Cakes, Cakes and more Cakes

Ok, so I finally located the pictures Mike took of the cake I made for our church graduation Sunday. It's the Sunday in May when we celebrate all the seniors who are graduating and we have a little reception after church for them. So I made the cake... Four different torted cakes, two were butter cake with apricot filling, one was dark chocolate with chocolate buttercream filling and the last was dark chocolate with no filling, but covered in melted bittersweet chocolate. The flat portion of the grad cap is made from a matzo cracker, coated in bittersweet chocolate. Each of the book cakes started as a larger flat sheet which I split into two pieces for the layers. Two are wrapped with fondant (the red and yellow ones) and one is iced smooth with buttercream. It was a blast to make!

Since I'm sharing cake photos, I figured I'd share a couple other from this year. Next is my grandmother's birthday cake. It was a really warm April day making this one and we didn't have the window A/C units on, so the fondant was "melty" along with the buttercream... I think this would have been much prettier but it was what it was :)

Then there's the cake I made for the Women's Ministry cake auction at our spring Fiesta. I actually made two cakes, but this is the only one Mike remembered to take a photo of. It was a coconut cream cake with fresh shaved coconut on top which I made into a bonnet cake. I created the flower out of fondant using templates from my scrapbooking stash. It sold for $30! Pretty good if you ask me! :)

Next is the cake I made for the closing of our summer vacation bible school. Our theme this year was based on hot air balloons, so I created a hot air balloon cake. Anyway, I used the gel colors to fill it in and covered the board with some cloud scrapbooking paper :)

And last but not least is the birthday cakes I made for my niece Kayla's birthday in November. One is a Dora the Explorer cake made from the custom Dora pan and the other is my own version of "Backpack" (from Dora cartoons). I cut two 8x8 square cakes to make the backpack. Kayla seemed to enjoy them both so that made me happy :)

Hope you enjoy seeing these as much as I have enjoyed making them!