Ace of Cakes

I was trying to come up with a catchy title for this post, and I realize that the one I chose sounds a tad braggadocious. Please excuse my apparent lack of humility here!  

But this is indeed a post about cakes.  And cakes are what I do, pretty much.

I went SO many years without one of theses mixers, until I had daughters-in-law 
who insisted that my kids should pool their resources and get me one.  
Best. Gift. Ever.

We have 14 grandchildren who live within striking distance here in VA, and I am the birthday cake-maker for all of them.  (The 7 who live in Wisconsin have a dad who makes them, and the 2 who live in Tennessee have a mom who does.)  My VA grandchildren tell me what kind of image they'd like on top, and I try to fulfill their birthday wishes! It's a tradition now, that I make their birthday cakes.  If it's just going to be for an intimate family celebration, I'll make a round layer cake or a 9x13" sheet cake.  But if it's for a party that will involve a lot of friends and other guests, I'll make a larger 14x18" sheet cake (which uses two cake mixes).  I do Baptism and First Holy Communion cakes sometimes, too; but my bread and butter is birthday cakes.

Or perhaps "my confectioner's sugar and butter is birthday cakes" would be a more apt way of putting it.

I am by no means a professional, but with as many cakes as I've made for my grandchildren (and my boys, too) since we moved to VA in 2017, I should be!

I always made and decorated birthday cakes for my sons when they were growing up.  They would put in their "order" for what image they wanted on the top, and I would do my best to make it happen.  (As an artist, I work mostly in frosting--LOL.)  I made some nice cakes for them back in the day, but I think I've gotten a lot better at cake decorating in recent years; partly because of the VOLUME of cakes that I've made, and partly because as a Grammy, I have a lot more time to spend on them than I did when I was a mom of young boys.

October is an extremely busy month for Grammy's Bakery.  Our oldest grandson celebrates his birthday early in the month (he just turned 12).  And then last night ended a three-day run of birthdays: one grandson turned 8, the next day his cousin turned 7, and yesterday his younger brother turned 6. For the two brothers, the cakes were just 9x13" ones, because our tradition with son #2's gang is that my husband and I usually go over for dinner with them and their immediate family, with a cake and present in hand. For the newly-minted 7-year-old granddaughter in the middle, I made the larger-sized sheet cake, because although we visited her on her real birthday, she'd had a big party with cousins and friends last weekend and the cake was for that.

Here are those last three cakes: we've got a Ja'Marr Chase, for our grandson who is obsessed with football in general and the Bengals in particular; a Princess Zelda, for a video-game loving granddaughter; and a Godzilla-themed one, for a grandson who requested it (after having monster truck-themed cakes for a few years in a row!). I kind of cheated with old Ja'Marr, because I was intimidated by making either a portrait of him or an action shot of him receiving a pass. But my grandson was thrilled with it, so all was well.

You might have noticed that I mentioned using mixes up there.  Yes, I do.  I've tried making a yellow cake from scratch, using a recipe from a Mrs. Fields cookbook, and it was good; but it wasn't as tasty as the ones I make from mixes (she admits sheepishly).  I start with a Betty Crocker yellow cake mix.  But where it says add water, I add milk. Where it says add oil, I add double the amount--but of butter, not oil.  And where it says add 3 eggs, I add 4.  It's a trick I found years ago online somewhere, for making a ho-hum cake from a box taste like a bakery cake.  (You're welcome!)

I always make my own buttercream frosting, with butter, confectioner's sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla. Then I make my own colored frostings, and although I do have some professional metal tips for cake decorating, I've never invested in a lot of gadgets that would make my hobby easier.  (Not sure why, I suppose I should.  But most of the cakes I make for my grandchildren have so many colors involved, I would need so many different tips and bags!)   So instead, I usually make my own decorating bags out of ziplocks, and I snip one corner.  If it's fine work I'm doing (like outlines), I make the snip very tiny. If I need to fill in a big space with a color, I snip off a little bit more. When I'm in the middle of making a cake, there are about 10 bowls of frosting going at once, spread out all over the place, and countless ziplock bags; there's confectioner's sugar dust everywhere; and my fingers are stained every color of the rainbow.  It's a glorious mess, I'll tell you.  And I could never do a cooking show, not with the way I trash just about every inch of my kitchen.

I showed my leftover decorating bags from this most recent string of cakes to my daugher-in-law Ginger last night. (I usually hang onto them until a cake has been delivered safely, just in case I need to do touch-ups or what-have-you.  And I still had the ones from the two cakes I'd made before the Godzilla cake for her little guy.)  When I did, she said I should blog about making cakes.  So this post is for you, Ginger. :)

The inspiration for this post.

If you're going to make colored frostings, the best food coloring is the Wilton brand (there on the right).

This truly has been one of the great joys of my life, making these cakes that I hope will be treasured memories for my grandchildren when they're older and look back on their childhoods.

I'll end this by showing you a few of the cakes I've made over the years.  I might not be an ace, exactly; but if cakes were rated by how much love went into them, I'd probably have few equals.  

Wow, braggadocious once again!  Sorry, dear readers!

Football, monster trucks, Pokemon, and Disney characters (princesses in particular) are common themes in these cakes, you might have noticed.

We have another busy cake month in November, with three grandchildren celebrating birthdays in a 10-day span. And we will be out of town, visiting our oldest son's family in Wisconsin, during that stretch.  So I am planning to bake and decorate three cakes for them before we leave, and drop them off so they can be frozen until needed.

Because CAKE = LOVE.  At least in the Pearl family.