Chocolate Covered Goodness!

Sometimes it seems surreal, but almost a decade ago, I met my absolute best friend. We weren't exactly friends at first, but one fateful weekend in our old sorority house, when everyone else had gone home for a break, Gen and I had no choice but to bond. Since then we've done practically everything together. (You know, except for the fact that she has a husband and a kid now, but that's besides the point.) 

Anyway, two weeks ago I got to celebrate Gen's 27th birthday with her. How better to do so than with an epic cake and some new Jessica Simpson shoes! If you don't know me, I LOVE shoes! Evan thinks I have a problem. Maybe I do, but I love the fact that Gen and I wear the same size! 

Nicole, Gen and me in our FAB shoes!
We all love shoes and share excellent taste,
if I do say so myself! :) 

While putting on our dancing shoes and hitting up our favorite places in Buckhead was fun, the cake definitely deserves a mention! I usually try to surprise people, but I pretty much run everything by Gen, so why should this time be any different? I asked her what kind of cake she wanted. She said "chocolate with strawberries. Nothing too fancy."

You really want me to do something simple? I didn't think so! I took her idea and I ran with it.

I knew I wanted to do something with strawberries in the middle and I knew I wanted to layer it a little. Kinda like a trifle, but not really. I started with the basic chocolate cake (2 of them actually) and baked them in the awesome 9x square pans my mom just bought me (thanks mom!). After they cooled, I sliced them and put a thin layer of cream cheese icing on the first layer. Then I put a layer of strawberries on top of that.

A note about the strawberries: I cut them up, sprinkled them with sugar and let them sit for a while. When I say I sprinkled them, that is a lie...I actually poured sugar on them, but I suggest just sprinkling because pouring lead to a massive mess later.

After the strawberries I added a layer of homemade cream cheese-based whipped cream. This stuff was AMAZING! I can't even pretend to be humble about this. It was a total success. You blend the cream cheese and sugar together with my secret ingredient: 2 teaspoons of ALMOND EXTRACT. My Nana is probably fussing at me from Heaven because she believed religiously in vanilla extract and would NEVER have put cream cheese in her whipped cream, but let me tell you...this was a whole new ball game, Nana...you would have been proud. Whip in the heavy whipping cream until it makes a stiff peak. Layer that on top of the strawberries. Add another layer of cake, icing, strawberries and whipped cream. One more layer of cake and you're finished with the inside of the cake.

Stick it in the freezer for a minute while you mix the fondant. I set some aside once it was mixed and left it white. Then I mixed up the color for the rest of it. I was trying to make red, but unfortunately I mixed pink in there instead. Fortunately it ended up looking really pretty so I decided not to freak out about it. Later. I did freak a little at the time and my hands were stained pink for quite some time.

With the leftover white fondant, I did something that most people would call...obsessive. I rolled it all into little tiny balls to look like pearls. :) Pearls make everything classier!

Once the cake was cooled and delicious looking, I covered it with the same cream cheese icing and then rolled out the fondant and placed it over top. Then I stuck it back in the freezer. For good measure. And to solidify its perfection.

While that was going on, I decided to cover some strawberries in chocolate and drizzle with white chocolate on top. Then I did that on the cake too. Top it off with the strawberries and add the pearls at the bottom and voila! You've got a masterpiece for your mouth. Delicious!

Happy Birthday, bestie! So happy we've been friends for so long! You're the best!

It's Good to be the King

I love making cakes! It's by far my new favorite thing to do, so I jumped at the opportunity to make a cake for my friend Ben's 34th birthday!

Ben loves Crown Royal. Ben loves a lot of other things too, but one of the first things I found out about him was how much he loves Crown Royal. Therefore, when Ben's wife, Phyllis, called and asked me if I had any creative ideas for his birthday, I immediately googled "Crown Royal cake" and came up with my own plan of action.

First I made 2 cakes (red velvet mix, cream cheese icing- this is his favorite icing flavor and I always like to pair it with red velvet cake...) and let them cool. Because I have a crappy apartment and a crappy oven and really crappy cake pans, the cakes came out a LITTLE lopsided. By a little I mean a LOT! (side note...now would be a perfect time for SOMEONE to save up for some nice cake pans...or a house...unless you're saving for something else...

sigh.

fine. cake pans it is)

Anyway, luckily for me, I was able to put the thin side of one on the thick side of the other and it ended up more or less level. With a thin layer of icing in the middle it looked pretty great. Then I eyeballed the shape of a Crown Royal bottle. It wasn't that hard, but if you're nervous, print out an image and cut around. Cover it with icing to crumb coat and prepare for the fondant.

Here comes the fun part! And boy oh boy am I glad Evan was there to help with this part.

I was trying to be cost conscious, so I bought white fondant and some candy coloring. I used this instead of icing coloring because it's not water based and using water-based food coloring in fondant can cause it to break down and soften, rendering it useless. I played with some colors (creating a very unsuccessful brown that is not suitable for human eyes) until I got the proper brown for the bottle, yellow for the cap and purple for the bag. This takes quite a bit of lower arm strength and your hands will get discolored and cuticles will look like crap for a while. Thanks for the help, Evan!

I rolled them out (pretty thick for the bottle so you can make lines in it like on the bottle--the rest pretty thin) and placed them on the cake. First the brown over the entire bottle. Smooth. Then the label in white. Brush a small amount of water on the back of the label and place on the cake. Repeat with the cap and band around the cap.

