Transportation Month

This was definitely a month of transportation cakes. Cars, trains, and trucks! All for little boys!

This cake is made of chocolate and covered in red, yellow and blue fondant :)

I love the photo above because it looks like multilevel parking.

These cupcakes are for Karan's 4th birthday. We did his 3rd birthday cakes and they were 12 pieces of the same designs. This year, he attends a bigger class thus his mom ordered 36 pieces! These cupcakes look easy, right? They're not! Each truck has a lot of details so it takes time to do them.

This is Karan's candle blowing cake. It's the same design as the previous year! Only in a different color :)

Thomas and Friends cake for Elijah.

We've done these cakes many times but every time's like the first time! :) We look forward to do more car cakes next year! :)

Dinosaur King

This cake is for Marcus who turned 7 this month.

We've been decorating cakes for several years now and it's always interesting when we get unique requests. This time the challenge came from a boy --he wants 3 dimensional dinosaurs from a Sega game called Dinosaur King. You can read about the card collecting game here. One lazy afternoon, my sister and I went to the Timezone with our nephew to check out the game-- and we found out that it's basically a digital rock, paper, and scissors game!

It took the whole week to make the two dinos! After drying them, they were assembled then painted to make them look scary. The next concern was how to place it on the cake. He wanted a T-rex and a Triceratops fighting. Again, there are limitations of sugar art hence four obvious support were used to prop up the dinos. Three were used for the T-rex which in my mind would've probably saved them had they had better support during the Cretaceous period!

Trees were placed on the background -- all of them made out of gumpaste as well. Two shades of green were used to make tree and the trunk was painted in dark brown to accentuate the tree bark.

We use the Dinosaur King logo as pattern for the name on the cake based on the color scheme of red, orange and yellow.

The problem with 3D cakes is they are transport sensitive. When we got to the Discovery Suites, the T-rex tail moved! Luckily, we had royal icing with us to fix the problem.

150 pieces of mini cupcakes were placed around and below the cake. The final layout gave the cake another dimension! I love the final look of the cake and I hope Marcus did, too! We were not able to meet him but his Mom likes the set-up so yey!

Cake: Chocolate, 10"

P.S. Thanks @joefrago for the directions and support!

Quintbelles Insider: Liezl + TJ

Autumn is a fantastic season. And the colors are so pretty! Burnt oranges, reds, yellows, moss greens. It's a perfect time for weddings, too. The weather is ideal-- not hot, not too cold (and make ups wont melt!). Too bad the Philippines only has 2 seasons - rainy and sunny. Luckily, it gets a little breezier around this time :)

This week, we made a wedding cake using the maple leaves in autumn colors. Each leaf is cut by hand, air dried and then brushed with colored dust. No two leaves are exactly alike.

The cake is then accented with gumpaste flowers (also made by hand) in the lighter shades brushed with dust.

To compliment the theme, we used carrot walnut cake with buttercream. Normally, we would use creamcheese icing to pair with the cake but we wanted to make sure the icing won't spoil :)

The cake is 7, 10, 14x8.

Louis Vuitton Inspired Wedding Cake

We've done bag cakes in the past but never 5 layers like the wedding cake requested by wedding coordinator Anet.

The lowest layer is an epi trunk with gold dragees, next is a damier round cake, followed by a tan leather neverfull bag, then a multicolored bag and finally a monogram bag. While these are not exact copies of the LV bags, we took elements from their collections and made bags from fondant and gumpaste.

This was for a Chinese wedding so we wanted to make sure the cakes are not all dark browns. Turns out pretty, yes? We added a luggage tag with the couples initials. Although not visible from the photo above, the gold label on the trunk has a gold heart drawn on the plate. We love putting little details hoping the photographers catch them-- much like hidden mickeys!

The cake part is carrot walnut with buttercream. Total height of 42".

Quintbelles Insider: 3D Cat

We rarely get to do 3D cakes so it's exciting when there are requests for them! Chloe, the birthday girl, loves cats! After looking at several options, we decided on an orange tabby cat.

Her mommy doesn't like fondant so we agreed to use marshmallow icing instead --something we rarely do too! Double excitement for us. We love trying new things, you know :)

And so, here is the cat cake.

Tadah!

So here's how we made this. Start by baking an 8" round cake, a 8" bowl cake for the body and a 4" cake for the head. Crumb coat the cake as below.

Crumbcoated

Then cover the cake with the orange marshmallow icing. Since cat fur isn't actually very smooth, we didn't think it was important to smoothen out the icing all too much. After which, we put in the details-- paws, eyes, nose, tail, whiskers!

Coated

Finally, the finished cake!

The cat looked like its frozen in surprise so we decided to put eyebrows!

We were told that the birthday girl liked that cake! So, yey for us! :)