Design Paul and Sarah wanted something simple, natural, flowing, relaxed and with the essence of Spring and the beginning of Summer.  They had given me several cake photos showing different elements that they liked.  After a short “interview” of going through the photos and getting to know them better, I was able to determine their sense of “design” that worked with their personalities as well as with the wedding theme.  Sarah was definitely the romantic type, so I worked with a flowing flower theme and their wedding colors of dusty pink, sage green and ivory to come up with this cake design.  To be honest, I never really had a clear picture of the finished cake in my mind like I usually do for my other cakes.  I didn’t even know what flowers I would use until the actual day of the wedding.  I just made a bunch of flowers, This cake simply just “came to be”.  It was definitely a lot more stressful because I didn’t have a final design, but it helped keep the cake more natural and free-form.

Cake I think I have a new favorite cake, and this is it.  It is a recipe slightly modified from the Dede Wilson lemon velvet buttermilk cake with a lemon simple syrup brushed onto each layer of cake.  This was a 4-layer cake with 3-layers of filling.  It is to die for alone or with the lemon curd!

Filling Creamy lemon curd and fresh strawberry Italian meringue buttercream fillings. They liked the idea of contrasting colors inside the cake, so I incorporated the wedding colors of green and pink inside the cake as well as outside the cake  The two outer layers were green tinted lemon buttercream and the middle layer was naturally pink strawberry buttercream which contrasted perfectly with the yellow-ivory colored cake layers.

Icing Lemon curd Italian meringue buttercream covered with vanilla fondant.

Decoration Gumpaste flowers tinted 3 shades of pink with sage green centers and sage green gumpaste leaves adorn the cake in a natural, flowing drape.

Thanks Many thanks to my friend, Poorti, who came over late one night to help make flowers. And, as always, many thanks to Blake for making the lemon curd, helping with the buttercream, assembling the flowers, delivery, etc, etc, etc.  He also took some amazing photos of this cake that would even make the official wedding photographer envious  Eventually he’ll get so good I’ll have to start paying him!

Design The design for this cake came straight from the advertising flier for this event which can be seen in the background behind the cake in some of the photos.  It shows a life preserver ring with the silhouette of a seal in the middle.  We simply made it three dimensional, not to mention edible, and put the cute little creature sitting in a life preserver ring floating on a little patch of ocean over a kelp forest as if he’d just been saved by the Marine Mammal Center.  He even has a little band-aid on his flipper….  To get enough “depth” for our ocean and kelp forest, we stacked three 10-inch round cake layers and then applied a thick layer of multi-colored blue-green “water”.

Cake We tried to come up with an “ocean” themed cake flavor, but the only thing that came to mind was the tropics.  So we decided on a delicious coconut cake.  I had fun trying out a few coconut cake recipes before I chose one made from coconut milk and shaved coconut.  The seal and life preserver are both made from pound cake which is denser and easier to carve without falling apart.

Filling To keep with the tropical theme, we incorporated a passion fruit Italian meringue buttercream made with passion fruit curd.  The tart passion fruit paired nicely with the coconut cake for a truly tropical flavor combination.

Frosting The frosting was coconut Italian meringue buttercream made with coconut milk and creme of coconut for a coconut “essence” that would not overwhelm the cake.

Decoration The seal was made using the teddy bear 3D pan and carved to about the right shape, lightly frosted and covered in black fondant.  The life preserver ring was similarly made using a bunt pan and carving off the ribs.  The team helped make the kit of parts including the chocolate shells and sea creatures as well as the gumpaste kelp and fondant band-aid.  The “sand” was simply made from graham cracker crumbs, straight out of the box.

Thanks The Steinberg Architects team came up with the overall design and helped make it all happen. The official team was comprised of my colleagues (from left to right), Priya, Lisa, Karie, myself and Shannon,.  There were several others from our office that popped in during our lunch time work sessions to help make all the chocolate shells and sea creatures. Lisa designed and created all the signage.  Karie  came over and stayed up late one night to help make the kelp.  Both Karie and Shannon came over early the day the cake was due to help finish it up as I was desperately behind schedule.  I gave Shannon (an interior designer) the fitting role of coloring buttercream.  And as you can see, everyone was there to help set the cake up at the event and apply all the decorations. Shannon massaged the seal with a bit of buttercream to give it a shiny, right out of the water look while I  stacked the cakes, applied the “water” frosting and piped the coral (coral color created by Shannon).  We all took up corners and applied the kelp.  Finally Lisa gave it some whiskers while the rest of us spread out the “sand” and artistically laid out the chocolate fish, shells and other sea creatures.  I have to say that it’s events like this that really bring your co-workers together on a more personable level.  We had a great time and I think we were all proud of the results (even though we didn’t win anything this year).  And for once, Blake had nothing to do with this cake since he was in LA.  Thanks to everyone who helped make this cake a success.  And now you are forever on my website too.

