Mother's Day Mayhem - Part 2!

Sorry to keeep you waiting on cake #2! It's been a 3-cake week for me (more on #3 later) and I have hardly had time to even think, let alone post a blog! As promised, here are the pics from the Mother's Day cake I made for my mom:



















I wanted to make something really summery for my beach-loving mom. This was a lemon layer cake/lemon cupcakes with the same raspberry cream filling I made to go in the Naughty Cupcakes a couple months ago. I added 1t. of raspberry extract to really kick up the flavor of the filling. It was a perfect complement for the light, springy lemon cake.

One of my cake-making friends gave me a hint on how to prevent your filling from oozing out between the layers of your cake when you're frosting it, and it worked so well I'd like to share it with you. Before applying your filling to your layers, pipe a ring of your frosting around the outside edge of the layer, making a frosting barrier between the filling and the edge of the cake. Works like a charm!

Once the cake was frosted and the cupcakes were given watery waves of blue icing, I rolled out a strip of blue fondant and hand-cut a wave pattern, then wrapped it around the outside of the cake. I dusted the top and sides of the cake and 2 cupcakes with graham cracker crumbs to give it a sandy effect and topped with the sea shells and beach fondant decorations I made the week prior (giving them plenty of time to dry!). The only thing on the cake that is not edible is the umbrella.

Each cake I make, I'm learning more and more about how to work with fondant. It's definitely less intimidating each time around! When I was in Atlanta, I bought the chocolate molds for the seashells, as well as the edible metallic luster dust I applied to the "cap" of the sunscreen bottle and the tops of the seashells to make them shimmer. I've heard you can mix the luster dust with clear vanilla extract or vodka, but I've been using water and have had great success. The water does make the fondant sticky, so you have to be careful not to touch it until it's had a lot of time to dry.

So that is cake #2! My cake #3 of the week is for a party tonight... more on this next week. Oh! And I still owe you a write up from the fabulous cupcake safari my sis and I went on in Phoenix last week! Too much to do and not enough hours in the day. Stay tuned!

Have a great weekend,
~CaraCakes

PS - My mom didn't wait to cut into her cake! Here's a fuzzy shot of the carnage from my camera phone...