Happy "Ice Cream Sundae" Friday!

Sundae! Stripey "cup"!

Cutie custom flag for Mia's 3rd birthday!

Dive on in! The ice cream's fine!

Banana slices and sprinkly bits

MEGA SPOON! Heehee

Celebrate life... with cake!

ICE CREAM SUNDAE cake! Even my own cake-making eyes were tricked by the scoop of vanilla "ice cream" peeking out of this red and white striped ice cream cup. I just loved doing this order - it was lots of fun and I was chuckling the whole time. Leila really wanted an ice-cream themed cake for her daughter Mia's 3rd birthday - I was thinking of using my round sphere cake pans to make ice cream balls so did a little research and came across this wonderful inspiration!

So hilarious, and of course I love making fake food cakes so much...

The cake was dark chocolate with vanilla buttercream with chocolate ganache. The decor is vanilla buttercream, more ganache for the chocolate syrup and fondant bananas and fondant ruffly wafer cookie!

A sweet email from Leila post-cake:

"The cake was a hit!!!! And this is probably the first time in 5 years that there's no left over...not even the crumbs! Thanks again for your fabulous work, and for making a 3 year old girl (and her family) very, VERY happy! She was all smiles :)"

This is what cake-making is all about to me.

Thanks so much Leila for the fun order and happy happy birthday little Mia! xo Lyndsay

Burger Heaven: Burger Cake, Fries 'n Soda!

Man oh man. If there's one cake I don't mind doing over again it's the Hamburger Cake Classique. It kills me every time!

Marissa asked me if I could do a burger cake for her husband Steve's birthday... her excitement and enthusiasm for the cake was matched by my own hyperness -- I love the magic of cake! Colour some buttercream, trick the eye with squiggles of "mustard" and leaves of fresh green "lettuce" and blobs of "ketchup." Roll out orangey fondant super thin and cut into squares then triangles, and you've got a cheeseburger! Personally I like my burgers a little more rare than charred... but you can blame the rich dark cocoa powder I used for the burger patty cake layer... ^__^

The cutesville kicker on this cake -- SODA AND FRIES! I was just going to make the soda and fries for display and for photos... but they turned out so cute I turned them into their own flags and poked them in to the top of the cake. I did a stripey cake board and matching flag. The cake itself was vanilla cake and chocolate cake, and between the layers of cake there was dark chocolate ganache...

I got a really cute email from Marissa the next day:

"I had to really be careful to preserve as much of its cuteness as possible when cutting it. The first cut was, indeed, the deepest."

CUTE!!!

I know how much I loved this cake because this was the last cake I made over a painful/delightful/extremely tiring weekend of pure cakeing... but I had so much energy in creating it because I was seriously so stoked on it.

Happy Birthday Steve! You've got a super cool wife! ^__^

Salmon Nigiri Birthday Cake!

I've come to the realization that, apart from making beautiful little artful cupcakes, making cakes that look like other types of food is one of my favourite Coco Cake things to do. (See: hamburger cake, pizza cake, fish cake...) There is just an inherent sense of comedy and whimsy in this concept that I find really hilarious and satisfying! The "salmon nigiri" cake is no different-- I was chuckling the whole way through while making this, and was excited to take on this new project. I ended up making it monstrously large by accident, thus undercharging for it, but I have learned for next time the amount of time and labour involved in this one! So here goes, for all my Coco Cake friends and fans:

THE MAKING OF THE SALMON NIGIRI CAKE! by Coco Cake!

I baked two rather large dark chocolate sheet cakes! So I began by filling the center, then began carving the edges to even out the layers and to make it more smooth and nigiri-like. I covered a large piece of cardboard in nice green paper for my cake board! I thought the green would be a nice contrast to the final product, the red salmon topped cake...

I did two coatings of vanilla buttercream: First the crumb coat, and then another on top of this one... I tuck wax paper under the cake while frosting it so the buttercream doesn't grease up the nice green-paper-covered cakeboard!

Next: I commissioned my husband to help me roll out this huge piece of white sugar fondant, enough to smooth over this big ol' cake, as my right wrist is still killing me from excessive buttercream-piping and other such cakeworld hazards-what a guy my RT is!! Then I carefully rolled the fondant on top of my cake, patted it down and tucked in all the edges and made it all smooth. I had also cut out 300 pieces of "rice" shaped fondant, so I set to work brick-laying the rice on the sides of the cake!

