Ruffle Rose Cake

This cake is for my mum, I've been doing cakes for 2 years and this is the first time I got a chance to do a cake for her. She happened to visit Australia for my little brother's graduation from Uni. She loves shoes and handbags and first thing came to mind is to do a cake related to shoes and handbags. But after second thought I decided to make something feminine and elegant for her.

This ruffle rose design has been around for quite sometime and I really wanted to do this design so I decided to do it for my mum. It's not as simple as it looks and I did found difficulties at times but at the end I managed to pull something quite decent. It is time consuming and took a lot of effort to do.

For the topper I decided to do my favorite peony, this time in white and open wide as the center of attention. For the top tier I used my new airbrush set (a Christmas gift from my wife) to give it pearly sheen. The pearls was last minute addition as I thought the tier looked too bare without anything.

It was 4 faced ruffle roses all around the cake, took me approximately 3 hours to finish this small tier. The bottom tier was 6 inch and top tier was 5 inch yet it took me forever to finish the ruffle.

My beautiful mum with her birthday cake, I had so much fun doing this cake and her reaction was priceless.

This is my last entry for 2013, it's been a wonderful year. I had amazing opportunities to learn and try new techniques and the highlight of this year cake-wise was being featured in Cake Central magazine.

I want to say thank you to all my supporters with your positive comments on Facebook and word-of-mouth recommendations. I'm a hobby baker that hopes to turn this cake decorating as a sound business venture. Hopefully year 2014 will be my year to realize the dream, thanks again and have a safe holiday and Happy New Year 2014.

Rustic Wedding Cake

One of our bridesmaid was getting married and she asked me to do her wedding cake. I've been quite close to Indira the bride because she's really easy to be around with, always positive and open minded. When she asked me to do her wedding cake unlike other bride she left everything up to me I mean everything.

Her only brief was the wedding going to be in a vineyard and it has sort of like rustic feeling to it and her color was green. First came to my mind was sugar succulent which is quite popular lately, it's still uncommon and quirky and fit to the rustic theme.

This is my first time did sugar succulent and I love how easy and great it turned out to be. The branches idea came to me when I visited Cake Expo in Melbourne, I saw one of the cake has succulent and branches on it. The challenge is to find what branches to use. At first, I was thinking to use dried curly willow so I went to the florist and informed that they don't sell dried willow only fresh willow and it will get dry if taken out of water for a couple of weeks, yeah right I only have like 4 days until the wedding.

So I took the change and bought the fresh curly willow and took it out of the water. At the end it worked out better because the fresh branches are easier to handle.

I accompanied the cake with a dozen of cupcakes decorated with sugar succulents. It's not your usual wedding cake so I was quite nervous if Indira doesn't like it but when I showed her the pictures I took when I saw her outside the church she approved it phew.

Me the baker hehehehe

Look how beautiful the venue was

Cutting the cake, seriously that vintage table was very wobbly I was scared that the cake toppled to the ground

The traditional sharing the cake (or cupcakes)

It was a very fun day and we enjoyed beautiful weather at the wedding, happy wedding Indira and Mike may you love each other for the rest of your life.

Thanks for checking my blog, I will update you with more projects.

Peonies Wedding Cake

Okay, when the bride first contacted me she failed to mention this is a wedding cake. Well practically this is not a wedding cake, this is a surprise birthday cake for the groom (so sweet) but it serves as wedding cake too. Ok I'll stop, before I confuse you even further.

Peony is my all time favorite flower in fact it's my wedding flower I think I like it because the fact that peony is huge and looks so dominant. So when the bride asked me to do peonies I jumped with joy, reason being I have peony cutter which I bought last year and I haven't got a chance to use it.

OK, back again this is a birthday cake for the groom with his Initial on top. I didn't even know that it was the bride who ordered the cake I thought she was ordering as part of a group of friends who wants to surprise the groom on his wedding/birthday.

How did I know the one ordering the cake was the bride? When I delivered the cake her name was on the venue announcement (D'ohhh) I secretly thought that she's a best friend who secretly had a crush on the groom (talking about 'My Best Friend's Wedding).