Design My father is an avid fisherman, so it was an easy choice to pick a fish as the theme for this cake.  The real question was which fish?  He most often fishes for trout and bass at Cachuma Lake.  But one of the fish he likes to fish for most is the beautiful California golden trout that is only found in high alpine lakes at altitudes greater than 10,000 feet.  Though they don’t put up much of a fight, the challenge with these fish is because they require so much effort to find.  They are also simply gorgeous in their coloring and I tried my best to recreate it on this cake.  I eyeballed the design using a photo of a golden trout that I printed off the internet. One difference is that my cake is a bit fat and squat because I used a football cake pan whereas a real golden trout is long and slender. But other than that, I think I did a pretty good job!

Cake The sheet cake below is actually a carrot cake from Costco.  Since the birthday party was in Santa Barbara and my sister and I had to organize everything for the party, I just didn’t have time to make the whole cake myself.  I figured the kids might want something other than carrot cake, so I made the fish from lemon cake.

Filling The Costco cake had apricot filling.  The fish had no filling.

Frosting The Costco cake had cream cheese frosting and the fish had vanilla decorator’s buttercream.

Design We asked Nisha what she wanted for her birthday and with a serious air, she said she wanted a catfish cake.  I looked at her in disbelief.  Do you mean a cartoon one with a fish body and cat head?  No, she wanted a real catfish for her cake.  Even after looking at a photo of a real catfish that we emailed to her, she still insisted on a real catfish cake.  In all honesty, I was having a hard time getting excited and motivated to make an ugly, mud-colored bottom feeder and found myself procrastinating over this cake.  Luckily, the procrastination bided me a little time.  Apparently one day, in the car, Nisha looked at her sippy cup and noticed a fish with a cat head and decided it looked cute after all.  Whew!  I just know she wouldn’t have been satisfied with a real, slimy catfish cake.  I think the only person who would appreciate that would be my fisherman father!

This cake was a joint effort between Blake and I.  Usually Blake’s title is cake support, but for this cake he decided to do the entire cake from start to finish so as to experience first hand the effort that goes into designing and making a cake.  However, Blake found himself overwhelmed with work and I had to step in to help, but he still did most of it.  So once we had final direction on the theme, we decided on a fun, cartoon-ish design.  The catfish has an Alice in Wonderland Cheshire Cat head with a Dr. Seuss like fish body.  The base has a psychedelic underwater seaweed look.

Cake The usual chocolate blackout cake for the round base cake and pound cake for the catfish because it is firmer and easier to carve.

Filling Blake dreamed up a wonderfully creamy strawberry Italian meringue buttercream.  Initially we were going to use raspberries to get a bright pink hue, but they were out of raspberries at the market so he pureed frozen strawberries instead and added it to the buttercream.  It had a wonderfully light strawberry flavor that blended surprisingly well with the buttercream.  We’ll definitely use this recipe again.

Icing This round base cake has vanilla fondant over vanilla buttercream and the catfish head has decorator’s buttercream icing as it is stiffer for making fur.

Decoration It’s pretty clear that two people worked on this cake.  Blake made the catfish cake at the same time that I made the base cake.  We laughed when we realized that the styles didn’t quite match when we went to put the two cakes together.  I suppose it only enhances the psychedelic effect, right?

For the base cake, I free formed the stylized seaweed using a quilting roller and then hand painted them using bright colored luster dusts mixed with lemon extract.  We used a bunt pan to make the initial s-shape of the catfish body which Blake then carved down to make the final shape.  The fins were cut free form from gumpaste, scored with a pastry scraper and then positioned to dry in a wiggly pattern. Nisha’s mom, Poorti, and Blake made the wire fish that were inserted into the cake at the last minute.

Thanks Well, I can’t really thank Blake since he was mostly responsible for this cake.  Maybe he should be thanking me this time???  However, we can thank Poorti for coming over to help make the wire fish and to keep us company late at night!

