2009: A Year of cakes for Boys: part 1

At our house, we could have titled this past year,"Boys R Us". Between Star Wars play-dates and pirate birthday parties, somehow word must have gotten out to our clients who all seemed to be celebrating their own amazing boys as well. This 4 foot high monument to the Yankees was made for a truly gorgeous Bar Mitzvah party designed by event planner, Marcy Blum which was held at the new Yankee Stadium.
I was so lucky to enlist the talents of some of my favorite cake makers to help to execute this design, since this was a very last minute order---only one week to do the whole project:LizShim, Mark Randazzo and Dan Pasky & my wonderful extern Kristen Veloria.Kristen's husband Anthony and Patti Paige just stopped by to say hi--- but got put to work instead! A very special thank you to Catherine Leonard photography for being so kind and supportive and letting us use these great photographs of the finished cake!

Holiday Smiles

Happy Holidays! baked with love, and kisses:

Read-to-me Cakes

With very little time and even less brain power to come up with a teacher's gift this year, luckily I came across this really warm and wonderful idea from Bakerella.

Below is our version, (baked with Sam, 5) with one of our favorite books on top. Instead of cake balls, we used a round cookie cutter to cut cake and covered it in chocolate ganache. Tiny color-copied books were attached to rock sugar stirrers and skewers with hot glue:

Magical Bite of Gingerbread!

Is this the best idea ever?
I'm very much in LOVE with this perfect little gingerbread house by Patti Paige at Baked Ideas.

2009 Gingerbread Adventures Show at New York Botanical Garden

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Wolves!
This year's Gingerbread house theme is fairy tales and it was really fun making the safe and sturdy 3rd pig's brick house...
O.K., so the whole house is edible, but the wolf never needs to know. The truth is, I don't know what I was thinking... but those pigs and wolves were made of chocolate... and it was unseasonably hot... and the houses are displayed in a green house... I won't recount the gruesome details. Needless to say there is a new set of characters (very un-meltable) in that house now...a kind of a happily ever after ; )

Snug inside the house the pigs are constructing their own Gingerbread House in front of a cozy fireplace covered in multicolored jellybeans. Their rug is made of string licorice and the lamp is gum-balls. The art on the walls were drawn by 5 and 6 year-olds with edible markers.