Designed Delights

How about this Sassy, bright cake for your 13th birthday?!? This cake completely embodies fun, youthful spirit and coming into your teenage years with the perfect amount of flair!

This cake has a Buttercream finish with a small amount of vintage piping on the edges. The Buttercream zebra print was created using a stencil. A big beautiful sugar paste bow for the top was dry dusted with black metallic luster dust. The 13 I created in The Cricut design space where I then created a stencil and cut the 13 out in sugar paste.

RANT - Can I get some empathy!

I don't understand how people cannot look at my work and realize that the level of design that I do is quality work. I am not going to charge you pennies for quality work. I value not only my time, and my skill set, but the types of ingredients and products that I use. I use Italian sugar paste over American made fondant, I use Italian modeling chocolate, and chocolate ganache. I pride myself on buying really high quality ingredients. On top of that, humbly, I am very good at sculpting and designing. My product speaks for itself. And I value myself. We should all love ourselves. And I love myself enough to know what I'm worth.

That being said... A gentleman reached out to me about a cake. And I will say, mostly, not always, men tend to not understand as often as women the price of cake art. They simply think they're buying a cake. So this gentleman reached out to me about sculpting, a horse head that he wanted to look specifically like his daughter's horse for her 16th birthday. Okay! Great! This is my favorite type of cake that I do. And I feel like we have a lot of great designers in our area, but this is my forte. This is what I do best and I feel like I'm probably one of the better sculptors in our area. That being said, I don't charge nickels and dimes because I know how much time that's going to take, (and I'm going to use a lot of chocolate which is a lot more expensive than sugar paste and fondant.) As much as I love designing cakes, and especially realistic cakes, I will never undercharge just to get the order. My time is very important to me. You will get charged for the amount of time and skill I put into a cake.

Anyways, I make a rough plan for this cake and decide I'm going to bake a 2 and 1/2 to 3-in tall quarter sheet and do a carve from that because the horsehead will be laying flat. And then quote him for a specialty flavor. A cake carve, a filling, chocolate ganache, and modeling chocolate and all of the sculpting and airbrushing and detailing, I line item everything out and I only charged him 300 bucks. Which is nothing for something like this but I wanted the job and I thought that it was a fair price for the amount of hours that I would put in.

I wouldn't even be posting this right now... But this guy had the audacity to email me and throw in my face that he found another Baker that wanted to do it for more than half the cost less. And I responded with "Well, sometimes people want value over quality, A simple no thank you would have sufficed."

Here's the deal. I do not care if I get every order. That is fine. But don't come at me trying to tell me someone's giving you a better deal in a rude way. I'm snarky, and I might bite back. I might even make a post about it. And turn those lemons into lemonade! If you were looking for value, you shouldn't have come to me. I serve a high quality product, with high quality skills. I am not ashamed to say that about myself. I'm a humble person, but right now I'm putting it out there that I'm really great at what I do. So if you want great, then you have to pay prices for that. I'm not selling Toyotas over here, I'm selling Lamborghinis. You should have looked at my portfolio and known that I was not going to give you the best value.

Rant over!

How about this adorable trip around the Sun cake and cupcake combo? I'm in Phoenix right now. Enjoying some sunshine, so it's great to celebrate the sunshine with all of you! Hope you're gearing up for a great weekend!

A sneak peek at what's coming up! All of my work is done for the week, because I'm traveling through the weekend. These cupcakes are paired with a beautiful cake. Make sure to watch out for it!!!

Weekly recap... Which one is your favorite?! (Share one of yours from last week!!! )

Last week I had some weird orders! Okay well half of what I did was my own kids weirdness. And I'm into it. And his order was not only that two-tiered cake, but 48 of those cupcakes, it definitely took up most of my time and I made sure to keep my schedule open for it. But time consuming cupcake Toppers and the cutest Mr. Rogers cake... Which one are you going for?

I have to go for my own kids cake! Because look at his cute little face!

And 48 cupcakes to match! Complete with Andy's face! Happy birthday sweet boy! The one that made me a mom!

This past week was mostly focused on my own kid. Andy was turning from 6 to 7, so of course we had a 6 7 party!!! Complete with swimming, laughing and a dance party. The colors were selected specifically from Andy. We also had 48 cupcakes! Help me wish Andy pants a big happy seventh birthday!

#67

Super Kitties! The amount of time that cupcake toppers take is insane. But they are super fun for the kiddos!

So I have never tried to dye peanut butter icing. And at first I forgot that her chocolate cupcakes were supposed to be peanut butter chocolate cupcakes. And I had made the pink icing. And then I remembered! Thankfully, before I iced the cupcake. Originally I was going to do something different with the backdrop of the Toppers. And then have chocolate in one box and vanilla in another box. What I ended up doing was adding the peanut butter to the pink icing and then adding a little bit more pink. So the pink looks a little bit Dusty Rose, but I think it worked out okay. I wanted it to be a more bright vivid pink, but it is what it is. Luckily the peanut butter icing still tasted amazing! But then I decided to mix and match the cupcakes. That way they were blue and pink in both boxes. Because I did make 24 cupcakes.

Won't you be my neighbor?! Every great neighbor deserves a Mr. Rogers cake! Complete with Daniel Tiger and all the friends around the cake! How adorable!

Throwback Thursday! A day of sharing!! Decorators! Share a throwback. Let's enjoy this community and show our artwork and give some love!

This highland cow never gets too old to share! I'll share her as one of my original cakes forever!