Crazy Cake Lady

That's me!

Several months ago I volunteered to make a baby shower cake for a friend at work.  They wanted a jungle theme cake, so I found one online that I thought I could replicate.  I ventured into the world of fondant icing and ended up making my own to mold the jungle animals out of.  It was very simple to do and tasted much better than most of the fondants I've tried before.  This inspired me to try covering an entire cake with fondant.

I got my opportunity to try that when we had a chili cook-off at work.  Instead of bringing in a pot of chili, I opted to bring in a pot of chili cake!  The cake was actually pretty simple to make but looked much more complicated, so people were pretty impressed :)

My most recent cake endeavor was this past weekend for the Super Bowl party Joe and I hosted.  I thought it'd be fun to make a football helmet cake showing both team's logos.  I knew the cake part wouldn't be too hard, but the face mask was going to be the trouble maker.  I couldn't have been more right.  My first idea was to make some modeling chocolate, which seemed pretty simple based on a recipe I found.  However, after I made it, it became completely unusable.  When I tried to knead and mold the chocolate, it just fell apart.  My "great" back-up plan was to make the face mask with some leftover white fondant.  Joe and I assembled the mask and laid it over a bowl to set-up and dry, but when we tried to attach it to the mask later, it fell apart.  With the help of some toothpicks and some luck, we managed to salvage it long enough to get a decent picture.  The rest of the cake went pretty much as planned, thanks to some emergency cake surgery done by Joe.  He is to thank for making it actually look like a helmet.  Well enough talk about it, here are some pictures of the process and the final product.

After bringing a couple cakes to work, I had a co-worker ask me if I'd be interested in making a birthday cake for her daughter in April.  Of course I said yes!  I'm not sure what she has in mind yet, but I'm hoping that maybe it will lead to a couple more cake orders.  Maybe I'll just have to keep "practicing" and bringing them into work :)