Design The original design was to have chocolate branches wrapping around all the layers with molded, faceted hard candy leaves based on the wrought iron tea light branch centerpieces that they had for each table. I was really exited about the challenge to make the original design a reality.  Blake and I spent hours and hours brainstorming ideas, researching and figuring out logistics.  We even built a full scale cake mock-up out of styrofoam disks to see if our design was feasible. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted the original design to work, it proved to be just too complicated considering the fragility of the decorations and the fact that they needed to survive a 6 hour car ride from Mountain View to Pasadena without breaking.  Since the wedding was so far away from all my tools and my own kitchen space, we decided that it was just too risky.  So a month before the wedding I came up with another design based on the wedding invitations.  I was relieved that Dan and Lucy liked it even more than the original design because it tied the wedding colors and invitation design into the rest of the wedding decor and would make it to LA without major catastrophe. Their invitations were deep blue with a pair of contrasting white doves and stylized laurel wreaths arranged in a modern organic random pattern and the RSVP cards were white with blue wreaths in a similar pattern.  So I scanned their invitations and RSVP cards and created several design options on Adobe Photoshop software for them to choose from.  They picked a design with 12″, 10″ and 6″ white tiers and a double high contrasting 8″ blue tier (actually two four-layer 8″ cakes tiers stacked and covered in fondant).  The blue matched the blue of the invitations perfectly.

Cake Four 1″ layers of rich, dark chocolate black-out cake.

Filling Three 3/8″ layers of creamy white chocolate Italian meringue buttercream with fragrant vanilla undertones.

Originally the cake was supposed to have white chocolate mousse filling, however, when we arrived at the Villa on Friday at 1pm to assemble the cake, we found that the mousse had hardly thawed and was no where near a spreadable consistency.  There is no hurrying the thawing of mousse.  You cannot microwave or otherwise heat it because it causes the solids and liquids in the whipped cream to separate.  We only had 5 hours of kitchen time at the Villa on Friday to torte, fill, crumb coat and frost the cakes,  so there was no time to wait for the mousse to thaw properly.  So, with a broken heart, we decided to use the white chocolate buttercream for filling as well as frosting.  By the next day, the mousse eventually thawed out in the cooler and a dollop was served with each slice of cake at the reception.  So not all was lost, but it was not quite the way I had envisioned it.

Since I have not often used mousse as a cake filling, especially for weddings where the cake sits out for long periods of time, I researched and tested 6 different white chocolate mousse filling recipes to determine which ones could withstand 6-8 hours at room temperature without watering out.  Though I tried recipes with various ingredients for stabilizing whipped cream and chocolate including egg whites, egg yolks and/or gelatin and various methods for combining those ingredients, it turned out that the most reliable, best consistency and best tasting mousse was also the most simple recipe which utilized only cream and white chocolate.  After some research I found out that the cocoa butter in chocolate is a natural stabilizer for whipped cream.  In all honesty, a mixture of just chocolate and cream is really a ganache, but when the proportion of cream to chocolate is high and depending on how it is combined, it can have a lighter, airier texture more like a mousse than your traditional heavy chocolate ganache.  I eventually made a full size 8″ test cake to make sure everything would work in the same environment and within the same time table that we would be making the real wedding cake.  I hope my colleagues at work thoroughly enjoyed my test cake efforts.

Icing White and blue fondant over white chocolate Italian meringue buttercream.

Servings Serves 125 - 150, depending on how you cut it and if you keep the top tier for the 1st anniversary.

Decoration Hand piped royal icing stylized laurel wreaths and color flow bird topper to match the wedding invitations. I piped for several hours each night until my hand would cramp and I could literally do no more.  The decorations were made by piping royal icing onto clear cellophane over templates I had created in Photoshop. I probably broke half of the decorations trying to get them on the cake because they were so fragile.  The slightest pressure from my hand when applying the icing “glue” or from my fingers when trying to stick them on the cake and they would literally shatter into tiny pieces.  It took me a solid 3 hours to place the decorations on the cake and pipe the borders.  The circular white shell leaf wreath mirror I found at Target made a perfect cake base because it repeated the circular laurel wreath design motif on both the invitations and on the cake.  And each slice of cake was served with a dollop of white chocolate mousse and a hand molded white chocolate dove-in-flight to symbolize the newlyweds exciting new future together.

Schedule We had to keep to a strict cake work schedule on top of our hectic career work schedules to make sure everything was finished on time.  Besides the time it took to design and redesign the cake, we also had to shop for and buy an appropriate cake base, supplies, fondant and wet/dry ingredients; research decorating techniques, chocolate molds and mousse recipes; test mousse recipes, and make a test cake; make royal icing decorations, buttercream frosting, mousse filling and bake the cakes all before departing for LA 6 hours away.   2 weeks before the wedding I made the royal icing decoration templates.  8 days before I began making royal icing decorations after work for 5 consecutive days in a row.  6 days before we made the buttercream and froze it.  We also made the white chocolate doves.  Three days before we made the mousse and refrigerated it for one night and froze it the next night to help stabilize it for travel. Two days before the wedding we baked the cakes and packed the car with practically all my tools including a stand mixer, just in case. We packed the filling and frosting in a cooler with ice and double wrapped the cakes in plastic wrap and stacked them in cake boxes. The day before the wedding we woke up super early and drove straight to the wedding venue in LA to begin assembly. I truly felt like a sardine. The day before and the day of the wedding reception were all about assembling and decorating the cake.  Prior to that, it was all about making the kit-of-parts ready for assembly.  I put a ton of effort into this cake to make sure it came out perfect.  In the end, I missed the rehearsal dinner and the wedding and finished the cake just in the nick of time at 3:15pm and the reception started at 3:30pm.

