If you’ve followed along with my blog for a while you probably notice this pattern: I have several posts and then I wont have any for weeks. My silence is not laziness, during those weeks that I don’t post I am always super busy making the beautiful sugar works that I share! I wish that I could be more consistent and always have a regular MWF blog but it’s just a lot of work when the majority of my content is all my creations. If you would like to see sneak peaks of my day-to-day creations you can follow me on Instagram (my live feed is in the sidebar). If you do follow me, then you have seen the beautiful cake I made for my daughter’s 11 birthday.
Macy loves nautical striped shirts, first it was just the plain navy ones, then J.Crew started making ones with sequined hearts & anchors. She has striped dresses and skirts, all mostly in navy. In general navy is a neutral for all of us. We often go out as a family looking very stripey, bluey and coordinated. Not on purpose, we just all like it! Ok, Hudson doesn’t really know what he likes but we like it on him (currently his favorite shirt is one that we tie dyed, he calls it his “color shirt” it makes him very happy to wear it…with navy shorts of course).
For the first time ever Macy didnt have a party for her birthday. It was a break that had been decided when we planned on during the planning of her Dylan’s Candy Bar birthday party last year. So there was no disapointment for her or me, it just the decision that was made. I still knew that I would make a beautiful cake. In fact, I did plan to make several cakes (all fake except one for us) but I had too many other projects going on that it fell to the wayside. Hopefully I can make the beautiful Nautical Suite of cakes that I sketched out, I just have to make it a project on my list.
I made Macy’s cake an extra tall 6″ round. It had 2 layers of chocolate and 2 layers of vanilla cake with swiss buttercream. I used brand new recipes for every bit of the cake and I am so happy with them! Both the chocolate and vanilla cake recipes were suggested by Jessica Harris of Jessicakes, they are the sturdiest cakes Ive ever made. They are definitely the type of cakes you need to get a flawless fondant finish. If you are new to fondant and find it frustrating to get perfect, it’s probably your cake and icing that is the problem. I know when I started researching the best tips and techniques I found my fondant skills were fine, my cake stacking skills were really bad! So along with Jessica’s recipes I also used the upside down icing technique, (its crazy sounding but for small cakes it really works!!) and I’m a big fan of the wax paper transfer method for applying cake decorations. With horizontal stripes this is the ONLY way to achieve perfect level stripes all the way around. You will lose your mind and too much sleep any other way. I will post links to recipes and tutorials at the end of the post.
So the design was simple really, it mimicked the stripped shirt Macy loves (and now has 3 of). The sugar sequins technique on the anchor was new for me, new in general really. I had seen it somewhere on the internet and filed it away in my mind. In going back to look for any tips or the example I had seen I could not find anything anywhere. So I winged it. I pressed candy sequins into still soft fondant and let dry over night. Then I painted on metallic luster dust. It turned out beautiful but I’m sure there must me some other ways to cover the candy sequins more completely. The thicker I painted on the luster dust the less definition I got on the shape of the candy, I tried the spray color too but it didn’t cover the colored sprinkles at all.
Over all I liked the creation enough to make cupcake toppers for my etsy shop with this technique. These cupcakes were not for Macy’s birthday but I still had the nautical theme in mind when I combined them with stripped Simply Baked baking cups I purchased from Pick Your Plum ( you can also get them here or here and on amazon) I’ve listed heart shapes in gold or silver in my shop, but really the shape and colors are limitless!
Although we didn’t party like rock stars, we did spend the whole day celebrating Macy, with a movie, dinner, stroll in the old neighb (Lower Manhattan) and she had a friend stay over. It was a beautiful and unseasonably cool August day, we enjoyed our stroll on the Battery Park City Promenade as we always do.
My chic tween rocked a new Target dress with an on trend origami bird pattern on her birthday, she added to it a glitter Crewcuts belt (the type that inspired the sugar sequins technique) and a brass whistle necklace she bought at the Brooklyn Flea, oh and a navy blazer, lol.
Check out my new Sugar Sequin toppers here.
My new favorite Vanilla Cake recipe for a dense sturdy cake here.
My new favorite Chocolate Cake recipe for a dense sturdy cake here.
Swiss Meringue recipe by Martha Stewart here.
Jessicakes wax transfer technique here and a video on icing a cake upside down here.
nikkiikkin.com 