Beach Wedding Cupcake Tower: Michele + Dustin

First things first...May/June has been a really exciting time for my little business. Starting last weekend I began the first of FOUR wedding cakes in a row, which is the busiest I have ever been. Thank you for continually visiting my site and passing on the word to your friends and family- it is seriously paying off and I couldn't have done it with out you!

To start off the summer wedding season I packed my little car full of custom cupcakes and headed down to Va Beach to celebrate the marriage of Michele and Dustin. The wedding cake for this very sweet couple fell into my lap via close family friends, and I couldn't have been more happy to do it. The beach holds a special place in both Michele and Dustin's hearts - so much in fact that they said their vows with sand between their toes. To reflect their shared appreciation and venue of choice, I created a very beach-y cupcake tower for their reception. We bounced more than a few ideas back and forth before settling on the final design, and you can check out their inspiration board here. The final sketch looked like this:

The cupcakes were two different flavors. Michele's favorite- vanilla poundcake filled with chocolate-almond ganache and topped with dark chocolate frosting, and Dustin's favorite- chocolate chiffon cake filled with chocolate peanut butter ganache and topped with peanut butter frosting. Each cupcake was dipped in graham cracker 'sand' and decorated with a handmade sea creature.

Gumpaste sand dollars, fondant starfish, and pink sugar coral.

The Adirondack chair topper was ordered off of Etsy, and is the only non-edible element of this cake. The driftwood fences are also gumpaste.

Congrats Michele and Dustin!

Black and White Anniversary Cake

Yin and yang, chocolate and vanilla, Christian and Ally. Opposites attract! Check out this fun and classy black and white cake I made for my friend Christian to surprise his girlfriend on their two-year anniversary. The cake was split down the middle chocolate and vanilla, inside and out. It was dark chocolate cake layered with dark chocolate mousse on one side, and white cake layered with white chocolate mousse on the other. I iced it with vanilla and chocolate buttercream and then poured chocolate ganache on top so it was dripping down the sides. Hand piped white and dark chocolate hearts top it off. It turned out to be one of my favorite cakes, and as aesthetically pleasing and opposite as Christian and Ally themselves :-) Lots of pics because I liked it so much:

The naked cake

Hand piped chocolate hearts

Finished product!

A shot of the insides

Monarch Butterfly Birthday Cake

This cake is any chocoholic's dream. The top tier is three  8" dark chocolate cake layers sandwiched with chocolate-almond mousse. It is sitting atop 10" of vanilla bean chocolate chip pound cake with whipped cream cheese filling, and the entire thing is en-robed in velvety dark chocolate ganache. The type of cake that just needs to be eaten with an icy cold class of milk! I made it for one of my friend's mom's surprise 50th birthday party. The little feather monarch butterflies held a special significance to their family and were ordered online to ensure their accuracy. The number '50' topper is handmade from gumpaste and completely edible!

Blue Moon Cupcakes

My roommates both had birthdays in March, and we properly celebrated the first anniversary of their 21st birthdays with these delicious Blue Moon cupcakes. The cake is dense and flavored with the citrusy-yeasty Blue Moon beer. I poked holes in the top of the cupcakes fresh out of the oven and brushed them with more beer to make sure the taste came through. The result was a moist, spongy cake that was only slightly sweet-pairing perfectly with orange cream cheese frosting. Finished with orange zest and an orange wedge, these little cakes were the highlight of the 'mustachio bashio' we threw in honor of Emily and Mary.

Happy Birthday Emily and Mary!!

Fair Trade and Organic Ingredients

Taking a brief detour from cakes today to talk about the importance of fair trade ingredients. I know, I know. You've heard all the hype and seen the shelves full of products sporting 'fair' lables and 'organically grown' claims. It's easy to assume that the extra money they ask for in exchange for those products gets lost somewhere along the supply chain and never really makes it to the farmer. When you're in the store deciding which brand of coffee to buy to feed your daily addiction, or which ingredients to buy in bulk for your bakery, it's even easier to have a 'cheaper the better' kind of attitude.

