Saturday, September 25, 2010

I'm the Bakezilla!

It's been a long time since I last blogged - mainly because almost all weekends over the past couple of months had been fully occupied with baking and cake decorating.

Aside from fulfilling orders for a few friends, Cor & I have also recently completed the PME Professional Diploma - Sugar Paste Module @ Bake-it-Yourself, which helped to improve our sugar crafting skills given that I've really been self-taught so far, and saved lots of time and heartache spent to trial and error on my own. The course itself was rather intense, because it takes up a significant amount of time for each class, but we all took away some valuable knowledge, and made a few great friends!

So here are some of my creations during the course:
Fruit/ Picnic Basket Cake
This cake was decorated with Frannie in mind as I brought this to her farewell party that evening. The theme was ER (Emergency Room) so I thought the "Fruit basket" may be apt. She is originally from the Philippines, and hence the smiley mango!

In this class we learnet more about patchwork cutters, embossers as well as how to create a fabric effect. Had some time to spare so decided to play with lustre dusts and butterflies

For our final project we were asked to create a tiered wedding cake. My theme was a little more Art Deco but didn't have enough time to finish up (because I encountered problems on the baking stage which took up way too much time!) 
I'm not totally happy with the outcome but I've definitely learnt lots from this project!

So after taking a week off at the end of the course, it was back to baking for friends again! First up was Cupcakes for Tiff's boys as Teacher's Day gifts:

Vanilla Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream


And my most challenging project to date was for little Ian's 3rd Birthday - a 3D Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Cake! It took lots of planning especially around the architectural setup, some physics as well as making sure that from a design angle it actually resembled the MM Clubhouse!

This is what the real toy looks like:
And my finished product (Mickey, Pluto and Goofy figurines were provided by the birthday boy's parents):

Ah Mak's Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Cake

I was so glad that things turned out alright in the end, because there was some major cake drama in the morning where the weight of the head and hand couldn't hold due to the overnight humidity change! I had to redo some parts on the spot under lots of time pressure.

It felt amazing though, to see little Ian playing with the cake thinking that it's the real clubhouse! hehe...

I can feel that with each project, I'm "levelling up" like in RPG games (sorry the geek in me is speaking)! More coming up this month, so watch this space!