Elsie Bakes: Cha-ching!

Well hello again! Yeah, fine, it's been a month since I updated, whatever, sue me. Here's my excuse: I figured I'd wait til I had a few different delightful desserts to post about instead of one at a time. Is that weak? Can you tell that I was just procrastinating?

Anyway, whatever, let's move on, shall we? This week marks a momentous occasion in the life of me attempting to be a baker. I sold my first cake! Ta-dah! It turns out that Karen did actually want me to make a cake for the baby shower she was throwing. No joke, I decorated that cake in my head every night as I tried to fall asleep. But, more on that later...

A few weeks ago some friends of ours invited us over for dinner and I took the opportunity to make a cake to bring. Side note, have I forced you to go to bakerella.com yet? My lovely friend Bee turned me on to it and she has some of the best recipes and dessert ideas EVER. So I used her recipe for red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting. It might possibly be the moistest (most moist?) cake I have ever eaten. Go. Bake. It. Now. Ok, anyway, I made the cake and decided that it was a wasted opportunity to try something new, so I made my first attempt at fondant roses. Here are the results:

You like? I loooooove. They were super duper easy. I think next time I'll add a little edible glitter. Too much?

My next undertaking was St. Patrick's Day cupcakes. I made them about a week before St. Patrick's day and brought them into the group therapy session at school. (For those of you who don't know, my practicum this semester is with adults and I have a group session once a week with my client who has speech problems resulting from a stroke). I decided that since it was the last session before spring break that I needed to bring in a treat. However, I announced this to all the group members before I took the time to realize that I would need to bake them in between studying for and taking two exams and completing a very difficult assignment. It was quite a stupid moment for me. So yeah. They're cute, but less inspired then they could have been.

I used vanilla frosting and then rolled them in white crystal sugar. The shamrocks are sugar pieces like the footballs that I used in February. I think the green foil wrappers are my favorite. They got rave reviews. I took a nap.

Ok, ok, I know that you've been on the edge of your seat waiting to see the baby shower cake that I made so here it is! (Ignore Sophie in the background. I swear there's no cat hair in that cake).

I took a few pictures during the process to share with y'all. The cake is a lemon yellow cake that I made from scratch (again, the curtsey) with a vanilla buttercream. Both tiers are three layers. You can see the area that was uneven with the other two layers that I have to carve down.

Both tiers were covered with white fondant and then a sheer, shimmery white ribbon.

For the bottom tier I made white chocolate baby carriages which I attached with buttercream to pink fondant diamonds. Once they had set I placed them all the way around the cake.

Then I made chocolate diamonds and everywhere that the points meet is a sugar pearl. Yeah, I totally didn't make the pearls.

And here is the part that I became so involved in what I was doing that I forgot to take pictures. I'm pretty sure you can handle it. These are some pictures of the completed cake. I made the booties out of white chocolate just like the baby carriages.