Now I'm a poor college student, and if you look in my pantry (ahem, cabinet...) there is a 100% chance you will find some kind of snack chocked full of preservatives and bad-for-me things. Pop-tarts are my shameless weakness. I've always thought that eating organic and using all-organic ingredients in my cakes was a great idea for that far away day when I have disposable income to burn at Whole Foods. That is, until I got the opportunity to travel to Peru for Spring break this year. I've been writing my thesis all year on the cocoa trade in Latin America, and received a grant from my school to go to Peru and investigate the feasibility of fair trade cocoa there. Suddenly,  'disposable income' took on a whole new meeting.

I know what you're thinking: "Here's comes the sermon about only buying fair trade." I don't do that myself, and until I do, I will never claim it to be the only right option. I just want to clear up a lot of the speculation about buying fair trade and organic, simply because I had the fortune of meeting someone who grows fair trade cocoa for a living and he completely changed my perspective. Meet Carlos Valero, cocoa farmer extraordinaire:

He grows organic cocoa classified as 'fino de aroma' in the jungle of Echarati, Peru. He took me in for a few days and taught me everything he knows about growing cocoa: 

Like fertilizing his trees with organic compost and minerals,

harvesting the pods and splitting them open to free the cocoa beans inside,

drying and fermenting the beans,

hand picking only the best ones to de-shell and toast in a kettle over an open fire,

grinding them by hand to form a paste, 

molding the paste into chocolate bricks,

and finally, melting the bricks and adding spices to make the most delicious hot chocolate I've ever had.

In the wise words of Carlos, he makes, "Chocolate pura, como nuestras vidas." Pure chocolate, like our lives. Carlos has everything he could ever want because of his organic cocoa farm, and he still lives below the standards that most of us would consider 'normal'. After meeting him, touring his farm and neighboring ones that were significantly worse off, I realize how important organic and fair trade produce is to the farmers who grow it. They are more organized, more educated, and very passionate about delivering a quality product. 

So whether your reason is wanting to put fewer chemicals and preservatives into your body, doing your part to further the development of agrarian societies, or simply because you believe it is the right thing to do, I hope I made you think twice about buying fair trade and organic today! I promise to use only the best quality, non-slave labor, organic cocoa in all of my cakes in order to start doing my part. As I become more successful, I hope to add free range dairy and egg products to that list, as well. Buying fair trade and organic is a small price to pay to make a big difference in the lives of many, including yourself!

Buttercream Piping

This week I was practicing piping letters and designs with the leftover buttercream I had in the fridge from the past few cakes. I'm a classic youngest child in that I learn by imitating, which is how I've taught myself cake decorating. That tendency comes into play when I'm doing a new design for a client or something I've never seen before. Give me a picture and I can copy it!

These are actually copied from the Curlz font in Word:

This is a filagree pattern, similar to the one that will be on Mark and Cassie's wedding cake I'm doing in June:

And here is a cool design I just found online and copied in buttercream:

What the heck is Italian buttercream??

I boast all the time that I use 'Italian buttercream' to ice my cakes, but other than sounding oh-so European chic- what does that really mean?

The buttercream you're probably used to is American buttercream, which is made by incorporating large amounts of powdered sugar into a fat (butter, shortening, cream cheese etc.). Although this frosting does hold a special place in my heart (especially with cream cheese!), it has a super sweet taste and sometimes gritty texture that is not ideal for achieving a smooth finish on a cake. Which is why, for most tiered cakes I prefer to use meringue based buttercream, or Italian.

Italian buttercream is made by cooking granulated sugar on the stove until it reaches the soft ball stage, adding that mixture to whipped egg whites and then beating the mixture until it cools down.  Now comes the butter. I'm not going to disclose exactly how much butter is actually added, but let's just say this frosting is NOT figure friendly...Next, you can add any number of different flavorings and then you're left with a not too sweet, super smooth and oh-so European chic Italian buttercream...heaven!