Peggy Porschen's Romantic Cakes

I always meet my potential cake clients in various coffee shops around the city. Well the nice thing about Starbucks is there's a bunch in Chapters book stores. Which means after the meeting I can celebrate with a new cake book!! Well three weeks ago I bought a book called 'Romantic Cakes' by Peggy Porschen. I love this book! Soo many great cake ideas, beautiful cakes and I look forward to making most of them. It has alot of useful information on basic cake decoration as well. Some of her techniques simplified things from what I am used to as well so I really look forward to trying them. Well I opened this marvelous book and looked through it and suddenly realized it was missing the "templates" referred to in alot of the patterns for the cake designs. Because I loved the cake designs I was really upset. I thought I would google my problem to see if I could see anyone else with the same issue. Nothing. So I looked to see if she had a website that I could contact her about this problem. Also thinking that maybe the glitch hadn't been caught yet. Well I found her website and used the contact link emailed them and within a couple days received an email of apology and that the templates had been mailed out to me! I was really impressed that they responded so quickly and shipped them out as well. Needless to say any and all books that she comes out with I will definitely be adding to my collection!

Hey! What's this??

Yay!! My templates are here!!

Stupid mail, bent my templates...

Yup, It really is my templates :)

Pretty templates in a really pretty folder.

Super Cute Recipe Box's

So last weekend I went to Michael's excited with coupon in hand to go get somthing new for a great price. Well I notice they had this new isle with various bins filled with little nick nacks and what not. To my surprise I came across this little beauty! I have looking for a recipe box on and off for awhile now. I currently use a recipe binder but wanted a box to start placing my favorite most comonly used recipes. This box was $3.00!! and super cute :) Then they have matching recipe cards for $1.50 a pack! I seriously was blown away by the cheap cuteness of this. They had another adorable one that was white with pink, teal, and brown measuring cups, beaters and other baking things on it. It was actually a really tough choice. Especially since my kitchen is cream and pinky/purple. I thought I would share this great deal with you all in case you are like me in need of a cute recipe box for a great price. I also figured if I took a picture of a cupcake beside it, it would still fit in with the theme of the blog :)

My new recipe box!

Here it is flipped open :)

The matching cards I got.

Hockey Cupcakes

Here are pictures of some Hockey themed birthday cupcakes I made for an order this weekend. I went with hockey pucks and hockey sticks for decorations. I made these out of fondant. Super easy and quick to do. I actually like the pucks so much that I might just start putting little fondant circles on my cupcakes from now on.

Group shot

Hockey stick cupcake

Hockey puck cupcake

Twilight

You probably don't know these but, I am a huge Twilight geek. Yes I am in love with all things that sparkle :) So when I came across this which combined two things that I absolutely adore I couldn't resist posting it here. Check out Gary Cruz's other photography here.

Peony Cake & Cherry Blossom Cake

Well I put together a couple cakes this weekend and thought I would share a few pictures with you. Let me know what you think! I needed to test out some recipes and at the same time add to my portfolio as well. Now I think I'm going to go take a bite out of the one I made for our house :)

This was covered in Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

This was covered in fondant, its hard to tell but there was a small bow in the middle.

Pavlova.. YUM

I found this recipe a couple days ago and was really excited to make it so I thought tonight for dessert I would. Let me tell you YUM! Move over strawberry shortcake, this is my new berry whip cream dessert cake. Sooo good. Although I think I might take the sugar down either a quarter cup or make the whip cream less sweet them I typically do. Although a smaller slice probably would work too. But it's soooo good :) Here's the recipe if you like me have yet to try Pavlova. Enjoy!

Here it is just put in the oven.

Here it is out of the oven.

All dressed up and ready to eat!

Wedding Cake

I had a Wedding Cake I was working on all day Friday and most of today for a client. As some of you know I was on a mission searching high and low for a 14" pan and wasn't able to find one. So I ended up renting a 16" and then cutting down the sides. I hate doing that, its such a waste but I was hooped. Also I had a incident with 2, 16" cakes, so I actually ended up wasting alot more then just sides. Here are some photos of what the last two days have looked like for me :)

Here is the ridiculously huge 16" pan

Here it is baked. Let's just say I ended up making 4 of these instead of 2....

Here they are stacked.

At this point I think I had made 6 batches of Swiss meringue.

Just about done!

Finished!! Yay!

Happy New Year!!!!

Just thought I would welcome your new ideas and creativity in the next year by inspiring you with super cute cupcake! Have a great new year & be safe!!