I made this cake for Halloween. It’s a skeleton coming out of a grave. VERY SCARY!!!

I got this cake idea from a Wilton Yearkbook.

The skeleton is made from a popcorn/corn syrup mixture. I used the pumpkin cake pan from Wilton to shape the skull, I shaped the arms and hands by hand. I used lollipop sticks to give the arm strength. The facial features are made from royal icing.

The skeleton is sitting on a sheet cake with chocolate icing. Oreo cookie crumbs make the dirt, and green buttercream is used for the grass.

This cake served ~25-30.

I made this cake several years ago for my husband. He LOVES monkeys!

The monkeys are made from royal icing. They are holding yellow candles for bananas, with yellow royal icing around to look like banana peels. The lion, elephant, giraffe, and zebra are plastic toys from Wilton. I put the party hats on them using royal icing (to match the monkey hats). The cake that the animals are standing around is two Oreo cookies iced with a candle on top. To make the trees, I piped leaf-shaped royal icing over the round muffin pan to form the canopy-leaf shape. Once they dried, I attached them to the top of pretzel sticks. Those are gumballs beneath the leaf canopy. I used needle and thread to attach the gumballs to the tree.

The royal icing parts must be done well in advance, because it takes a long time for this much royal icing (the monkeys) to dry. I would say at least 2 weeks in advance.

I got this idea from a Wilton yearbook; their instructions said to attach the gumballs with royal icing, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work! Please respond if you’ve used that method successfully, I’d love to know how!

This cake served ~20.

This Curious George cake was for a little boy’s 4th birthday party, and it was a total hit with ALL the kids at the party!

Curious George is hangin’ on to balloons, floating above the New York City skyline while the man in the yellow hat drives in traffic. At the party, the number “4″ was placed next to the car for the birthday boy.

This cake is 2 tiers, 14 inch and 8 inch. I used approximately 18 cookie buildings around the bottom tier and 9 or so cookies around the top tier. I hand-cut the cookies to get whimsical looking buildings, and a car cookie cutter for the cars. I “painted” the buildings with food color mixed with clear vanilla extract. Vodka would give the same result; I just used what I had on hand. For the man in the yellow hat, I painted his face using black food color and a tooth pick. And I realize that “in real life”, the man in the yellow hat drives a blue car, not a red car, but I thought the red looked better on the cake.

I am pleased with the look of the buildings, but if I had more time, I would have colored the buildings and cars with color flow (or royal icing…I happen to prefer color flow).

The clouds on the top tier are made from white chocolate. “Happy Birthday Ethan” is written on the cloud using black food color and a tooth pick.

Curious George is a plastic toy I found at Diddams, and the bunch of plastic balloons came from my local cake shop. I used 3 bunches of balloons, and kept them together by sticking the stem of each bunch into a straw, and using the straw to stand the balloons up on the cake.

This cake served ~90 people.

I made this Princess Birthday cake for a girl who was turning 4 years old. She had a Princess theme, and the invites to her party was her standing in front of the Disney castle with her dressed as a Princess in a blue dress.

I had to assemble this cake onsite. I was really bummed when I realized the wall color was almost the same color as the castle tops.

This cake is an exact copy of a castle cake in one of the Wilton yearbooks. And the castle parts are from the Wilton castle cake set. The parts are solid white, so everything you see is my decorations. The purple outlines, the flowers, leaves and the white icing strings are all decorations I added.

This cake served ~65 people.

I made this cake for my daughter’s 1 year-old birthday party. It took me a long time to decide on the exact cake, but I knew it had to be Elmo. I think all little kids absolutely LOVE elmo; ok, i’m somewhat fond of the little red monster myself!

This cake is an exact copy of a cake from a Wilton Yearbook, but I can tell you that if you follow the directions exactly from the book, you will not get this result! If you do, please comment here and share your secret! Please!

Here’s how I made this cake:

2 tier cake, bottom layer 14 inch, top layer 12 inch. This cake serves ~120 people, but I only needed ~70 slices, so I made the 12 inch layer using styrofoam rounds instead of cake, and covered the rounds with fondant. The bottom tier that I served was iced with buttercream instead of fondant, just because I don’t care much for the taste of fondant.

The curved yellow pieces are made from fondant. I cut the triangles from rolled fondant, then laid them on a round surface to dry. They will dry hard and hold this curved shape. I used the plastic round pieces from Wilton, to dry the fondant on, but a cardboard paper towel roll would work just as well. I used yellow royal icing to attach the fondant pieces to the cake. The ball border is tip 12 icing piped into a ball shape.

I used rolled fondant for the letters, and cut with alphabet cookie cutters.

Elmo’s hands are formed from rolled fondant. I just eye-balled the shape of the hands from the Wilton yearbook picture. To get the split for fingers, I cut in between and smoothed out the edges with my fingers, then left the “hands” to dry.

The yellow crayon is rolled fondant. I rolled it between my fingers to get the long-round shape, the made the end pointy. Then I took a knife and carved a little indent around the top. I used a similar method to get the two thin black lines. I rolled black fondant between my fingers until it came out long and thin, then wrapped it around the crayon. I used a yellow food marker to draw yellow scribble marks on the yellow tier cake.