Challenges We faced many, many challenges with this cake besides the challenge of the original branch design, the distance factor and a hectic, tight schedule. We had Plans A, B, C, D, E and F but thankfully only had to go to Plan B with the design and to Plan C with the buttercream filling in lieu of the mousse  filling.  Other challenges we faced included the limited time we could use the kitchen at the Villa (I had to do some work at Blake’s grandmother’s house), the fact that Blake kept disappearing because of groomsman duties, the fragility of the decorations and the fact that the bird toppers had not completely dried due to the high humidity from the constant rain that week.  In my humble opinion, despite the challenges, the cake turned out super beautiful.

Thanks I cannot thank Blake enough for his help on this very special cake for his sister.  Despite having to work around his intense job and the responsibilities of being a groomsman in the wedding party and sneaking in a little time with his family, he spent every other spare moment he could helping me including chopping 9# of white chocolate, making the white chocolate mousse, making the white chocolate doves, preparing all the cake boards, cutting parchment rounds for baking, coloring and rolling out fondant, applying the fondant to the cake and basic clean-up and decorator support duties.  I must also thank Angela, Blake’s grandmother, for allowing me to take over her kitchen at the last minute to finish up loose cake ends the night before the wedding.  And finally I must thank Sandy, one of the owners of Santa Anita Gardens Catering, for allowing us to use the kitchen at the Villa for 5 hours on Friday afternoon and 4 hours again Saturday morning before her catering staff arrived.  I felt so bad because for liability reasons she had to be there to chaperone while we were there using the facility.   Also, the catering staff were so accommodating, friendly and helpful and their support and compliments made all the difference to me that day.

Design Well, it’s hard to know what a 1 year old would like for their birthday cake.  It’s not like they can really tell you.  In the end, it’s the parent’s decision.  After a go-around between Nirvika’s favorite things including the 3 blind mice nursery rhyme, macaroni and cheese and nesting russian dolls, we decided to go with the  party theme at the last minute.  Nirvika’s mom sent me a link to the “Garden Girl” plates and napkins which I used for inspiration.

I initially wanted to make a topsy turvy cake, but two things prevented me from doing this.  One hindrance was time since the party was on Saturday which only left me half of Friday and Saturday morning to work on the cake.  A topsy turvey cake needs to be frozen before hand so that it can be easily carved, but freezing the cakes takes at least 6 hours so there was no way I had that much time.  Also, the strawberry cake ended up being extremely moist and light in texture and I did not think it was strong or firm enough to be carved without the risk of falling apart.  Oh well, next time !

Cake To my surprise, the parents said anything but chocolate and finally chose strawberry cake.  What a relief to try something new!!  The only problem was that I didn’t have time to make a test cake.  So, after researching several recipes, I finally decided on one that sounded tasty.  It turned out a bit sweeter than I normally prefer due to the addition of strawberry jello for added color and flavor.  However, I also used strawberry puree from The Perfect Puree in Napa Valley.  Previously you could only order their wholesome products online with a minimum (3) 30-oz jar purchase, which was expensive and usually more than I needed.  I was so excited when I got an email a few weeks before this cake saying that they were now available at select high-end markets like Whole Foods in a 30-oz AND a smaller 15-oz size.  The best thing about The Perfect Puree is that you can get hard to come by pure fruit purees when that particular fruit is typically out of season such as strawberries in January, for example.  They also have passion fruit, blood orange, etc…  Check ‘em out !!

Filling A yummy cream cheese filling and frosting actually helped cut the sweetness of the strawberry cake.

Decoration Cookie cutters were used to cut out fondant flowers into several shapes and sizes. which were applied to the base fondant using a paint brush and a little water.  According to Blake, I applied the large pink and yellow flowers in too much of a “wallpaper” pattern.  So, Blake applied the smaller pink flowers by weighting them to the bottom of each tier and grouped to allow for some negative space and a more random appearance.  The bugs on top were made by pressing two stickers back-to-back onto thick gauge wires.

Thanks As always, I am forever grateful to Blake.  He made the bugs on wires, cut the dowel supports and helped me to color the fondant, apply the fondant and decorate the cakes.  He was also our transport/delivery person and photographer.  After not seeing him all week due to work, it was nice to spend the time doing something creative together.