So Its Been a While...

Hello followers it has been brought to my attention that I have been absent from my blog for quite some time. Although in light of my absence I have accomplished quite a bit. I took 2 summer classes at college and finally earned my degree in General Studies. I have also been very busy at work with the end of summer coming and the beginning of fall starting to arrive. This is our busy time in the bakery so I have been working on quite a lot of cakes. Here are a few that are my favorite.

Tip Tuesday

One of the easiest parts of cake decorating is putting on the border. The most common type of border is the shell border which is pictured below. This is the the type of border I use at work 99.9% of the time. I have to admit when I first learned how to do it I found it very difficult, I could not seem to get how to do it. I originally learned it by taking a basic cake decorating class at Michaels. After that I had a friend show me an easier way and now its one of my favorite borders to do. However without tip #22 I would never be able to create this border. Tip #22 is a large star tip, and is the most common one used for the shell border. There is also tip #32 that has more lines in the shell. I personally don't like the look of this border which is why I stick to using tip #22.

Cakes

I have been very busy these past few weeks! It seems that our cake orders have increased and on weekends its normal to have 30-40 cakes! That is quite a lot of icing and decorating but I have documented them well and thought I would share some of my favorites.

Tip Tuesday!!!

Although I use many tools to create my cakes, there is one thing I could not live without! A cake smoother. This tool is used to smooth the sides of the cake as well as the top. Without using this, cakes would have spatula marks where one tried to smooth the icing. This is something that I use every single day. Everyone should have one because it makes your cakes look professional even if you doing it at home!!!

A Busy Month...

Sorry followers it seems it has been some time since I last posted to my blog. The past couple of weeks have  been very exhausting at work. One would think that I would be getting a lot of cake orders for graduation but the opposite is true it seems that there has been a sharp increase in my orders for just birthday cakes! As of right now I have 16 cakes due for this weekend. Anyway with the past few weeks being busy I have done a lot of cool cakes. Below are some of my favorites!

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday is a new thing that I'm starting on my blog! The purpose is to help fellow beginning cake decorators by using the skills that I have learned.

For the first Tip Tuesday I want to feature the most important tip to a cake decorator! Its the cake icer tip #789! This tip is so amazing...instead of using a knife and risking cake crumbs in the icing you can use this tip to get your frosting on smoothly! This tip retails at $3.29 and is made by Wilton. This tip does not work with a coupler and has to have its own bag because its such a large tip. I bought one the first time I saw someone use it and it was the best $3,29 that I have ever spent!

Busy..Busy...Busy

Sorry followers it has been quite some time since I have blogged. I have been super busy at work. Not really doing anything fun just working on decorating cakes for my case! It has been a pretty uneventful week at home, the boyfriend was sick so I basically hung out at home and slept. But last night he was feeling better so  we decided to go to the movies. We chose to see Oblivion. I have to confess I was not entirely sure how I felt about seeing this movie. When I first saw the trailer I did not want to see it but as I kept seeing it I found myself intrigued by it. It started off pretty good. In a nutshell aliens destroyed the moon which caused earthquakes and tsunamis which destroyed earth then aliens invaded. The human race nuked the aliens and won the war but destroyed the planet so the whole human race is moving to Titan. I wont say how the movie ended in case I have an followers that want to see it. Overall is was too long and disappointing.

     

Cakes, Cakes, Cakes

Not much happened today so I thought I would share a cake I did recently!

Relaxing Weekend...

Over this past weekend I took it easy. I worked on Saturday but I didn't have any fun cake orders to do. Later in the day I went to my boyfriends, we mostly just watched TV and then in the evening we decided to go see a movie. He and I are huge movie fans, we go almost every weekend. So we decide to go see G.I.Joe Retaliation. It was defiantly better than the first one, but the whole story line is quite out there. We thought that it would follow a more realistic approach, overall it was a good action movie.

A Surprising Cake

Today at work I had to make this very unusual cake. It was a double round 10'' cake that had this cascade of frosting dots on it. The picture looked a little odd and to be honest I was quite worried about how it would turn out. After I got the cake cut and iced it was time to add the decorations. At first I thought it was going to turn out horrible but after I got going on it and was finished I really loved how it looked. It just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a cake by the picture because it could really turn into something great. Below is the finished product!

Cream of Tartar

I've decided to challenge myself to post on my blog everyday. As the day started I struggled to think of a topic. Today was my day off so I knew I wouldn't have any work stories and nothing really exciting happens outside of work so I was really drawing a blank on what I could write about. I was talking to a friend and telling her about my new blog and she was excited to know that I would be incorporating baking and decorating ideas, she then asked me what cream of tarter is used for in baking. Then the idea hit, I had absolutely no idea what cream of tartar is used for in baking. All I knew was it has a weird name, you only use a pinch at a time, its in a bottle that is too big and no one ever uses all of it and its kinda expensive to buy. So I began my research on uses for cream of tartar.

According to Wikipedia the actual name is Potassium bitartrate also know as potassium hydrogen tartrate, which is used for use in wine making but when cooking is know as cream of tartar. The use of this ingredient serves several purposes. First it is used to stabilize egg whites and increase the heat tolerance and volume. Second is to stabilize whipped cream by helping to maintain the texture and volume. Next it prevents sugar and syrup from crystallizing while being baked. Lastly it prevents discoloration when boiling vegetables. 

So hopefully everyone learned something and next time a recipe calls for cream of tartar you'll know exactly what it does!

Life is Sweet!

Two months ago I started at the bakery in our small hometown grocery store as the cake decorator. I have worked very hard on improving my cake decorating skills and was recently promoted to Assistant Bakery Manager. Being a bakery manager has been a dream of mine for sometime now. Ideally I would love to someday open my own bakery. I am very excited to see what the future holds in store for me. Perhaps one day I will be the bakery manager or even own my very own! Below are some of my recent creations!