Here comes that iconic purple bag. I had fun with this one! I played around with it a few times before getting it perfect. I rolled it out, folded part of the top over so it looked like the section where the tie goes. Then I kinda gathered it up like folds in fabric and placed it on the cake. But I forgot to put water down first. So I held the folds in place and picked up sections and brushed water on the area under and placed it gently back down. I also used some extra yellow to make the cording. I rolled it out kindergarten snake style and twisted them together.

I had already gotten Evan to wrap it in plastic wrap but we took a picture of what it should look like thus far...

The next day I painted on the details by combining lusterdust and clear vanilla extract into little paint buckets. I brushed the gold paint onto the label and the cap and ties, bronze onto the bottle and purple onto the bag. I added a little food coloring (because I was too lazy to go to Michael's AGAIN to get more luster dust in the right colors) and it worked out pretty well but a little runny. I made red and purple for the details on the label. I also used the gold luster dust to write Ben's name on the bag and add some details. Here's a hint with that one though, maybe try writing the name on the bag BEFORE you put it on the cake because it was really difficult to do it after. Anyway, sorry for glossing over the last details, but you can be creative after you get the basic shape done. Here's what the finished product looked like. The lighting is quite a bit different, but you get the idea!

Hopefully will have some pics of people enjoying the cake later! :) I really should have taken my own pictures this time, but I had a little bit going on. 

OH! Forgot to mention that for party favors, I made the same oreo truffle recipe from before but did them as pops and just went with purple candy coating. Added some edible confetti with some corn syrup to make it a little more glittery. Then Evan bagged them up and I tied purple ribbons around them and BAM! All done! :) 

Happy Birthday, Ben! Hope it was the best day ever!

You Got a DREAM? In Hollywood, Everybody's got a DREAM!

After a trip to LA with the boy and this Hollywood themed baby shower, I feel like an expert on celebrities! :) Well, maybe I didn't see any real celebrities in California, but I certainly saw quite a few celebrity impersonators at Gen's baby shower!

I cannot believe that my best friend is about to have a baby, but throwing this shower and celebrating with all her family and friends really made it real!

I have to start out by saying that I had the best co-planners imaginable for this shower! Rachel and Petty and I had such a blast putting this all together. Kudos to Petty for the unique (and very Genesis appropriate) theme! After some very productive brainstorming sessions, we had a plan of attack! Petty was in charge of the food and did a FANTASTIC job! Rolled deli sandwiches, pasta salad and spinach salad with feta and cranberries...delish!

Rachel was our baked-goods goddess! She made such a fantastic strawberry cake in the shape of a popcorn bucket. Cute and fantastic!

She and I also had a wonderful time getting absolutely filthy making the Hollywood sign backdrop! Just a quick how-to on this one:

I got a blue sheet from Wally-World (mostly so I didn't have to paint the blue of the sky) and laid it out on top of a plastic drop cloth so as not to ruin my cheap apartment carpet. Then I rolled some left-over black furniture paint onto the bottom half of the sheet to provide a base for the landscape. After allowing that to dry, Rachel and  I had fun! We took every shade of green and brown that I had in my paint-tackle box and squirted and squeezed it out onto the sheet. This, of course, looked AWFUL so we decided to use a couple of paper towels to give it a kind of sponged effect. This looked better but still not great so we folded the sheet back over on itself and blotted it and squished it and crumpled it up so we could make the colors look a tad more mottled. Finally we had something that remotely resembled a landscape!

Rachel had to go home to her adorable son, so I opened the windows and turned on the fans and let that sucker dry. While that was happening, I decided to cut out the letters for the sign. I figured that doing so would allow me to create the best consistency in the width, height and shape of the letters. I cut a piece of letter-sized cardstock down to 8x10 (or maybe a little smaller) and folded them in half to cut out my letters. I wanted to make sure the double letters were exactly the same (and, to be honest, I wanted to save myself some trouble), so I only cut out one of each of those. I used place holders when I laid them out so that I could  ensure the adequate spacing of the letters. I traced them and filled them in with white fabric paint. A couple times. A ton of times, that is...it was quite difficult to make it opaque enough. Then, for a little extra oomf, I covered them in white glitter. It was fantastic. I have to admit!

A couple of other little things we did that made things fun...

E! Microphone and Oscar statuette carved out of florist foam and covered in model magic.

Cake Pops! (remember these from a few posts ago?) Thanks so much to Rachel's roommate, Casey, and her friend Alex for helping us so much with these! You guys saved us so much time!!

Casey also created these awesome paper mums for us! Not only did she save us time, but she saved us money as well. Flowers are expensive!!

Ballot box and ballots for our "most likely mom" awards! There was also a nominee list so everyone could vote, even if they didn't know anyone else at the shower!

Last, but not least, my absolute favorite piece of the puzzle! I created this poster using the same method I did for the giant map a while back. I modeled it on the original "A Star is Born" poster. I recreated the same feeling for the background and everything in Photoshop. It was quite a bit of work, but it was well worth it!

We added in a red carpet and some hand painted details and we had a fabulous time!

 I was so thrilled with the way everything gelled together and how much fun everyone seemed to have! Thank you all for helping us with the details and especially those of you who stayed and cleaned up!