Graduation cake for a runner

Graduation cake for my son last year. He ran track all four years of high school, so I made a track cake. The image of him running was made from two pictures, one of which was flipped so that when I cut them out, they matched up and looked the same from both sides. I glued the pictures back to back and stuck a toothpick in the leg part of the picture, extending the toothpick about halfway beyond the edge of the pictures so I could stick it in the cake and the image would remain upright without getting too much frosting on it. The "Y" logo was done with the buttercream transfer method.

50 years old

I made this cake for my husband's 50th birthday. I used the buttercream transfer method described here. I liked having the ability to shade a little bit and make the image look sort of painted.

The image itself, of driving down a road, is metaphoric of several things. First of all, my husband likes to drive. Whether going on short trips to the grocery store or cross-country week-long trips, my husband is happy to be behind the wheel. The 50 is also metaphoric for how fast time seems to be going these days. Cheesy, I suppose, but I like the cake anyway. And so did my husband.

Marceline of Adventure Time

I made this cake this past week for my daughter. In case you don't know, the character is Marceline from the cartoon Adventure Time.

It's done in fondant, which I find disgusting to eat, but easy to work with as a decorating medium. I just peel the fondant off my slice of cake and apply leftover buttercream frosting before I eat it. Youngest daughter and son like fondant to eat, though, so they don't mind me using it. 

I used a printed picture as a pattern for the face/neck shape and the cutout portion of the hair. For the face, I added a little bit of periwinkle blue coloring to the white fondant to give Marceline's skin an added wan-ness (she's a vampire). The hair is black fondant that I bought at the store. I am so glad Michael's sells colored fondant. I wasn't looking forward to dyeing fondant black. My hands would have hated me for days for the dye beating they would have taken.

I did what little facial expression with piping. The vampire teeth are tiny little cones of white fondant. 

I don't like piping on the mouth because from every vantage point except straight on, it looks funny. The 3D effect places the piping on top, which looks funny for a mouth. If I had more time, more patience, and less shaky hands with delicate processes, I would have cut a mouth out of the face and piped inside the hole to make it flatter, more like the 2D cartoon that Marceline is. 

My favorite part of this whole cake is the spiky hair that extends past the edges of the cake. 

Gir cake

I made this cake for my daughter's 15th birthday. It's one of the more fun cakes to do. It was easy to design, simple to execute and it still turned out the way I wanted it to. I fashioned Gir's tongue out of fruit leather, and his ears are graham crackers that I broke into Gir's ear shapes and frosted with black icing. The eyeballs were the top halves of two cupcakes--I made 3 cupcakes total, one was used for the #15.

It's almost the same daughter's birthday again and I haven't yet settled on a design. I'm thinking Adventure Time theme.

Let them eat turkey!

The story behind this cake: 
My oldest daughter K used to be a vegetarian. She did not live at home during her veggie years, but came home to visit for one Thanksgiving. She wanted to eat turkey but didn't want to give up her veggie ways just yet. She also wanted cake, and we settled on this answer for her desire to eat turkey and cake.  

I made two circle cakes and one cupcake. I cut one cake into a crescent shape so it would fit on the other circle cake, then used what I had cut out to form the turkey neck (the cupcake was used for the head). My daughter and I had fun putting this together. She wanted to play with fondant, which is what we used for the feathers, the beak, the wattle and the covering for the head and neck. The piping on the rest of the cake was my personal fave buttercream icing. 

 

Crossword puzzle cake

Cake for my mother's 70th birthday. I attempted using the buttercream transfer method and it worked ok. The technique is outlined here.

The placement is off center and that is visually irritating but you can't pick it up and move it once it's placed. Oh well. Such is the problem of an impatient amateur cake decorator.