I'm finally getting started!

Wow! I've been so busy these past few days, but here I am finally submitting my first entry. I thought I'd start with something really fun that I did over the summer. For my boyfriend Anthony's birthday I was asked to create a fabulous cake. So I quite willingly took up the challenge knowing that I had to bring something awesome to the table. Anthony himself is a very talented chef and not so easy to impress. I learned that his favorite cake is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Good, easy enough. I made a basic yellow cake from scratch and a decadent chocolate cream cheese frosting. I'd go into more detail, but the point of this entry is to share how I achieved the decoration part since it was the most fun (and frustrating!) component of the cake.

My inspiration for the cake was to take something from Anthony's childhood that he loved. Birthdays for me evoke feelings of nostalgia and I wanted to create a cake that would inspire some of those feelings for him as well. So what do I decide to do? Slap on a big ol' picture of his favorite Ninja Turtle Raphael! I'm pretty artistic and did lots of drawings as a child, but unfortunately my talent with pencil and paper does not transfer when it comes to icing and cake. You'd think it would though, right? Anyway, so I had to get creative and did some research for alternatives to a traditional icing decoration. That's when I discovered fruit roll-ups of all things. You're pretty limited when it comes to fruit roll-ups because they give you the 3 primary colors plus green. That means I had to make Raphael's orange color by stacking yellow on top of red (thank goodness fruit roll-ups are transparent!) But before I could even hassle with the colors, I had to draw Raphael first. That was the easy part. Once he was to my liking, I cut out his body parts into individual pieces. Then I put each piece on the color I needed and then cut around the pattern. Then I found out how sticky and stretchy the fruit roll-ups can get. I ruined the first few pieces because they melted and fell apart. So I had to back up and put the roll-ups in the freezer. That made all the difference when the pieces were frozen - much easier to cut. After I had all the pieces cut out it was as simple as putting a puzzle together. But it was still tedious work. I started from the bottom with Raphael's belt and worked my way up. I filled in the gaps and the details with writing frosting just out of a tube. It actually turned out a lot better than I thought! I'll definitely use this technique for cakes in the future.

The cake was a huge success and I never saw Anthony more pleased! If anyone ever uses this technique, please post and tell us all about it!