Decorated Cakes – Bead Yarn & Spatula

Happy New Year! The holidays are quickly winding down. Truthfully, and I think most would agree, the holidays just seemed to fly by this season. Mainly due to the short time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. With Thanksgiving falling so late there was less than a month to get everything ready for Christmas. Besides posting my annual Cookie Palooza recipes I just didn’t have time to blog anything else during the month of December. That doesn’t mean I didn’t do a lot of baking though. There were chocolate covered pretzels, Almond Biscotti (these were so good that I ended up baking a second batch the day after making the first), a few cakes (one of which was supposed to be a tangled lights decorated cake but turned into a congratulatory cake for my oldest niece after competing in her very first gymnastics tournament and placing in a few of the events), and of course cookies, cookies and more cookies. I baked about 300 cookies in one day and by the end of the day the smell of sweets and sugar was just too much for me to handle.

So here we are in a new year and a new decade. Truthfully it didn’t really dawn on me that a new decade was upon us until I was watching the news and they started talking about it. I was just thinking of how the year had gone by so fast. And granted one could say that about every year, but, 2019 in particular seemed to fly by to me. I was thinking about things that happened and they didn’t seem like months ago but more so days ago. I have heard that one of the perils of getting older is that time goes by faster. Maybe it’s because you have a greater realization of things happening. As a kid I think you forget more than you remember but as an adult everything that happens gets filed away so it’s easy to measure things by the events in our lives. My dad has been gone 4 years and I still measure things from before and after his death as well as before and after he got sick. I’ll remember something or see something from a particular year and I measure it against these dates. Not always a good thing. But, it is a good reminder to me of how quickly things can change and can happen. It’s true what they say that life can change in the blink of an eye.

And for many a new year means resolutions to change things in their lives or do things differently. I myself have never made a New Year’s resolution. I personally believe that there is no time like the present to make a change for the better. Every day you are given the opportunity to do things better and/or differently than the day before. So why not grab on to that as opposed to waiting for the year to change. Let’s say you fail at your resolution in February, does that mean you should wait 10 months to try again? Absolutely not! So, instead of resolutions I’ll look back and see if I have grown as a person over the course of time. Of course there are things that I would like to be different, but, at the end of the day I am content. And being content makes it a bit easier to work on those things that I would like to change.

So, what’s on my plate for 2020 so far… A semi-monumental college reunion that I may or may not attend and a pretty exciting vacation! And of course more baking and crafting. Next month marks 8 years that I have been blogging. And while I may not have the amount of followers that others have, I am still trudging along and thankful for those of you who do follow me and welcome any and all new readers. I enjoy baking, crafting, photographing, writing, and everything else that makes up my blog so I will continue on! Besides, good things come to those who wait.

I leave you with two pics…

A pic of the Christmas cake I made (this was totally not the design I had in mind for this cake, but, I had a frosting fail at 10p on a work-night so I had to improvise and was happy with the outcome)…

And the cake I made for New Year’s Eve – I decided to try out the decorated sheet cake trend. After piping the designs on to the cake I then sprayed it with Wilton’s Color Mist in pearl and sprinkled it with a mixture of festive sprinkles…

Happy 2020!

So, if you follow me on Instagram or if you take a peek at my Instagram feed on the lower right-hand side of this page you’ll notice that I post more of my baking adventures on there than I actually blog about. It’s for various reasons… Sometimes I’ve already blogged and shared the recipe or as this post is about, its pictures of cakes that I have made and decorated and don’t blog about because I am really bad at taking pictures of the step by step of decorating them. So, I decided that since I made a fair share of cakes this summer I would compile them into a post and give a little description of each.

Up first, a Lion Guard themed birthday cake that I made for a friend’s daughters’ 2nd birthday. Whenever I create these themed fondant cakes quite a bit of thought goes into them and a bit of Pinterest surfing. A week before I actually made the cake I did some prep work by cutting out all the leaves, flowers and animals and stored them in my refrigerator.

And then the following week it was time to bake, frost, roll fondant and assemble. After covering the base cake with yellow fondant I painted it orange to give the effect of a sunset. To do so, I combined orange gel color with vodka. I didn’t completely mix the two so I would get different shades of orange as the gel color diluted into the vodka. Once the color was dry I attached all of the cut-outs I made the week before to the cake and topped it with some Lion Guard figurines I picked up from my local Disney Store.

For the 4th of July I created this patriotic cake.

The inside was patriotic as well…

As a belated birthday gift for a dear friend I made this adorable cake topped with a bright big sunflower and some cute purple flowers that I am not sure the name of. To decorate the sides of the cake I piped ruffles vertically using a 1M tip.

And finally, this past weekend I made this cake for another dear friend’s birthday. It was truly a death by chocolate cake… A chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and the filling was the mocha cream that I used for the Mocha Chocolate Icebox Cake I blogged about last week. I knew I had to use that delicious cream again for something and what better way than with chocolate cake. I created the dark and white chocolate toppers for this cake by melting Wilton candy melts and then piping them into small drops using a Wilton 6B tip and then placing them in the refrigerator so they could set. The other drops are the mocha cream which I piped using the 6B as well as a 4B tip.