January is for birthday!

At least for me! My birthday is tomorrow and oh yes there will be cake. But you’ll have to come back to find out what I whip up.

I also know of 15 others born in this great month plus my Rowan’s birthday is February 1st, so lots of cakes to be done. No I don’t make them all, just for a select few. I also had the opportunity of making a cake this year for a new friend, Mark. Mark is the owner of Mark Day Company, Caterer. He emailed me before Christmas to ask if I would make some cookies for the holiday rush and I said sure! Then he went through my portfolio on Flickr and saw a cake in my feed plus some day of the dead cookies and asked if I would make them for his birthday. UMMMMM…OK.

It also happened to be on the same weekend as our next door neighbour’s son’s birthday and I usually do his cake too. I don’t do a lot of cakes and two in one week is certainly extraordinary but what the heck.

I started by making some cookies and by some I mean one hundred Day of the Dead cookies. Now when Mark went through my Flickr he ordered based on this picture. I’m embarrassed now but at the time I made them three years ago I was uber proud. The picture is bloody aweful too.

I told his that they were a while ago and my piping on cookies was definitely at a different caliber now, so I could probably make them nicer. So I made him these…actually 100 of these. And yes my hand did cramp.

The cake he wanted was a replica of the cake I did at a course I did at Swank Cake Design here in Raleigh. It’s been two years but sure I can do that, at least I hope I can :) But man I have to make a flower too and I haven’t done one of those in over 5 years, especially one on a wire. I guess I better practice and so I did.

It turned out better than I expected on the first go, it ended up being the one I used. That was a good sign. I then made the recommended gumpaste from scratch and practiced on the applique cutters and they seemed to work, so I decided I was ready. After the cookies were complete, I moved on to the cake. The cake was a dark chocolate sponge with fudge buttercream filling and coated with chocolate ganache. I really like working with ganache, it smooths so beautifully.

Add a fondant coat and it’s ready for the applique and voila…looked pretty good. The words are an inside joke, I think :)

Now Mark also wanted some simple rosette cupcakes for which I forgot to take a picture, so lets use our imaginations, shall we. They were vanilla bean cupcakes with a simple syrup and a vanilla bean buttercream peach rosette on top.

I dropped them all off in the swanky location, got to finally meet Mark and then I was off back into the kitchen to make cake number two! This one was slightly less stressfull. Tyler turned four and he wanted cookies but his mum wanted cake, so I combined the two. He’s also all about the movie Cars and Cars 2, so I made some cookies. I made all the big names and added Guido “pit-stop” because he’s my favourite. Sorry about the bad picture, I forgot to take a good one.

Then I used the same vanilla bean cake as in the cupcakes and made a simple 8” cake covered in buttercream. I tried the Viva towel method for smoothing and for the first time it worked. I added the cookies and now cake two was done and I can take a very short break.