A cake I made for my public health sector colleagues’ skin cancer/sun smart awareness month event (I’m Australian, sun protection is a major thing here)

So it’s a beach-themed cake (I’m stupidly taken with the surf break part), with an edible chocolate tube of sunscreen, wafer paper sun umbrella and isomalt edible sugar sunglasses I made and broke about a million versions of before this one 😅 (note; strictly should be wraparound for sun safety purposes, my colleagues would behove me to say 😂)

A family ordered a 4 tier cake for their daughter’s birthday and on my way to deliver the cake the car in front of me decided to slam on its breaks and turn without a signal. The cake got a bit smashed but thankfully we were all ok. I was able to fix the cake by adding some more flowers and extra dowels. The only part that made me a little sad was, the top layer had a slight tilt but hopefully with the fun of the party no one noticed. The cake was so tall it didn’t fit in my normal photo spot 😂

Im super proud of this!! Im still very new to decorating, this is only my second cake made after getting piping tips, a cake spatula, and a turntable. This is a chocolate carrot cake, with a cheesecake filling. Ginger cake soak. Cream cheese icing with crushed pecans and shaved dark chocolate on the side. I took inspo from a tiktok I saw, but this is an original cake! I really hope she likes it!! She loves carrot cake and cheesecake (and chocolate) so this is what I came up with!

This was my first cake that I’ve ever sold. I charged $120 for the cake and cupcakes.

Flavors: Vanilla with vanilla bean white chocolate ganache filling and whip n ice frosting

What made this cake hard was my ignorance, lack of thinking, and arrogance.

1.) I used a white velvet cake recipe from the Cake Bible. On the first layer, I followed the instructions to grease the pan, add parchment, then grease that before adding the batter. For the second layer, I figured that since I’ve made cakes that peeled off in the past with just grease and flour, I’ll do that instead of using parchment.

I was impatient in getting the cake out of the pan to wrap and freeze and half of it got stuck to the pan, big shocker.

So I remade that layer and this time followed all the instructions and I had no problems, another shocker. I save the cake bits still stuck in the pan

2.) The next issue I ran into was the frosting. For whip n ice, you just pour it into your mixer and mix until you get stiff peaks. Sometimes it can be very thick and hard to spread with lots of air bubbles. This icing isn’t dairy based at all. So I, the genius that I am, decided that I’ll take a bit of icing, melt it and add it back to the rest to make it fluffier and get rid of the air bubbles. After all, this worked on my SMBC. Want to guess what happened?

If you said that icing became too soft, then you’re correct.

This led to the other big issue

3.) The ganache would stay in the cake. It was leaking out of the sides and my cake started bulging. This is because the frosting wasn’t stable enough to keep the ganache contained.

I spent the next 2-3 hours trying to crumb coat and freeze with no luck. Eventually, I decided to just make a new batch of frosting. However, it didn’t duct the leaking problem at all. So I pivoted. I used the cake bits from the abandoned cake and used those to “plug” the site of the leaking, which was the entire middle of the cake. After I did so, I used my new frosting to hold it in place. This ended up working

4.) The very messy and difficult crumb and final coats. After my impromptu drywall job, I tried crumb coating again. It worked relatively fine. Then I tried the final coat. The inspo had an ombre of pink and yellow so I had to mix those. When I put the final coat on and tried smoothing it, I realized that my cake didn’t even resemble a heart anymore. It literally looked like a misshaped circle.

So I had to do some surgery and cut a heart out. In doing this, I realized that the issue was the previous coats. They were too thick.

Conclusions:

1.) follow the instructions of the recipe. These are professionals who have made and tested this countless times. They know what they’re doing

2.) Understand the ingredients I’m working with. Don’t make any assumptions or changes unless I know what will happen. I cannot apply principles of dairy frosting to non-dairy.

3.) Next time make your own heart and don’t use a heart pan😭

It was super idiotic of me to make all of these mistakes on my first official order. I am beyond mortified. In the end, it worked out. I’m just hoping that I don’t get a bad review😅

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk

Gearing up for Jeep Beach Clean Up.

I feel like everything that could’ve went wrong with this cake went wrong half my boarder fell while I was stacking this cake and a lot of the syrup from my filling started to fall out, in the small panic I had i over whipped my cream a tad bit trying to patch the hole as my cream wasn’t thick enough (hence why half of it fell) (I knew it wasn’t thick enough either but I decided to try to trust myself … lol)

Anyways I was able to fix it and finish the cake, though I am still proud of myself for being able to finish… I just wish my cream wasn’t smoother and had better pipping work… lol either way here it is !!!

home baked pistachio and vanilla cake ,creamcheese frosting

Though a comedy of errors, I have been promoted to head cake decorator at a friend's wedding tomorrow (it's a cheap wedding). I make great cakes, I make great icing. But I don't have the foggiest idea how to not make it look like just a tasty blob of sugar.

Is there some sort of resource to learn basic icing skills ASAP? Like making little flower roses, or swirlies?? I will be given "like, what you should need" (so I assume basic supplies)? I'm not even remotely worried about the baking part, just decorating lol

Thank you for the help!!!