Cinderella Cake

For this lovely little girl, the past few years' cakes were: My Little Pony, Bubble Guppies and Hot Pink.  This year was Cinderella and I had so much fun making this lovely carriage.

There is something so magical about pink and gold!  This cake was layers of vanilla bean cake with strawberry buttercream.

Blue Whale Cake

One of the first cakes that I posted on my blog was a big blue whale so I had a lot of fun creating another one this past weekend.  This cake was many many layers of blueberry swirl cake (made by the client) with lemon zest swiss meringue buttercream.

A view from the top!

 And then the other side.

Fun Corporate Cakes and Cookies

Now here's a fun fun fun corporate cake order for the holiday.  I had so much fun with this one!  My client's corporate gifts were based off of one of her products, toenail fungus ointment.  She had a lot of fun delivering these cakes - which really were delicious!

How about these fondant-covered cookies?  Her clients loved it.   During one of her deliveries, she ended up with a flat tire.  A nice gentlemen helped her out and she thanked him with a package of cookies.  A good laugh for everyone :-)

Taj Mahal Cake

The other week, I had a pleasure of creating the amazing Taj Mahal out of cake and sugarpaste.   The cake was to celebrate a 70th and 80th birthday.  It was so much fun. I love this photo with the antique filter.

I have never been there but after studying all the photos, this is a place that I must visit!

Matryoshka Doll Cake

I have always loved Matryoshka Dolls, also known as Russian nesting dolls.  How exciting to be able to make a cake design for one of these!

Generally these dolls are narrower, but the client was very stressed about transporting and moving it, so I made her a little thicker.  That's better for everyone - more cake! :-)  The cake was strawberry vanilla cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream.

6th Birthday: Angry Birds Star Wars Cake

It's that time of year when my nephew's birthday rolls around.  I love to see his expression when he sees his cake.  For the first two birthdays, I was able to design whatever I wanted from his favorite things.  Then for his new few birthdays, he would tell me what he wanted.  For the latest birthday, he actually drew me a picture of the Angry Birds Star Wars cake that he wanted.

 That was a fun cake to make, although he did mention that I made a few mistakes on the characters that he drew, ooops!  But he still loved it!  :-)

Here's a review of his past birthdays!  I'm excited to see what his 7th birthday brings.

• 1st birthday Heffalump cake 
• 2nd birthday Tractor cake
• 3rd birthday Crane cake
• 4th birthday Stegosaurus cake
• 5th birthday Transformers cake

Mad Scientist Cake

Last year, this birthday boy got a Crocodile Cake.  This year it is a Mad Scientist theme.  I had some amazing graphics and color palette as inspiration for this cake.

I painted the mad scientist with edible ink onto a sugarpaste background.

And when they cut inside.... isn't that fun?!!

Fraggle Rock Cake: The Process

Today I wanted to share the process of how a custom designed cake comes together.  There is a lot of planning involved in cake design, even to provide a price quote.  For many cakes, the structures have to be built in advance or petals for sugar flowers started a couple weeks earlier.

For this Fraggle Rock cake, the main design was provided to me.  I added in a bottom tier and some extra characters as the cake needed to feed over 100 people.

© Henson

I started the sugarpaste decorations a week in advance.  I made sure I had lots of photos of the characters to use as inspiration.  My client provided me with these helpful plastic 3D characters to use as models.

There were a lot of colors involved in making the characters and you really have to get into the zoone of figure modelling.  I leave extra time to re-do any characters and sometimes make an extra one of a fragile item.  I probably worked 3 late nights to finish all the characters and details.

The day before, I iced my cakes with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream.  The bottom tier was 14" and the top tier was 11".  Each cake was 5 layers of alternating vanilla bean cake and chocolate sour cream cake.  Marjory was all cake too, except for her sugarpaste hands.

Everything started to come together with the top tier, I was very happy with the character sizes.  The cake was pretty heavy so I kept the tiers separate until the delivery.  Hope you enjoyed these pictures and have a great week!

Fraggle Rock Cake

I was absolutely thrilled to be asked to create the Fraggle Rock 30th reunion cake.  The talented, creative and fun team came together a couple weeks ago to celebrate at The Spoke Club.  Some of you may have seen this cake posted on the Fraggle Rock FB page the other day. 

