Meet Mr. Crab! I really enjoyed making this cute baby shower cake. Plus, crab cakes are always delicious, right? Ahahaha. Okay, it’s not a crab cake, it’s a vanilla cake with white chocolate mousse. Probably a better choice for a baby shower (and definitely a fun one)!
I loved little Mr. Crab – I kind of missed him after the clients picked up the cake! I’m sure he was happy to go to the party, though. 🙂
Winter this year seemed like it would last forever. Thankfully, it didn’t – and now that we’re all enjoying the warmth of a well-deserved summer, why don’t we think about some ice and snow again? Now, before you start sending me snowballs as hate mail, don’t worry, I’m certainly not missing the cold (I was one of the happiest to see it leave!), but this cake celebrates some of the fun parts of winters past. This cake was for an end-of-season party for a team of synchronized skaters – similar to synchronized swimming, but on ice! COOOOOL, huh? Ahhaha, I’m so punny. 🙂
Anyway, enjoy the cake, and the summer weather – both always seem to disappear far too quickly!
Close up of the gumpaste ice skate. The blade is painted with silver lustre dust to give it shine, and the whole cake is sprinkled with edible snowy glitter.
As a counterpoint to last week’s girly cake, I now present a very manly little cake for a manly little boy!
This was actually for a baptism, but could easily serve for a baby shower or birthday too (even for grown up, not so little boys with moustaches and bow ties of their own!).
Here’s the fully finished cake: the name plate on top is written in Greek for his baptism (fun fact – this is the second cake I’ve written on that I don’t know how to read. I wrote “Happy Birthday” on this one in Armenian – I just have to trust they say what people tell me they do!)
Today’s pretty cake was designed for a little girl whose favourite colour is yellow – I think it fit the bill! I balanced the delicate lace-y borders with fun, multi-coloured bunting and a big, polka dot bow.
I made this cute stegosaurus birthday cake recently for a little boy who absolutely LOVES dinosaurs.
I sent his mom a couple of different designs, initially – one was a cake shaped like a dino, like this one, and the other was a round cake with a little dino figure on top. The birthday boy liked them both, but his biggest point of concern was why the little dino on the round cake (the baby dino) wasn’t with the big one (clearly the mommy dino!). So, for his birthday cake I made sure to put baby and momma together.
At first, he also specified that he wanted the dino to be “dino colour”… An obvious choice, right? However, since I’m no palaeontologist, I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant and I was happy when he changed his mind to red! And hey, red could have been dino colour – how do we know, at this point? 🙂
So, here he is: Morris the Stegosaurus, as a red dino birthday cake (apparently Morris is the name the birthday boy goes by when he is pretending to be a stegosaurus – how cute, huh?).
I know he’s a little rotund to be anatomically correct according to the fossil records, but this way there was more cake to go around! (For the record, Morris the Stegosaurus was vanilla cake with rainbow-coloured sprinkles right in the batter. Again not anatomically correct, but much more delicious!)
Here is the third (and final) cake I made last weekend – whew, that was a lot of cake!
This cake was a special one, since it was for the combined birthdays of my wonderful godparents (love you guys!). However, I only managed to get a few quick snaps of it, since my ravenous family was waiting behind me, forks in hand (okay, we’d just finished a huge Easter dinner, so they weren’t THAT ravenous, but they still really wanted cake). 🙂 So, my commitment to better photos lagged a bit on this one, but it was tasty, so I hope you’ll forgive me (and I actually got to eat this one – most of my cakes go to other people these days!).
This cake is also special because that’s not buttercream – that’s my white chocolate mousse! My family’s favourite is my Black & White cake (dark chocolate cake with white chocolate mousse). The mousse is much softer than buttercream, though, so I was unsure if it would hold up to the rosette piping – seems it actually turned out quite well! Woohoo! Finished with a peach-coloured gumpaste rose and rosebud.
Also, today is the last day to enter my Free Cupcakes Contest! It closes tonight at 11:59pm – is your entry in? Go comment on the original contest post to enter, if you haven’t already, and get your chance to win a dozen free cupcakes!
