Coming Out of Retirement

Ok so it's been over a year since my last post. I took a brief hiatus from baking for the public eye (aka, this blog) due to a cake-tastrophe in mid February of last year. I will not go into detail, but suffice it to say I still hear the blunt splat of pound cake on linoleum in my nightmares. Fortunately for you, I neither stopped baking altogether nor stopped taking pictures of my work. Also, I'm planning on baking a lot more in the near future, because I now have an office of well over 60 financial professionals that all have birthdays and are hungry for cupcakes.

This post will be a long one, for it will consist of the cakes/cupcakes that I've made over the past year that never got the exposure that (most of them) should have.

This Happy Holidays mini cake and cupcakes was made for my Aunt Peggy's neighborhood Holiday Party (in 2009... woops). I remember this one not giving me any problems aside from the epic failure of the bow that's on top. It ended up looking like a toddler's poorly tied StrideRites, so I plopped an extra cupcake on top. The cake was sparkly, but unfortunately you can't tell because my iPhone was (and still is) a 3GS and does not have the high def-bright-vivid-staringintothefaceofgod-like camera quality that an iPhone4 has (this will be a trend throughout this post).

So this one was really fun for me aside from the fact that it was made on the same day of Cakepocalypse Twenty Ten (which again, I refuse to discuss). I made it for a friend of my Aunt's (yes, Aunt Peggy gave me a lot of business) son's (I think) 40th (maybe?) birthday. Who can remember though, it was a year ago. Anycrap, this was a marble cake with chocolate buttercream. FOUR SQUARE MARBLE CAKES because I don't own a rectangular cake pan, I find this to be ludicrous (someone please send me one). The grass was made with my handy dandy piping tip that was made specifically for creating grass. I love Wilton. The squirrel, flowers, banner and trees are all fondant. Please enjoy this close-up...

What up, squirrel?

Well, this is the teeny tiny mini cake I made for Jay for Valentine's Day. LAST Valentine's Day. It was about the size of a post-it note and its only saving grace is that little guy on top. The rest was a train wreck as you can see from the mangled lettering and paper plate cake board. I got the idea from a rubber stamp my mom has that looks like this...

(Got this image from Holley's Hobbies http://helloholley.blogspot.com/ thanks Holley, very cute card).

Anyway, I was pretty proud of the way the little raccoon came out, and as I'm always down for a good pun, the "You Stole My Heart" (get it?! Raccoons are known to be theives... STOLE my heart... Priceless.) I was generally ok with the hideousness of the rest of the cake and my poor attempt at marbeling fondant.

A P.S. on this one: this cake was ALSO made on that same fateful day. I'm beginning to think that attempting to undertake three cakes in one day contributed to "the incident".

NEXT!!!! :

Unfortunately, this is the only picture I have of these cupcakes, but there were lots. They were made for my sister-in-law Monica's friend's bridal shower. They're obviously very similar to the Mickey Mouse Baby Shower of yesteryear, only the starfish are made out of white chocolate. This was my first attempt at molding chocolate and I highly recommend it. The stars were easy to make and freaking DELICIOUS. I'd say the best part of this endeavor was the fact that I got to use my Cupcake Courier for the very first time. Bro is off the HOOOOOOOOOK. And by "bro", I mean the Cupcake Courier. It will come in handy when I try to transport large quantities of cupcakes from Hoboken to Midtown East.

And finally....

I'm very sad, because this is the only picture I have of these cupcakes. You can't really tell, but they say "Showers of Happiness, Lauren", as they were for mine and Jay's and Monica's and Tommy's (and everyone's) friend Lauren's bridal shower. There are teeeeeny tiny rose buds next to each letter, which is why I'm pretty upset I don't have a close up picture of one of them, because those stupid things were a HUGE pain in the ass to make, but they looked cute. Biggest problem for this one: Summer in New Jersey. It was freaking HOT, and those letters were originally standing at attention atop a peak of fluffy buttercream. They drooped like Christopher Walken's face skin.

I would like to add that Lauren and Chris's wedding was the bomb.

Ok, I'm done now. Hopefully I can get back to posting more regularly as I have lots of cupcake recipes that I need to try.

Haley- Out.