Here’s where Wilton’s yearbook instructions do not work:

The Elmo head. Using the Elmo cake pan, Wilton says to melt white chocolate and fill the eye area, orange chocolate to fill in the nose area, and 4 pounds of red chocolate to fill the pan. I was seriously scratching my head on this one, even before I started. I couldn’t figure out how I would get a round object that is over 4 pounds to stand up straight on one end without falling over. I never figured that part out, because I found that I couldn’t get 4 pounds of chocolate in the pan without having massive cracks in the chocolate. When all was said and done, these instructions simply did not work for me. I was seriously sweatin’ this one, cuz my daughters birthday was the following day, and my kitchen was a total disaster area, my husband had to take time off from work to care for our daughter while I experimented and figured out an alternative. I was so bummed because I had already put at least 40-50 hours of work into this cake, and the most important part was turning out to be a total disaster! BUT! I DID come up with a better idea, and I loved the final result!

Here’s what I did:

Using the Elmo cake pan, I colored gumpaste with colors to correspond with Elmo’s features: red for Elmo’s face (close as I could get to Elmo’s color), orange for his nose, white for his eyes, and black to fill in the mouth area. I covered the entire pan (outside) with a solid piece of gumpaste that was rolled out very thin. Using my hands and fingers, I pressed the gumpaste into all the indentions of the pan to bring out the features. Then I rolled out white, black and orange with similar thickness and used the same technique to cover the eyes, nose and mouth. Before the gumpaste dried, I trimmed all the edges. Once all the gumpaste dried, remove the gumpaste form from the pan. It’ll be very hard (but breakable if it drops!).

When everything was dried, and the pieces came together, I was not happy with the shade of red, and the texture of the gumpaste didn’t look that great. To fix this, I melted some red chocolate and brushed it on the face and hands. I believe that this technique was exactly what Elmo needed. It was the perfect color, and the texture looked more like his matted hair.

To make Elmo’s face stand up straight on the cake, I used a piece of tier support plastic to prop his face up from behind.

This cake served ~85 people.

This cake was for a baby shower.

The top tier is an elephant sitting on top of the cake. Between the top and bottom tier, is a bear, lion, tiger and zebra.

I got this idea from a Wilton Yearbook. Of course, I modified the directions, which I almost always do!

The animals are made from fondant. I used 1″ and 1 1/2″ styrofoam balls from Michaels for the animals.

First, I inserted plastic dowel sticks into the styrofoam balls to make the holes through the balls. Note: don’t cut the dowel sticks until you know how thick the cake is, as these sticks also serve as support between tiers.

Using colored fondant for each animal, wrap fondant around each ball; use the larger size balls for the body of the animal and the smaller ball for the head. Use black fondant for the eyes and nose, use a black food marker to draw the mouth. I hand-rolled the arms and legs, to the correct proportion of the animal.

To get the fringe of hair around the lion, I took a long narrow piece of fondant, and cut it on the long side, just enough to give it the fringe look, but not cutting all the way to the end; next, I wrapped it around the “head” of the lion over and over to make it look layered.

The ears of each of the animals are also made from the same fondant. I just “eye-balled” what looked “right” for the size and shape of the ears.

I used green fondant around the edge of the cake for grass, I also put green fondant on the cake boards to continue the grassy look. I used a green food marker to draw blades of grass on the fondant.

Once the bottom cake is iced, put the animals on the dowels, insert the dowels into the cake. Cut off any exposed plastic from the dowels above the animal heads, then place the top tier on top of the dowel sticks (the animal’s heads).

The “Welcome Baby” sign behind the elephant is held up with pretzel sticks.

*common sense disclaimer: if you’re taking the cake to another location, do not stack the tiers until you get to the party site! .

This cake was for a 3 year old who LOVES Little Einsteins.  Apparently all 3 year olds LOVE Little Einsteins!  The Mom let me borrow “Rocket” so I would have a guide for getting the proportions of the ship just right.  The characters in front of the cake are the actual characters that sit inside the toy version of “Rocket”.  According to the parents, Ethan (the birthday boy) noticed that “Rocket” was missing…they told him that Rocket went on a “mission” and that seemed to make him happy.  I guess he understood that Rocket had important things to do!

This cake was so much fun to make!  It was the first cake I designed and created–all the others are “recreations” of cakes from the Wilton yearbooks (which is a GREAT source for cake design ideas).  For the bottom part of Rocket “the belly”, I baked a cake using a football pan to get the pointy-oval shape with a little roundness underneath.  The “cabin” and the “engines” are made from rice crispy treats.  There was a LOT of carving work on both the football cake and the rice crispy treats to get the shape I wanted.  The red part of Rocket is regular icing, and the blue parts are made from fondant.  I used silver food-color “paint” on marshmellows for the headlights with small pieces of gold foil for the lens part of the headlights. You can’t see it from the picture, but I used the same gold foil on the rear engines to duplicate the look of the plastic toy.  The antenna and the round center part of the engines is candy.  The “fins” on top of the engines is cardboard–the only part of the cake that is not edible.  I was going to use crackers, but at the last minute decided that would look too thick.  By then it was too late to make gumpaste parts, so I went with cardboard (covered in icing, of course!).

This cake served ~65 people (not including Rocket).