Mmmm…cupcakes…
Here we go: as promised, here is the second of three cakes I made last weekend! This vintage-inspired pink wedding shower cake has piped buttercream ruffles and a gumpaste peony. The top tier is smooth-iced buttercream. It’s a bit hard to see in the photos, but I dusted the flower with some edible gold lustre dust to give it a bit more antique-y vibe.
The inside is my favourite flavour: Black & White Cake (dark chocolate cake with white chocolate mousse filling – yum!).
Congratulations to the beautiful bride, and all the best of wishes to you and your groom for your wedding and happy life together!
Also, if you haven’t already, don’t forget to enter my contest to win a dozen free cupcakes as I celebrate reaching 200 followers! Contest closes 11:59pm on April 30th. Winner will be announced May 1st!
I know it’s supposed to be Throwback Thursday today, but I had some exciting news to share instead: Cakes by Caralin just reached 200 followers! Woot woot! 🙂
To celebrate this milestone, I’m going to offer my very first “Win Free Cupcakes” contest!
Up for grabs? One dozen full-size OR two dozen mini cupcakes in the tasty, tasty flavour of your choice.
Want them? All you have to do to win is leave a comment on this blog post! (Hey, Facebook followers – I love you guys too, but to be eligible you have to come on over to my main blog!)
For practical purposes, this contest is only open to people in the GTA – either that, or you have to be willing to drive here to get them (c’mon – it’d be worth it). I’ll even deliver if you live fairly close to downtown Toronto!
Contest is open until the end of April (that’s in one week – wow, time flies!), so leave your comment before 11:59pm on April 30th. I’ll use of those random-generator things to choose a comment, and I’ll announce the winner on May 1st!
While we’re talking about it, I’d just like to thank everyone so much for following this blog. Making these cakes is a labour of love for me, so I really appreciate your support and enthusiasm (I guess it’s not too hard to get excited about cake – at least for me – but I do still appreciate it!).
UPDATE MAY 1, 2014: Congratulations to Erin Bury for winning free cupcakes! Thanks so much to everyone for your support, and I hope to make cupcakes for all of you very soon! 🙂
Happy Easter-was-last-week, everyone!
Sorry I’m a bit late with posting my contributions to the festivities, but it was a pretty busy week – I had three cakes in one weekend (whew – posting the others soon!). Well, I hope you’re not too chocolate-bunny-ed out to enjoy one more Easter goody, because here it is!
So, I originally started this blog several years ago. Those of you who have been following me since then (thanks, guys!!) know that I sort of fell off the wagon and didn’t post anything for a while (okay, I didn’t post anything for a loooong time), but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t making tasty cakes! (To those who are more recent visitors – thanks to you too! Welcome!!)
These days, I’ve been in the much better habit of posting cakes as I make them, and I’ve really been enjoying sharing them with you (at least in photo form – I wish I could send you a slice!). However, I still have a whole bunch of photos from past cakes, and since I’ve recently done a redesign of the whole blog (and ordered new business cards – woot!), I thought this would be a good time to start Throwback Thursdays!
Every Thursday, I’ll post a cake from my archives. Some photos will be snazzier than others – my recent pledge to take better photos of my cakes wasn’t yet in effect, and I also used to leave my cake boards uncovered (I’m covering my cake boards now for a more polished look). Some photos you may have seen if you follow my Facebook page, and some will be brand-spankin’ new. Either way, it’ll be good, tasty memories. 🙂
For my inaugural Throwback Thursday post, I thought I would do a DOUBLE throwback (whoa!). This is both a new cake and a revisitation of an old one – a Celtic Football Club jersey cake. The original was one of my early posts on this blog, and looking back on it now, it’s… well, it’s good to see the progress I’ve made. 🙂 Today’s post is a second jersey cake I made not too long after the first one, actually, but I learned a lot and I think the second is vastly improved.
It’s all buttercream with a few little fondant accents (the yellow Nike symbol, the star and sleeve edging, and the team logo).
Close up of the logo, which is hand painted then over-piped with tiny buttercream lettering.
Still not quite perfect, and I know I could do a much better job now, but a nice memory that I thought was worth sharing (If you haven’t seen the old post, check it out here for reference!).
