Sunday, July 20, 2014

So many more cakes

Sorting through my photo library today, delaying heading to bed, I realized that there are so many cakes I haven't featured in a post as some were from a good chunk of time ago and others didn't turn out that great and I was embarrassed to show them.  Well, now they all get their day.  And even a bad cake still offers a lesson, which I am all about these days.  So enjoy a plethora of cake photos.

Try not to get too hungry on me here


Jen Bakes Cakes
One of my first cakes, for a friend of my moms.  That old cake recipe was a pain!  It took so many batches to get any decent amount of cake, but I swore by it for a good two years.  I often think about trying it out again, but it's so expensive to make compared to my new recipe.

Jen Bakes Cakes
Jen Bakes Cakes
This lemony number was for a colleagues mother, who was a big gardener.  I was fresh out of pastry school at the time, and was very keen to put all my new skills to work.  These flowers were very fun to create.
 

Jen Bakes Cakes
My first fondant cake and I went big with 3d, made for by best friend at the times 23rd? birthday.  Maybe 25th.  I can't remember any more.  She lived in her pink high tops, and even switched to them after the insanely high heels we picked out for her wedding shoes.  Sorry about that Catherine!  This was a real hit with all the girls that night.  I knew she wouldn't want to cut it until her husband got home, so I made a second plain cake for us to eat.


Jen Bakes Cakes
Most of my cakes in the beginning were for the people I worked with.  This cute one was for a relatively new employees baby shower.  Even though it was well known that I did this for a business, I didn't often get asked to make a cake for a group function like this.  Normally a Costco cake was on the menu.  Nothing wrong with that... that carrot cake is delicious, but it was an honour to finally get to make one for the group.
 

Jen Bakes Cakes
Ugh.  The snake cake.  This is the first cake that I have ever wanted to throw out and not give to a client.  This was the summer of 2013, during the really humid August we had in Southern Ontario.  This was actually the reason Fella and I bought a portable air conditioner for the apartment.  It was upward of 40° in the kitchen when I was working on this, and the fondant was way too sticky.  I put it down in the basement for the night where it was relatively cooler (by comparison anyway), and when I went to get it in the morning it had melted to this pile of goo.  This snake had been round and firm the night before.  Scales were imprinted from head to tail, I airbrushed colours and details all over it.  It looked like a snake.  I don't think I ended up charging the customer anything more than ingredient cost for it.  I was so angry at myself all day.  The worst part, being a co-worker, I had to see her all the time.  The boys at the party still loved it, but I knew it would have been much better, because it had been 8 hours earlier
 

Jen Bakes Cakes
Another of my early cakes, and I can't remember anything about the client.  I think this was a birthday cake, and being very new to the game I didn't really have the grasp of quantity.  This was a full slab cake, so 22"x16" and about 3 inches high.  These days I would suggest that size for 50-70 people.  I'm pretty sure there were 20 at the party.  They got one heck of a deal!  This was also before I started using fondant, so I had to get creative with my buttercream, which worked out well.  I kept the cake in the fridge after icing the green and then ran my spatula across it to get the textured look to the 'felt' of the table.  And all the cards and chips were made of a frozen sheet of butter cream that I cut to size and placed on the cake still frozen to maintain the shape.  It's a great technique, but time consuming.

 
Jen Bakes Cakes
After finishing at pastry school, I got more adventurous with 3d cakes.  Sculpting was a lot of fun, but it took quite some time to figure out how to pipe on a vertical surface, as seen in all the saggy windows.
 

Jen Bakes Cakes
A quick and easy 8" cake attempting to make it look like a bakery cake, like the ones I made at my bakery job of the time.  I didn't have access to the chocolate shaver, so I just chopped up some white chocolate discs to get the side details.  It didn't pack quite the same punch though.


Jen Bakes Cakes
One of my first cakes where I drew a real life 'thing', rather than a cartoon.  My attempt at a human spine certainly has some cartoony qualities to it, but it was very obvious to my co-workers what it was.  I tried to shade with various colours of beige, but it didn't turn out exactly as I had hoped.

 
Jen Bakes Cakes
This was one of my first fondant cakes, and I had a hard task of re-creating the birthday girl's favourite bottle of wine.  The label ended up looking pretty darn close to the real thing... that flower was fun to make.  The bottles themselves were not as smooth and straight as I wanted, but I think it's pretty obvious what it is

 

Jen Bakes Cakes
Those booties up top were my first go at modelling with fondant.  They are adorable, and the lace actually when though a hole.  The cake itself wasn't anything fancy, but what's what the clients wanted, so it was pretty much perfect.

 
Jen Bakes Cakes
Dora is so popular for little kids these days, and all the supporting characters are so well loved that they get just as much admiration as Dora.  This was my first go at the theme for my photographer friends littlest girls birthday.



Jen Bakes Cakes
My first wedding cake.  Friends of a friend got married, and really only wanted a cake for the ceremonial cutting.  Orange was the colour, and they wanted something very simple to match their low key wedding.  They enjoyed it, and it helped get me started.


Jen Bakes Cakes
My family has really benefited the most from my new business foray.  This will have been my first real 3D cake.  My brother was very big into fly fishing at the time, and I wanted to try something big to show my family that this was the right direction for me.  I will have just graduated (with honours no less) from school, and was frantic learning the ropes at a new job, but still had to make something spectacular for Jeff.  Everyone was blown away.  He and my sister-in-law fought for all the marzipan details.



Jen Bakes Cakes
Another fresh out of school cake.  I had nailed making perfect roses, and was happy to have a request for a cake matching the birthday girl's china "Old Country Rose". 


Jen Bakes Cakes
Wedding cake number two, the paisley cake for the Paisley bride.  This bride grew up in Paisley, Scotland and wanted to have that reflected in her cake.  She left the design up to me, as long as the shape of the paisley was correct, the details inside didn't matter.  I spent a lot of time researching it, and I was very happy with the outcome.


It's fantastic to look back on some of my first cakes to see how much I have progressed in these 7 years since school.  I can't believe it has really been that long sometimes.  What a fun time I've had making so many cakes.

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