Finishing up the "rice"...

Ah yes, finally decent enough daylight for some natural light photos! (I started this cake verrry early in the morning)... I moved my cake over closer to the windows... heh heh...

The secret comedy/sight gag inside the nigiri cake-- just a little bit of green buttercream for WASABI underneath the salmon!! This is an unseen detail on the finished product, but my hope was that when the receivers of this cake cut into the nigiri, a little chuckle would be had with the secret "wasabi" ! Heehee!

Et voila! The finished product! I hand tinted a large ball of fondant to make the "salmon" using a mix of red and orange gel colour, rolled it out and cut it to shape... I also made white fondant "strips" for the striations in the salmon... and placed it carefully on top! Next up was to make the extra details: wasabi rose and ginger...

I made a green fondant "wasabi rose" and thin strips of light pink fondant "ginger". I taped down that little piece of plastic grass (I actually had a packet of these grass papers from Fujiya that I had bought for my last year's trompe l'oeil party!)

Close-up of party flag and condiments... !

Detail of the salmon nigiri cake...

So there you have it! One thing that could have been added is of course a soy sauce packet, or little bowl of soy sauce! Which I will make for the next sushi cake... I like the comedy value of the fact that if that was my salmon nigiri piece, there is NO WAY that's enough ginger slices or wasabi for me! But the dainty wasabi rose and ginger was too cute to make a huge pile of it...!

Fun times at Coco Cake HQ! Thanks for tuning in, and Happy Birthday Martin! Hope you flipped out over your nigiri cake! :)

Coco Cake's Pizza Party Cake! Fo Real!

Zing!! How cool would it be to work at a great local Vancouver design/marketing/programming firm, and get treated to WICKED AWESOME things for your birthday? Man. That's boosting staff morale. I approve, hard. The amazing Engine Digital in Vancouver ordered a hee-larious cake for one of their staff members... a PIZZA CAKE. You may remember Coco Cake partying it up with the hamburger cake in the past... Now here comes pizza! I made it into a tutorial style thing too so you can make your own!!

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PIZZA CAKE TUTORIAL

This puppy above is a 14 inch round cake. It's a biggie. It can feed a lot of people!! I did a bit of googling to see how many cups of batter I would need. I did a very scientific comparison (NOT!) and found that I would need to basically make enough batter for 48 cupcakes! I doubled my usual 2 dozen vanilla cupcake recipe for this. Worked perfect! I baked it at 325 degrees for about 60 minutes, watching pretty closely.

I bought some fancy Callebaut white chocolate for the "cheese." Then I grated it into a party pile. I made fondant pepperoni, tomatoes, mushrooms, green pepper and olives too, while humming "pizza party!" Did you know white chocolate really IS chocolate? It's made from the cocoa butter of the cacao bean. But, sometimes you'll find some waxy stuff that pretends it is white chocolate but is just made up of oils. Read those ingredients!

"Rich!!!! Can you go get a slice of pizza from 4 Brothers and ask them if they will give you a box???" --"Yes dear..." It cost 50 cents!!! I soaked my big old cake round with simple syrup, then I frosted it with some tomato-sauce-colored vanilla buttercream! A weird color, methinks. I used red food gel, mixed with a bit of brown.

Fromage time! Sprinkle-dee-doo, I sprinkled my white chocolate all over.

Time to arrange my hilarious toppings! A year ago I bought this awesome mushroom cookie cutter with the intention of making smurf-like mushroom sugar cookies. But I got burnt out on the pain of sugar cookies, so I finally got to use it on my "pizzaz" cake!

A close up. Looks pretty good I think! The pepperoni reminds me of my husband's veggie meat slices, heh heh... (he's a vegetarian. Ex-vegan, even!)

Oh yah, I added the words "Shady" to the cake, by request... but I hid them to make it look like the rest of the green peppers.

Ding, dong, your pizza's here!! Man, I am seriously craving real pizza now... eeks... !!!

Happy Birthday Dane! Hope you liked your pizza cake! If you were these guys you totally would be flippin'!!