purple patron party

a friend of mine has been decorating cakes for about as long as i have. we have totally different approaches to cake making. ava is fearless. she thinks that if a cake can be made, why can't she be the one to make it? where as i am very careful to push my skill level envelope. don't get me wrong. i'm not affraid of new things. i'm affraid of crazy new things.

after deciding to have a purple patron party, ava knew she wanted a big cake to be the centerpiece of the night. she asked me to work on it with her and i was super excited about trying some new techniques on a nice three layer cake (i thought that was big). well, let me just show you what she had in mind.
as you can see, i was going to be way out of my comfort zone. however, despite all my little pushes toward a more sensible cake, this girl was going...crazy big cake.

i am so glad that she did. we actually got to add a bunch of stuff to our cake arsenal. we found a great edible silver spray paint, i did my first real carving, and we learned how to stack a crooked cake. when i say "we learned," i mean, i asked how to do, got scared, kept trying to talk ava out of doing it, and then she did it when i wasn't there. :) here are some "during the process" pictures...

and the cake...

i have to say a little about this patron bottle. i have just started wanting to get into carving. this was my first real go at it. i'm really happy with the way it turned out. although, next time i will use edible paper for the labels - i hate when everything is not edible.

price change

on monday, cupcake prices will go up 25 cents each. place your orders before monday to get the old price.

margarita cupcakes

a friend of mine was having a purple patron party. i wanted to make cupcakes for the party and being that it was a tequila party, what would have been better than margarita cupcakes?

when i was throwing the idea around with my family, all i got was squished up faces and noses turned up. noone could imagine tequila in a cupcake.

i ended up making two different cupcakes. both cakes had liquor in them, but the "spiked" cake had liquor in the icing and the "virgin" cake just had margarita mix in the icing for flavor.

i wanted to decorate them to look like little margaritas. i did two different styles and ended up liking the more simple cake. i was pretty happy with the outcome, but these will definitly have to be a special order cupcake. they were much more expensive to make. however, they were delish!

look! people are taking pictures of my cupcakes!

here are some of their pictures

bananas foster cupcakes

last week i found myself starring at more overly ripe bananas. what is the deal? this is unprecedented in our house! i'm not sure where the idea for bananas foster cupcakes came from, but it wasn't long before i was researching. i only found 2 recipes, and both of them didn't look good. so, i modified them - alot.

now, i have only ever had bananas fosters once, and it was horrible. so, i was really kind of walking into this new flavor blindly. one afternoon i packed up my baking supplies and went to my mom's house. i knew i had to put some bananas on fire, and i wasn't doing that at my house!

i'm not sold on putting this flavor on my menu yet. it's quite involved and calls for expensive ingredients. however, i'll have to figure something out, because they are awesome!