The Famous Wilton Rose

I recently decided to make my first attempt at producing a Wilton rose. These are roses made from frosting and are a signature of Wilton cake decorating. The hardest part is actually determining the right consistency of frosting. You need it to be relatively stiff but not so much that you can't easily squeeze it through the decorating tip with just one hand (the other hand will be holding the flower nail). Here are the step-by-step instructions from the Wilton website. These roses are perfect for many applications - birthday cakes, wedding cakes, anniversary cakes, mother's day cakes, baby shower cakes, etc. The photo above shows my results. Now I plan to use my new airbrush to play around with coloring them.

Taking It To The Next Level

OMG - My incredible hubby just presented me with a complete cake decorating airbrush set for Christmas! It includes a compressor, two different airbrushes and 24 food colors. I am dying to learn how to airbrush on both buttercream and fondant and plan to make it a goal of mine for 2009. I cannot wait to get started! Another plan for 2009 is to finally get myself enrolled in some official cake decorating classes. If you're like me and have always wanted to get into airbrushing cakes then check out this great Airbrush Starter Seton Amazon.com. What a wonderful Christmas!

Next Up - Indiana Jones

Now that I've finished the Christmas cake, I'm already starting to think about my next project. My middle child will turn 5 in just over a month and he is a HUGE Indiana Jones fan. I'm already planning some party invitations shaped like Indy's famous hat. When it comes to the cake, I think I'm going to go with an Indiana Jones Lego theme. I envision some Lego blocks made from fondant along with a fondant Indy. Other elements will include some spiders and snakes. It should be a fun project and will give me a chance to make another fondant figure or two. Making them to look like the Lego figures should be a little easier than trying to make them look like the actual actors :) I'll post pictures as I go so you can follow the progress.

You can get more Indiana Jones party ideas from my website.

Christmas Cake Finished!

Well, I finally got the Christmas cake completely decorated and placed my fondant Santa Claus prominently on top. I actually love how it turned out. I covered the traditional English fruit cake with marzipan and then used royal icing on top of that. I used viva paper towels to smooth out the icing once it was slightly crusted over. You simply ice your cake and then wait about 15 minutes until you can touch the icing without it coming off on your fingers. Then take a viva paper towel (works well because it has very little pattern on it) and lay it over the icing. Rub gently with your hands and your icing will become nice and smooth underneath. This technique can give you the look of fondant but the taste of icing. Find other cake making tips on my website. Happy Holidays to you all!

Fondant Santa Claus

I just recently attempted my first fondant figure. It happened to be a Santa Claus for the top of my Mom's Christmas cake. I used Wilton's pre-colored fondant which is great to work with. It tastes horrible but since nobody would be eating this guy I didn't really consider that so much and I just like that you can buy the pre-colored fondant in all the primary colors as well as flesh tones. If you want to save money I would make your own marshmallow fondant and color it using gel colors.

I really just started by forming different sized balls of the fondant and then shaped them with my fingers. It's like working with playdough. I used water and toothpicks to hold the pieces together. I let him dry until he was solid by sitting him on a plate on a baking rack with a bowl over the top. The baking rack allows air to flow up while the bowl keeps the dust off.

Next comes the frosting of the cake and the placement of Santa on top - wish me luck!

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog! I created this as a companion to my kids' birthday cake website, CakesAndKids.com. I will spend some time here writing about my various cake decorating projects both good and bad :) I hope you find some useful tips and ideas here and I encourage you to post your comments. Making your own homemade kids' birthday cakes is really not difficult and can save you quite a bit of money.

Have fun and happy baking!

Privacy Policy

You can contact me at info@cakesandkids.com. If you email me with a question or comment, I will keep your email address completely confidential. Your information will never be sold or shared with any third party.We use third-party advertising companies, such as Google AdSense, to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site. Google's use of the DoubleClick DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to this and other sites. If you would like more information about this practice or to opt out of the use of the DART cookie, please visit the Google ad and content network privacy policy.