The designed was from the bride, she asked me to do a square cake as the bottom tier and placed stages of groom's life on each side of the cake, here goes:

When he was a baby

When he was a boy

When he graduated from Uni ( I forgot to paint the frame gold on this one when I took the photo, but I did paint it gold after the photo shoot done)

When he marries his dream girl.

I think this cake is so sweet and I bet the groom was so touched with how far his bride went to get a surprise cake for him. Thanks for checking my blog, I will update you with my next projects.

Romantic Wedding Cake

I've been stalking Rob Ben Israel lately, looking at his YouTube videos, his website, NYC girls' blog and fascinated by his creations. So when a couple asked me to do their wedding cake and the asked for suggestion I pitched this idea inspired by Ron Ben Israel style.

The cake is 4 tier cake with dummy tier served as flower arrangement holder. I've been taking flower making classes in Craftsy and learned how to make sugar flowers from Jacquelin Buttler. I used technique she tought on her sugar flowers class to do the filler flowers.

Flowers I used on this cake dominantly are roses with small filler flowers and hydrangeas. As requested by the bride, roses colors were soft pink, ivory, and hot pink with green from leaves and hydrangeas as accent.

Making the cake is not a challenge, the challenge was time. I'm still working full time as sales reps and it required me to travel interstate. The week this cake was due I was out of town the whole week back on Friday and cake needs to be delivered on Sunday. So I had to do the flowers ahead of time, I made all the flowers a week before, otherwise hey won't set and unusable.

The other challenge was to make the couple's initial with romantic type, I didn't have the patient to hand cut them so I think think and think. At last I came out with the idea to hand drawn (or written) them directly on the plaque. It turned our pretty good and I love the technique.

Other challenge was transporting this cake, I think this one is the heaviest and tallest by far. Since the second bottom tier was dummy cake, this cake is sort of top heavy so carrying it took extra caution. This cake was so tall I can see the top of the bouquet when I looked at my rear view mirror in my SUV.

Thank God the venue had a food trolley which I can borrow to transport the cake. I think this cake turned out well and the bride send me a message thanking me for making the cake. I was grateful I got the change to do this beautiful cake inspired by Ron Ben Israel and hoping that  got to do more cakes like this in the future.

Thanks for checking my blog, I will update you with my next project.

Cake Central Fashion Issue 2013

Hi everyone,

OK OK it's been a while it's been a while, or may I say it's been too long. After 18 months diligently blogging my cakes I've been a slack for the last 6 months.

OK in case you don't know already, my cake was featured on Cake Central Magazine!!!!! I still can't believe it that I could be so lucky.

Here's the badge of honor, I'm so thrill and humbled as I thought my cake might not be good enough for and international cake magazine.

OK here's the story, back in April this year I received an email from Cake Central with this subject: 'Cake Central Magazine Interested In Featuring Your cake'. My initial thought this must be a scam, even though I'm a member in Cake Central website I'm not extremely active on the forum etc, what I did was just uploading pictures of my cake.

So I followed the link and it's seems pretty legit. They send me images below with instruction to do a cake draw inspiration from this beautiful dress.

Along with the instruction and deadline they make it clear to have plenty of pictures and suggestion to use professional. My first thought was my friend Klara from Unikblue Photography, she contacted me to do a cake for her son's birthday (Circus Cake). As I only doing cake for hobby, hiring professional photography is too expensive for an uncertainty investment (my cake may or may not be featured). So I did a deal with Klara to have a photo session done by her talented husband Steve and I do the cake in return and it went well.

So one sunny Sunday morning we had a photo shoot located in my office. We decided to use my office because the lobby got concrete wall to match the theme. The photos was fantastic but at that point I'm not sure if the cake is good enough to be featured. It's just very simple and not much technique to showcase.

I drew the inspiration from the petals and tried to mimic the dress, at point I thought it's too literal but I went with my initial impression of the dress and how I envisioned the cake.

I stayed with the true color of the dress and go with ivory. As the dress is very long and slender I decided to have a double barrel to make it look tall and slender.

The technique on making the peals is very straight forward, using rose petal cutter on gumpaste and I leave it over night to harden in shape before ensemble it.

