It's What's on the Inside That Counts

So this cake was for my Grandma Marianna's 79th Birthday in September. Due to being a bit rushed for the day, I didn't get to set up the best way to transport the cake, so the "Happy Birthday G.Ma (as I call her)" didn't survive the trip but that's okay. :)This cake wasn't about the fancy decorating, it was more about the inside. This was the first time I made and used chocolate ganache. For non-cake/bakery people, ganache is just a fudge filling. I put it between the 3 chocolate cake layers with chocolate buttercream icing...just like Grandma likes it. I guess it's the Stein family in us that makes us chocolate lovers ;). I haven't had the time to perfect the ganache recipe yet, so it was a little rich, but it was nothing a little side of vanilla ice cream couldn't fix! It was a great dessert to a great dinner at Carraba's! Happy Birthday G.Ma! Love You!

Lil' Bug is turning 1!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAYTTEN!!!!

Here's the ADORABLE birthday girl :)

Walkin' around in her cute little dress.
Cheyanne has been my best friend since Kindergarten, she was actually my first friend when I finally got to St. William! And her daughter Paytten is turning 1, tomorrow September 18th! I can't believe it's been a whole year since I went to visit that cutie pie in the hospital late that night. Chey had her whole party as a Princess theme, so naturally we put a crown on her cake :). Unfortunately i had to leave the party early and didn't get to see her stuff her face with the cake, but she was so happy during her whole party! This was a fun cake to do, and Chey and Justen were so appreciative.

Happy Birthday Pay! Love you lil' bug!

Surprise!!! Oh yeah, Change of Plans

So I had my first exam of the semester today, and it was CAKE! good pun huh? ;) Anyway, so I got home earlier than anticipated and was excited to get started on Merg's sister's surprise 17th birthday cake. Welp i had this great idea for a kind of argyle patterned cake, but that quickly changed when my homemade fondant was not cooperating with me. Thus, I came up with the following. I don't consider it one of my bests, but it was super cute! and sparkly! (I've kinda become addicted to the pearl luster dust!!)

Emily is definitely a bubbly, smiley, and funny person, and Merg told me that she would love the cake no matter what because it was from me...it didn't mater what it looked like. So she said. But it DID turn out cute and she called me and left me a message in her loud crazy happy voice saying thank you.

Oh also, if you can't tell, this cake was HUGE. It was a 16 inch round! and weighed at least 10 pounds. Definitely my biggest cake to date!

Happy birthday emily!! :)

Revamping and a Priceless Papaw

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALI!!!! One of our family friends, The McKernan's daughter Ali, celebrated her 8th birthday this weekend. Ever since June, she asked me to make her cake. She made it very clear what she wanted on her birthday cake.

So does it look familiar?? Ali wanted my friend Megan's cake, except with ALL hot pink. No lime green, only hot pink and zebra print. She got it! :) You can't see it too well in these pictures, but I used edible pearl dust on all of the pink on the cake, and it looked SUPER cute and fun in person. Ali and her friends loved it so I heard. This was a fun revamp!

My Grandpa Don turns 69 tomorrow. He said all he wanted was one of my cakes.. yellow cake white icing... That's it. But I wanted to make it fun.
He LOVES money, well joking about it. He always shakes cards out in hopes that dollars or coins will fall out. So I did his cake here as a Quarter. "In Don We Trust" instead of "In God We Trust" made it nice and personalized. He enjoyed his yellow cake, white icing combo, so that's all that mattered. Happy Birthday Grandpa! Love you!

"C'monnnn Mama needs a new pair of shoes!!"

Tomorrow is my wonderful Grandma Rosie's birthday. She's going to be 68 years young and active! So naturally, it was time for a cake. She loves card games, casino games, poker, and bingo, so I wanted to incorporate any of those. If you can't tell, I decided on doing playing cards with the numbers of how old she will be. Again, our A/C is still broken, so the cakes were sweating a little bit as you can see in the picture. But that was the least of my problems of baking tonight. I was going to use chocolate covered oreos as poker chips, but when I added the food coloring to the melted chocolate on the double boiler, it started chunking up. I burnt 2 batches! Obviously I gave up on that task and settled for just the cards. I used a different recipe of cake mix and it was not working out, my icing would NOT stick and kept pulling away my cake! I don't feel like this was my best work, but my grandma will love it. Happy Birthday Grandma! Love you!

A Weekend With No A/C!!!

So the hottest week of the entire summer and our air conditioning completely goes out. It's been quite the dreadful week. Making cakes was definitely a challenge to say the least.

Why does it always seem like when I have cakes to make, they come in doubles! But these were both fun ones so I can't complain!

Buzz Lightyear...to the rescue!!!
Sides of the Buzz cake.

Side of cake again.

"To Infinity......and BEYOND!" -Buzz Lightyear
My Aunt's best friend's grandson's Birthday is this weekend. He's turning 3 and is completely OBSESSED with Buzz Lightyear. So she asked me to make a cake for him. This was probably one of the most challenging. I've never done a character cake before. It turned out much better than I expected actually!
"And this one belongs to the Reds!" Our church's festival...St. William, was this weekend. AND the Reds are doing pretty darn well right now. So for the festival Cake Booth, I made this Cincinnati Red's cake. I made the stencil and did the letters free-hand (if you can't tell). They aren't the best letters. I do have an excuse though: I was without all my piping supplies because I had to do my cake at the house I nanny at due to our A/C situation...well lack there of. But it worked out pretty well. Everyone who saw it loved it, and the workers thought it would go pretty quickly!

Colorful and Dance Camp Ready!

My favorite, Xavier Dance Team, went to camp this past weekend. On Friday night before camp, our coach Erica, AKA Mama Diva, had us over for a spaghetti dinner, so naturally I brought the dessert! This was our goal for camp: to get our "golden ticket" of a gold bid, which is a full paid bid to Nationals in April.

This is my lovely dance team in our brand new uniforms after our camp performance! Granted, we did not get our gold, full paid bid we were aiming for, but we did get a partial paid silver bid!! We also left camp with a superior rating with our Gameday Routine, Placed 1st in Division I, and was voted most spirited by the other college dance teams at camp! The Most Spirited award is like the BEST award to get at camp, so we were very excited about our wonderful awards! It's going to be a great year! Love me some XUDT!

"The Ladies at Work" are famous around the Hungler household. That's where my mom gets all of her crazy stories and advice from. But they have been wanting to try one of my cakes for a long time, so she asked if I could make one for one of the ladies' birthdays. So this is Tracy's. My mom said she's super bubbly, so I did this brightly colored and modern-ish cake.

Side view of the cake