Dim Sum Anyone? I mean, Dim Sum Cake!

Dim Sum is a traditional chinese dish or a meal that involves small plates or bamboo steamers with small portions of food and drinking lots of tea.   I often crave the dumplings and just the atmosphere of dim sum where the servers will roll around carts stacked with bamboo steamers and you try to get their attention to get the specialty item you are looking for.

Now, this isn't traditional Dim Sum.... it's a CAKE!  Banana Sour Cream cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream and the steamer is made out of sugarpaste.

These dumplings are actually strawberry cake bites - yum!  I just loving making cakes that are meant to be other foods.

3rd Birthday: Crane Cake

When my nephew, Maseo, was born 3 years ago, I told my sister that he would always have the best birthday cakes.  On his 1st birthday: it was a Heffalump cake and on his 2nd birthday: it was a Tractor cake.

This year, I thought that I might make him a Thomas the Train cake.  But when I asked what his favorite toy was, he said it was a Crane.  He already knows how to challenge me.  I wonder what next year will bring :-)

The cake was Orange Dream cake with Vanilla Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  And thank you to my husband who built the wooden structure for this cake.  My nephew now plays with the wood stand and has hooked up strings to it like a real crane.

Cakelava Cake Designs

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a 3-day "Discover your Inner Artist" class with the amazing and uber-talented cake designer Rick Reichart of cakelava.  Rick and his wife Sasha traveled all the way from Hawaii to the amazing cake studio and classroom of Icing Inspirations in Waterloo, Ontario.

Rick was a fabulous teacher as he guided us through two of his amazing designs;  the very popular 3-tier tall hibiscus cake and a Clownfish sculpted cake.  He generously shared with us his design style, techniques, thoughts and created this wonderful atmosphere for all of us to get lost in our cakes.

Here is the wonderful line-up of hibiscus cake designs.  Each one has its little personalization to the floral pattern as they are freehand cut (no cutters).  My cake sits on the far right and the photo below.

 Here I am with the amazing and so genuinely nice cakelava duo Rick and Sasha Reichart.

 

I must also mention all other the wonderful people that I met.  The owners, Chrissie and Justin, of Icing Inspirations and Too Nice to Slice who held these classes - very kind and accomodating to us.  I also met my longtime blog-friends, Brandy, of Cakes-a-nonymous and Angela from The Sugar Cove.

I met so many new cake friends - it was such a wonderful experience to be in a room with so many people with the same passion.  One minute we are all laughing and chatting it up - the next minute, there is complete silence as we are all concentrating on painting the fine details of our cakes.  I loved that - I was in my element!

Here's a photo of Brandy (who kept me laughing all 3 days) and I with our finished clownfish cakes.  Also a top-view of all the sugar details we made during class.

I took so many photos, here are some of my additional favorite ones.  Imagine 17 people airbrushing 2.5 feet tall cakes.... that was a funny moment.

I had the pleasure of meeting the sweet Carrie Biggers of the famous Carrie's Cakes in Utah.  I have been following her beautiful work for many years.

Rick with the clownfish cake all iced with buttercream and ready for fondant - yes, it is cake!

7th Birthday Cake: Puppy Cake

Last year, I made a 6th birthday cake for a girl who loves dogs.  For her 7th birthday, it was the same theme and I could do any design I wanted to.

I have to admit, I do have this thing where I refuse/avoid making carved cakes that look like realistic animals, babies and also baby bumps - I know its just cake, but I still can't stand the thought of a knife cutting into it.  However, for animal cakes, as long as I can make them stuffed animal looking and cartoony, then its okay by me.  Here's some other views of the puppy cake.

 

Any other cakers feel the same or is it just me?

Camaro Z28 Cake

It's been a while since I posted a car cake... and this one sure is slick!  It's a vanilla butter Camaro Z28 cake for a 60th birthday.

 And of course, the final touch, the birthday boy with his favorite car and dog.

A February Wedding

This past weekend, I had the pleasure to make this 3-tier wedding cake for a lovely couple from Ohio.  They chose Toronto as the wedding getaway destination for family and friends.  Yes... Toronto in February... where our average temperatures are usually -10 °C (14 °F).  They wanted to do something different and heard lots of great things about Toronto.

Well, as luck would have it... we had an unbelievably warm and very sunny +10°C (50°F) day for their wedding.   I made this 3-tier cake based off of the Martha Stewart vintage daisy design with handmade sugarpaste cake topper and buttercup yellow roses.

 The top tier was chocolate sour cream cake with strawberry buttercream.  The middle tier was strawberry vanilla cake with strawberry buttercream and the bottom tier was chocolate sour cream cake with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream.

Baby Shower Cake

As a custom cake designer, I rarely make the same cake design twice.  Some cakes are similar but I usually customize the cake, change the color palette and add in different details.

In this case, the client just loved everything about this 1st birthday cake.  The only thing I really changed was to make it a baby shower cake - I loved how it turned out... again...

Valentine's Day Cake

An extra post this week for Valentine's Day.  So, instead of Be Mine, I Love You, Kiss Me, Be My Valentine, XOXO or Happy Valentines Day.... How about THANK YOU!

THANK YOU from the bottom on my heart!  This was 6-layers of carved strawberry vanilla cake with strawberry cream cheese icing.

While we are on the topic of saying Thanks... I want to thank all my friends, family, blog friends and clients for such a great start to 2011.  It has been over 2 years since SweetThings officially opened and I couldn't be happier!

I want to share with you an interview I did last month with a website called Human Detour.  The YouTube video gives you a bit of background on how I got started.  If you have the time, this interview is about 15 minutes long and split into Part I & Part II.  Thanks again!

Princess Cake

It had been a while since I did a very girly birthday cake.  This is a 2-tier cake based off of the the princess from Disney's Princess and Frog.  The bottom tier and the dress is chocolate velvet cake.  The character is handmade out of sugarpaste.

 And to make it even more special, some cupcakes with the popular sugar cake slice

 A view from the top - you know I love these photos.

 Here's a close-up of the cupcakes with a cute cake slice on it.  A popular design which I've done a few times.

Chinese New Year Cupcakes

Happy Chinese New Year Everyone!  The chinese lunar new year started on February 3rd.  This is a 15-day festival which ends with a lantern festival.

In the chinese zodiac, this year is represented by the Rabbit.  This is the lunar year of some very close people in my life!  It is your lunar year if you were born in 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987 & 1999.

Some carrot cupcake with cream cheese icing decorated with sugarpaste gold rabbits and coins.

Vanilla bean cupcakes with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream decorated with handmade sugarpaste lanterns and lucky money.  The symbol been Good Luck.

I hope everyone had a great start to the Year of the Rabbit.