Wedding Cakes

I'm preparing to make my roommate's wedding cake. We're looked at lots of pictures and made a few decisions multiple times and now I just need to get the ingredients. But while I've been thinking about that, I remembered that I never posted pictures of the wedding cake I did for my boss' wedding last year. This is the pictorial explanation of how I went from this:

to this:

The cake was a basic stacked tiered layer cake without separators. Each tier was a different flavor (white with raspberry filling, red velvet with chocolate filling, German chocolate, and lemon with cream cheese frosting) and covered with my go-to butter cream frosting, almond flavored. (We decided to forgo the fondant because she wanted the cake to taste really, really good.) The bottom layer was German Chocolate and since it was going to be the "load-bearing" tier, I hand mixed it with a wooden spoon.

Then I sprayed the pan with Baker's Joy, which is fantastic in every sense of the word and wrapped the pan in wet asbestos baking strips.

This makes the cake bake very flat.

I repeated these steps with the other layers, except the top most layer (lemon), I mixed with the whisk attachment on the hand mixer. I transported the cake in pieces (my sister made the sign, please excuse her for not being able to spell "transport") and constructed the tiers at the venue.

I also made four type of cookies and lemon bars. I was in baking heaven.

A little on the wild side

I'm home sick today and thought I'd catch up a little on blogging. :) Today's subject: Diaper Cakes. I made the above diaper cake for my sister-in-law's baby shower. It had a jungle theme, so the white tiger was appropriate as the topper and I chose the ribbons to go along with him.

I thought I'd do this tutorial-like so I took lots of pics as I assembled it. Here's what you need:

1 base (I used a cake cardboard circle the same diameter as the cake covered in blue wrapping paper)
1 pole-like item to use as the center (I used an aerosol air freshener)
approx 60 size 1 diapers (newborn diapers usually are outgrown before the entire package is used)
at least 63 rubber bands in varying sizes
Gift wrap tissue paper or burp cloths (which I didn't use)
Toppers and other decorations (baby themed)
Ribbons

I first started by rolling up all of the diapers with the crease on the outside. (That's my dad's hands.) I secured each one with a small rubber band.

Next, I prepared the base and center and positioned one layer of diapers around the air freshener, securing the layer with a medium sized rubber band.

This is where the tissue paper comes in. You could wrap each diaper in tissue paper, giving the entire cake the appearance of being white, but since green was used so much in the jungle theme, I decided the leave the diapers as they were. I added two more layers of diapers to the bottom tier of the cake and secured each with a large rubber band.

Then I wrapped a wide ribbon around the bottom tier - covering the rubber bands - and taped the ends together. Then I tied a medium width ribbon around that and tied a tight knot

leaving tails so I would be able to tie a bow to them later.

The repeated these steps for the second tier of the cake, only using two layers instead of three.

Then I made two bows and tied them with the tails.

Finally, I used the remaining medium width ribbon to tie a bow around the tiger's neck and I set him on top of the cake. Success!

Pi and junk

It's Pi day and I made this pie for me and my roommate because 1) I don't have a lot of time lately (as evidenced by my lack of posting) and B) I *heart* this pie.

It went over well.

Speaking of roommates, I bought a house in the last two months and have been working on fixing it up (slowly, I've only done the upstairs so far, excluding the bathrooms). This means I have a new kitchen to work in that is in desperate need to fixing up. I'll start posting pictures of what I've started with and what I've done so far. Maybe you all will be able to make suggestions.

If you're on Pinterest, let me know!

Also, I don't think I've mentioned this, but I have an Etsy store, Dreams of Annika if anyone's interested in some of the other things I like to do.