 The tricky part is how to make it flow and drop like fabric on the dress. I used royal icing to ensemble them and it took good 3 hours to ensemble the petals. It's so funny that I remember what movie was on TV while I did some cakes (not all but some). I remember 'Under the Tuscan Sun) was on while I did this cake. Very fitting with the romantic theme of the cake.

At the end I uploaded 30 photos done by Steve, and waiting for them to come back to let me know whether I made it or not and this was back in April.

Without knowing when is the actual magazine intended to be published days and weeks and months went by without and news and I let go on my dream of being featured in Cake Central Magazine. At one point I was so tempted to publish this cake on my blog as one of the instruction was not to publish it anywhere or I will loose the opportunity to be featured. At that point I was certain that I didn't make it.

Until, one day in July I received and email saying that my cake was considered to be feature and their on the final stage of making decision. Along with a notification not to publish it anywhere, lucky I haven't done it yet. So the hope was still there and I was so excited.

One morning at the end of August, I received an email to confirm that my cake was featured on Cake Central Magazine. I can here confetti and fireworks went off in my head and I can't stop smiling for the whole day.

I was so proud and humbled that my far from perfect cake was featured along other beautiful cakes.  To share the lime light with talented cake artists around the world was a very great opportunity and I would like to dedicated this to my beautiful wife that always supported me in whatever I do.

Thanks for checking in my blog I hope you're not bored as I have posted photos on facebook. But I have tons of cakes to blog and I promise not to keep you wait for too long.

Giant Rose Anniversary Cake

This cake is for charity that I did for my community. One of the community couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary and other members commissioned me to do a cake with Chinese theme.

I know this is not the best interpretation on Chinese theme but I used the colors red and gold. At first I was planning to dusk the red rose petals with gold lustre dusk. However things didn't go as plan because I experimented with new brand of fondant, red color fondant, eve though I saved a lot of time by buying ready made red fondant but this brand won't set regardless how many tylose I put in to it.

It's kinda a curse and blessing at the same time, curse because the petals keep falling off and blessing because the petals are still soft enough to manipulate when I placed them together.

At the end I wished I add double happiness cake topper on top of it as it didn't turn out Chinese enough hehehehehe. But with my red fondant refusing to set it's a bit impossible to make one out of fondant. Honestly it's been a while since I wanted to try this giant rose design, I'm quite happy with how it turned out but still think if the cake is taller than 2 tier it will be more dramatic.

Thanks for checking my blog, I will update you with my next project.

Rose Wedding Cake

I have to admit this is my first epic wedding cake, although I've done wedding cakes before and some cakes that I styled like a wedding cake but this one is the first one with traditional design.

I was approached by a friend of mine to do a wedding cake for her cousin. When we met the bride-to-be she was very knowledgeable about caking and stuff and things are easier because she knew exactly what she wanted. The bride gave us a beautiful cake photo that she likes and ask us to imitate the cake, an easy thing in term of designing but a bit intimidating because the example cake was done beautifully.

After back and forth emailing and throwing idea and arranging delivery etc we finally came to the week before the wedding. This cake is pretty special because this is the last cake we did in 2012 and we were leaving the country the next day so we were excited with the cake and our holidays.

On the week following the wedding I started with the sugar roses, as per suggestion from many cakers, make more as petals are very fragile and you don't want to have anything break while being assembled as it took sometime for sugar flower to set.

I spent a whole day creating 10 roses, 5 big ones and 5 smaller ones plus some rose leaves. The bride point out that on the picture she supplied the center of the roses has a slightly peachy color which I missed when I looked at the picture. I love how these roses have peachy center rather than all ivory, thanks to a great observation from the bride, told you she's good like that.

This cake constructed by 3 layer of Lapis Surabaya cake, it's Indonesian cake with spongy texture so it's not super firm and I have to play with my ganache to create structure. Especially the top bit, because they have tendency to caving downward so I literally have to pour ganache on to create flat workable surface.

I can't remember how many kilos of ganache this cake took but sure a lot of them. Look at the picture how they're sitting side by side waiting to set.

I then covered them with ivory fondant, not really a challenge but you never take everything lightly. Lucky I got everything done in fist attempt.

The next challenge is stacking them together, I had a long dowel running in the center of the cake from bottom layer to top layer and I have some dowels supporting each layer. I have to make sure the structure is spot on as Lapis Surabaya not really the kind of cake that holding any weight plus I have to drive this cake 1 hour across the town.

