Cakelets

Last week I promised that this Monday I would show you the other cakes I made at the same time as the Guinness cake, and so I shall.

(As an aside, schedule your backups, kids, for I have found that I am missing pictures of a couple of cakes because I lost them in a hard drive crash. This is especially saddening as one of them was a fantastic all-white three tiered anniversary cake.)

So, the Guinness cake was for my husband's birthday, and the cakelets were for a baby shower and for my oldest daughter's first birthday.  They were all made over the same four day period. I'd just been laid off, so I had plenty of time to finish them in (thankfully I found a job relatively quickly).

The cakelets are from a NordicWare pan sold by Williams-Sonoma and the cake itself is from the recipe that came with the pan. The brighter colored ones are done with my usual icing recipe and the pastel ones are cream cheese icing and colored sugar.

The baby shower had a theme of ladybugs and dragonflies, so those are the only cakes I used. I'm also thinking, looking at this, that I only used a round tip for the decorating. I wanted to create an evocation of the colors/shapes of the cakes without overloading them with frosting. However, feedback I got from the client was that some people didn't think the cakes had enough frosting.

In contrast, as there was no real theme (picnic, sort of) for my daughter's birthday party, I used all of the bugs in the set, and went wild with the colors.  I'm using the round tip again (I would guess probably a 3 and a 5 or 7) as well as a flatter tip to get the ridged black lines.  Nothing really special here technique-wise, just following the contours of the pan. Sometimes though, simple is better.

I will continue to troll the archives -- there's more fondant, threadcakes galore, and some really interesting early cakes still to come.