2013 Recap

2013 has been a busy year. My caking activities took a new turn this year and I discovered my love for bobblehead cake toppers. To my utter delight and amazement, it turns out I'm not the only one loving those bobbleheads. As a result, it's been a steady stream of orders through the year and almost every weekend has been a bobblehead weekend, hence why I've neglected my blog. 

In addition to bobbleheads, I also discovered a fitting name for my little hobby-turned-small-business, Cakicature, which is a play of words combining "cake" and "caricature." I set up a Cakicature Facebook page and a website as well. Do click on the links and check them out. 

To all those people who have been a great source of support to me this year, I'd like to say a big Thank You. My hubby Greg for being so patient, my fellow cake decorating friends on Facebook, whom I fondly refer to as "my cakey friends" - an uber thank you.... yes, you know who you are! Thanks for all the invaluable support, advice and awesome tips. And of course, to all my customers, thank you muchly for giving me the opportunities to make such a variety of bobbleheads and cake toppers. They each have their own unique challenges and I've learned so much more from them. 

Finally, I'd like to thank the master cake artists whom I've been fortunate enough to meet and learn from by attending their workshops - Peggy Tucker and Dawn from Dinkydoodle. The skills I learned from you have greatly expanded my capabilities. Oh, and all those Craftsy video lessons have been truly priceless as well. 

I still have one more person to thank, and that's Gary from Oldvision for his "how to pack fragile items" youtube. If not for this youtube video, I wouldn't have a clue how to pack and ship my bobbleheads safely. Check out his video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4X-8a2YVtw

That's my oscar-wannabe-speech done. Hahaha! Here're a few pickies from 2013. First, the bobbleheads....

And I made some cakes too...

Purple pig

This is my other weekend rush job. Got the cake order late Friday night, from Greg.... gotta love my hubby! This is the smallest 3D novelty I've made, it'll only feed like 4 people. LOL. This is coz Greg's taking it to Sydney on the red eyed special first up Monday. Can't even imagine him trying to balance a 3 or 4 tiered topsy turvy in the plane! Hahaha. So, the cake's gotta be small enough to fit in a shopping bag as hand luggage.

First thing's first... prepare foam core cake board. I secured bubble straws in the foam core and slip some fondant discs (slipped discs???) around the straws - these will be the pig's legs.

Greg carved the pig's belly from styrofoam, and there's the model pig in the background. It's a Smart Salary piggy bank... sorta like a corporate mascot I suppose. Purple not quite the right shade but since this is a rush job, I don't have time to play around with colours so I used Satin Ice purple fondant straight from the tub. As it turned out, the model piggy bank is the wrong shade of purple while my cake is very close to the official corporate purple... Yes, the marketing people at Smart Salary actually whipped out their colour charts and compared my pig.... awww......I'm touched!

My trusted Planet Cake white chocolate mud cake layered and covered in dark chocolate ganache.

Oink oink...

 Oink...

 The end!

Most epic one yet!

This is my most epic cake yet.... a standing bear cake. I'm really chuffed with how it turned out. It's a commissioned piece from my friend Alex for her sister's birthday. Her sister apparently likes Pedo Bear, which is rather inappropriate, I know... but clients do come with the weirdest requests! LOL. Although, Alex's original idea was to just bake a round glutten free dairy free chocolate cake and stick an edible image of Pedo on the cake. I talked her into this! Yes, I'm a sucker for punishment!

Start with watching an inspirational video by Bronwen Weber... do a search on You Tube. Bronwen's "cake bones" are available online but at $100, I decided to make my own... with a bit of help from Greg and Mr Bunnings, a nickname concocted by my buddies from the Facebook Australian Cake Decorating Network. When Greg and I were shopping for PVC bits at Bunnings, this very helpful staff member kept offering his help.... well, we stood looking at and pondering about pipes and bits for over an hour so I guess he realised we were kinda struggling. At his 3rd offer to help, I decided to explain what I planned to make. He scratched his head. I showed him a picture of Pedo Bear and he took off like a rocket.... hmmm.... I suppose that's the sort of effect Pedo Bear has on people.

From the bits and pieces, Greg made this cake skeleton...

Alex got her sister to bake her own birthday cake (smoooooth, Alex!)... It's gluten free, so a bit of a challenge to tort... oops!

Leaning tower of gluten free with cascading waterfall of ganache...

The best thing about chocolate cake is, you can sorta squish fallen bits back into the cake and glue them with ganache... like so...

Slap on a thick layer of ganache and no one's the wiser...

Meanwhile, Greg's prepping the cake board.

He even covered it with cake foil.... awww... looks like store bought!

So professional, it deserves a second look.

Assemble the skeleton, cover with foil. Oh, make sure you wash your bones thoroughly... we put ours through the dishwasher about 3 times.... afterall, they did come from the plumbing section in Bunnings!

Attach the cake board and secure it to the "hip bone"

Homemade LCMs, aka rice krispie treats, aka RKT. For this cake, I used up a giant box of rice bubbles, 3 bags of marshmallows and half a block of butter.... that's how much rice treats is needed to "flesh" out the bones.

One leg before and one leg after. The ganache helps the rice treats to stick to the bones.

Close-up of leg - doesn't that look like a bloody bone with ripped off flesh? Bu-wahahaha!

Greg's very good at packing in the rice treat flesh.

Legs done!

Under-belly done too, cling-wrap to hold everything in place and leave to set.

Once set, attach the spine and slide the cake down the spine, attach the shoulders and foil wrap.

Ganache the shoulders.

Rice treats wrapped around the shoulders and chest.

Plop on the head, which is a styrofoam ball. I used styro coz it's light and will stop the cake being too top heavy.

Okay.... the torso's looking elongated.... oops! Time to perform some surgery. Dislocate the shoulders, then saw off a chunk of the spine... easy... easy.....

Much better. Bear all ganached... well, almost... looks like skin, eh? LOL.

Close up of ganache after Greg and I have slapped it on...

Close up of ganache after smoothing. Best way to smooth ganache on a novelty cake is, wait for the initial slap-on layers to set and harden. Put on a pair of food-grade gloves, get ready a bowl of hot water. Dip fingers in hot water and use fingers to smooth.

Time for the fun stuff. Yet another good thing I stole from Greg (hehe)... his marble rolling pin. Nice and heavy, best ever to roll out fondant.

Stick on fondant one panel at a time.

Almost there...

Done! Sorry... as usual, I get carried away and forget to take pics but you get the picture. It's just the final touches. Pedo Bear says "you're too old for me" which is a good thing!