© Henson

Here is the original cake design by the creative genius Michael Frith.  I must say it was the MOST challenging cake I have ever had to create with all the detailed characters, colors and character expressions - but I loved every minute of it!  I was also determined to add a few extra surprise features to the cake.

© Henson

Here are some close-ups of the characters:  Marjory the Trash Heap, Boober, Mokey and Gobo.

 Red enjoying a little too much cake!

 Wembley decided which cake to eat.

 A couple of Doozers.

 A surprise appearance from Cantus.

Here are some more photos of the behind-the-scenes of the Fraggle Rock cake.  Hope you enjoyed the cake photos - Happy 30th Fraggle Rock!

Running Shoe Cake

Any runners out there?  Any marathoners out there?  How fabulous is it to cross that finish line for the very first time?  A perfect occasion for a cake with a handmade sugarpaste replica medal of their Disney Marathon medal.

I had so much fun making this cake as I have always been a runner and one day hope to get to Disney to run their marathon!

Fall Inspired Cake

I had the pleasure of participating in a fun Fall Cake Challenge project of bloggers brought together by Kathia at Pink Little Cake and Melissa at The Baked Equation.  We were tasked of creating at fall inspired dessert:  creative cake, sugar topper, cupcake or recipe.

I came up with this cake that reminds me of fall in Toronto:  Raking leaves!  All the leaves and the rakes are handmade out of sugarpaste.

It was just a small 4" chocolate sour cream cake - so fun to make!

Make sure you pop over to the other blogs via the links below to see their fall inspired desserts!

#1 - Cup of hot cocoa cake by Munchkin Munchies

#2 - Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese frosting by D & P Celebrations

#3 - Caramel Apple Cake by The Baked Equation

#4 - Maple Leaf Chocolate Cake by Butter Yum

#5 - Boo Shoe SugarTopper by Trilogy Edibles

#6 - Goodbye Fall by Pink Little Cake

#7 - Turning Leaves by Simply Sweet by Honeybee

#8 - Fall Teddy Bears by Karma's Cakes

#9 - Thanksgiving Head Dress by Sweetology

#10 - Fall Flower Pot Cupcakes by Butter Hearts Sugar

#11 - End of Fall Cupcakes by Not your momma's Cookie

#12 - Thanksgiving in a Cupcake by Savor the Baking

#13 - Turkey Cake by The Baking Sheet

Dogbone Cake

I've seen this design many years ago and have always thought it was so cute!  I was finally able to create it for a surprise groom's cake.  The bride wanted handmade sugarpaste characters of their two cute bulldogs.

 The dogbone cake was vanilla bean butter cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream.

Angry Birds Cake

Happy Friday Everyone!  Just wanted to share this Angry Birds cake.  It's much more simpler than my previous and more elaborate Angry Birds cake.

Here's the Instagram photo of this cake.  Do you use Instagram?  It is an iPhone app that allows you to take photos or use photos from your gallery and easily apply a filter, frame and/or adding the fuzziness.  It's definitely fun way to play around with photos.

Superheroes Cake

Welcome 2012 and I hope everyone had a wonderful start.  I was out with some friends on New Years Eve and I was reminded of this very interesting fact.... In Back to the Future II, the future date they went to was 2015... that is only 3 years away!  Yikes - time sure flies!

And speaking of somethings that fly... a superhero cake with "cutish" characters made out of sugarpaste.  It was for a 25th birthday and I just loved how it turned out - so colorful and fun! 

 Have a great week - see you next Tuesday!

Angry Birds Cake

Raise your iPhone or mobile device if you are addicted to this Angry Birds game?  Actually, I spend countless hours playing Scrabble on my iPhone, so for this cake - I had to do lots of research on this game.  I soon realized that it was all in the details and I had so much fun with it!

This was the first time I actually made a backdrop to a cake.  It started out as two cakes and then I ended up making the 3 birds and the TNT mini-cakes.   The 6 cakes were alternating layers of chocolate sour cream and strawberry vanilla cake.

Everything else is handmade out of fondant and the stacking bricks were Rice Krispie squares covered in fondant.

And yes, there is that golden egg hidden back there.