Final step of the day is pipping, the design supplied is quite intricate and required me to do delicate pipping slowly and consistently. Pipping is not my strongest skill but I pushed myself to deliver and I think at the end I finishes around 3am.

After few hour of sleep I finally woke up on the wedding day to arrange the flowers. I did my best to arrange the flower according to the picture supplied. Even though my roses is not exactly the same as the supplied picture, I kind of like it because it is something that is 'me' that I contributed to the cake.

The roses definitely lifted up the cake to a whole new level, once I placed them all I stepped back and really see how it's officially a wedding cake now.

In real life you can see a faint touch of peach color in the center of the roses which gave the roses new dimension, all credit to a very observant bride-to-be.

I used an oversize cake board to make sure that the bottom roses sit on the cake board instead of squashed to the side of the bottom tier.

When I took the cake to the venue, I was hoping that I get to set up the table and placed the cake myself and of course took some picture of the cake in the venue. However, we arrived to early and the venue is not set yet and the cake table was nowhere to be seen. So I didn't get a chance to take any picture of the cake in the venue.

I had mixed feeling while doing this cake, at one point I was very excited, at one point I was kinda scare because this is someone's wedding cake the pressure to get everything perfect. At the end I was really happy with how the cake turned out and looked back at the journey and really glad for the lesson I learned by doing this cake.

While we were on our holiday we received a text message from the bride: 'Happy New Year!! Not sure if you have returned from holiday or not?! Just wanted to say a big thanks for the wedding cake it was absolutely lovely!! Just how I imagined it to be. All the details on the cake was there including silver beads.' This text message was made our day and made all the hard work paid off. Thanks for the bride who trusted us with her wedding cake and I wish I can cater for weddings more oftern.

Thank you for checking my blog, I will definitely update you with my next project.

Wedding Cakebot

This is our first wedding cake and we're so excited when Jaslyn asked us to do her wedding cake. Jaslyn is Bakerz Mum uni friend and fellow architect. As an architect with creative mind unusual theme comes as natural. Thinking that I will do a traditional wedding cake with sugar flowers and pipping details, she came with robot theme. At first I thought she will ask us to do a 3D robot cake (R2D2 came to mind), but apparently she wanted only the cake topper to be Mr & Mrs robot, easy I thought.

Jaslyn sent us 3D modeling image of the cake topper she wanted, the design is quite simple and seems doable. She wanted the neck, hands and legs are actual screws and the body with metallic finish so I went to hardware store to find some nuts and bolts.

So I worked on my fondant to make the cake topper using fondant mixed with tylose powder. I utilize nuts and bolts to create robot like form according to the image Jas sent me. After hours spent and a day to let the whole thing dried I tested the topper and placed it on top of cake dummy. Nothing worked as the nuts and bolts are to big and heavy, the fondant also too heavy for the bolts to hold and I found difficulty securing the topper on the cake. I ended up frustrated and freaked out as the wedding day is approaching and it put a lot of pressure on me.

My first attempt, didn't work

After clearing my mind and decided to start over again, I learned from my mistake. I went and got smaller screws and was thinking to do the body with rice krispie treat. I went around shopping mall to get some inspiration and ended up in art supplies store. I found small styrofoam cones, a styrofoam pilar and small styrofoam eggs. I took them home and with a little of imagination I cut them to size and covered them with fondant, inserted some screws with help of hot glue gun and voila I got my cake topper. 

The finished cake topper

The day was such a beautiful day, we drove early in the morning for an hour to the wedding venue and delivered the cake. We had the ceremony in the park and it was just beautiful, the bride and groom surrounded by their family and closest friends, some even flew in from overseas.

The reception venue is over looking polo field serves as gorgeous backdrop of a gorgeous day and the weather is what everyone would as for a wedding. Luckily the bride and groom are happy with how the cake turned out.

Beautiful Bride and Groom with their cake

Congratulation Fooch and Jaslyn for your wedding and thanks for trusting to us to do your wedding cake. We wish all the happiness on your marriage and may you blessed with many children.

Thanks everyone for checking, I will update you with my next project.