The May Cakes....

The month began with Sierra's birthday on the third. Sierra remembered she wanted the little doll cake picks from the craft store, so off we went to pick some up...



Each dress is a cupcake and the dance floor is a buttercream frosted 8 inch round cake. For this one, I baked my first Lady Baltimore cake.

Next came Marina's birthday on the fifteenth. For Marina's birthday, I was going to make the cake look like a volcano. I started by (successfully, yay!) making a Tunnel of Fudge cake from scratch. Unfortunately, it is very hard to tint chocolate glaze red. It just looked more...chocolatey. So I decided to add a phoenix bird around the edge. Everything was going wrong with the frosting here. I inadvertently made a buttercream filling, thinking it would be the same. I ended up having to thicken a portion of it. Then my pastry bag bursted and the food coloring didn't blend well. Most of the frosting turned yellow, but there were only small sections that absorbed the red. (I tried to mix the colors in the pastry bag, which is why it popped. Never try to rush the process.) All of the orange and red color you see below is from drawing it on with a toothpick dipped in the section of red frosting in the burst pastry bag. I think it came out well.



My son loves the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketches. He wanted this as the theme for my cake. Luckily, it was the last cake of the month (today) so I had time to figure out what I wanted to do for it. Using my handy dandy Velvet Cake recipe and a Ghirardelli brownie mix, I went all out with this one.

I put Marina in charge of making the "cardinals" and I made the comfy chair and soft cushions from Velvet Cake cupcakes. I used leftover frosting and filling from my second cake. Marina made costumes for cookie men out of fruit roll-ups and features from melted chocolate.