun than I expected and turned out pretty well!
The flowers for this cake were inspired by some of the flowers in my
Simplifying Sugar Flowers book, although I did improvise quite a bit.
The inspiration for the lattice pattern came from a fabric swatch from
Ballard Designs.
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Nathan
This is a birthday cake of the late Jacob's Field in Cleveland, Ohio. It is made of gumpaste, fondant, and royal icing.
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Cara
4 tier coconut wedding cake in buttercream. Top tier is coconut cake with strawberry filling. Rest of cake made of styrofoam dummies.
This cake was
a lot of work. I had never peeled my own coconut before... and by the time I figured out where to
buy big coconut flakes, it was too close to the wedding (not to mention the insane price). So I hauled myself down to the store, bought seven coconuts, and started hacking away with a hammer. The best way to open a coconut is to let it sit in a
400 degree oven for about
10 minutes. Take it out and push on the coconut's eyes to find the softest one. Pound a decently thick nail into the softest eye with a hammer and shake the coconut milk out (I use the coconut milk in my coconut cake, just make sure you boil out the impurities and strain out any skin that might have gotten mixed in there!). Then wrap the coconut in a hand towel (to prevent coconut from flying all over the place) and smack the coconut hard with a hammer. Take the wrap off, and
WA-LA,
a beautiful white, meat filled coconut awaits your peeling. I just use a regular ol' potato peeler. With the coconut warm, the meat should peel off a little more easily. The more pieces of coconut you break your coconut into, the easier it is to peel due to its concave nature.
The cake here also has regular long (or large, depending on the store) coconut shavings on it as well.
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Mario
I made this cake for my husband's birthday. It was a lot of work, but I loved making it! It is entirely edible... the bottom layer is a strawberry cake with cream cheese frosting. The top tier is a funfetti cake, also made with cream cheese frosting.
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Noel 
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Kelsey
This light pink cake is covered in fondant. The branches are made of floral tape and wire and the flowers are made of gum paste.
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Rebecca
This cake was created for my parent's 25th wedding anniversary. The cake itself is vanilla with cream cheese and buttercream cream frostings. The cake is covered in fondant and the fruit, leaves, and flowers are made of fondant as well. It was a hit!
