Just a quick blog update to show some of the more fun cakes we did this past weekend at Twiggs.   The variety of stuff we do really keeps this job fun.  The things people come up with are really interesting.

The first cake is a small recreation of a lake in the Canadian Rockies.  Dennis and Jen got married a couple of months ago by this lake with a small group of immediate family and friends.  They had a celebration of their wedding down here but didn’t want the traditional wedding cake, so they ordered a sculpted cake recreating the lake they got married by.  It rained on their wedding day, so there are two small red umbrellas in the foreground.

Next Vanessa got her wedding cake from us a few months back.  She loved it so much she came back to get her birthday cake.  She celebrated in style with a replica of a Cristal Champagne bottle.

Finally, a birthday cake for a real estate agent.  We recreated his real estate sign.

We’re occasionally in the knock-off business here at Twiggs.  Rather than making real designer bag knock-offs, however, we make edible ones.  We just finished our 5th or so cake designed to replicate a Louis Vuitton purse.

Frankly, this isn’t the cheapest cake you can order.  After shaping the cake, it’s covered with chocolate fondant and then a painstaking process of stenciling on the iconic Louis Vuitton design in gold lustre dust begins.  Depending on the size of the cake, the stenciling can take anywhere from 4 to 6 hours.  We made the stencil ourselves, though we remade the stencil for today’s cake as the previous stencil had gotten a little shopworn.  Just creating the stencil took an hour or so.  After all this, the zipper is put in and painted gold and then the purse handles made the day before are attached.

 It’s a lot of work, but the end result is pretty terrific.  Emily, my main assistant made this cake and she did a fantastic job.  She was beaming after finishing this one –  as well she should.  Congratulations, Emily!  Great job!  

Oh, and Happy Birthday Tasha!

I’ve been thinking about what to write about on these blogs that would be of interest.  Then I laugh at myself as I think I’m the only person reading these so what does it matter?

But it occurred to me that Twiggs delivers wedding cakes to a lot of different venues in San Diego county.  For someone getting married, it can be daunting with all the venue options — and there are options people might not be aware of.  So I decided to occasionally write about different venues as we deliver to them.  And, of course, I have to include a picture of the cake we deliver!   This past Saturday, I delivered a cake for Jen and Caleb to the Ultimate Sky Box.

The Ultimate Skybox is a great venue not a lot of people might be aware of.  It’s on the 15th floor (the penthouse) of a building that’s literally next to Petco Park.  It’s a very contemporary, urban loft space that has incredible views of downtown San Diego, Coronado, the bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond.  One whole wall opens to a balcony that most of your guests will probably spend the night on.   One note about this venue:  you should be aware of what the Padres home game schedule is.  When the Padres are in town, it’s going to be a little tougher for your guests to find parking near the venue and you’ll also have a game going on right outside your wedding.  Some couples (particularly hard core baseball fans) love this while others would be annoyed by the distraction.  If there’s no home game, you’ve just got a spectacular view in an extremely cool space that all of your guests will remember.   Jen and Caleb and their guests got treated to a Padres 14-1 blow-out victory over the Marlins.  Hopefully, that’s a good sign for their marriage!

Here’s a link to their website:  http://www.diamondviewtower.com/Ultimate%20Skybox.htm

Here’s a picture of Jen and Caleb’s cake along with a few pictures I snapped of the view from the balcony.  I didn’t include any interior views as they were still setting up the room when I finished with the cake.  Go to the website above for interior pictures. 

She’s completely expressionless.  She doesn’t even have a mouth or eyebrows with which to convey expression.  Her face is a blank canvas and yet she’s incredibly popular.  Perhaps she’s so popular precisely because she has no expression.  She sits there making no judgement of you.  You can read into her whatever you want.  She’s Hello Kitty.

Here at Twiggs we’ve put Hello Kitty on almost every kind of cake you can reasonably think of — birthday cakes, baby shower cakes, graduation cakes.   I’ve yet to do a Hello Kitty wedding cake, but it seems inevitable.  I have to say, I’m happy to take Hello Kitty cake orders because Hello Kitty is pretty easy to pull off.  With two oval eyes, a round nose and some whiskers it doesn’t take much to capture the essence of Hello Kitty.  As wide as Hello Kitty’s appeal is, however, it does seem to be pretty much exclusively a girl thing.

Here are a few Hello Kitty Cakes we’ve done here at Twiggs:

The wedding cakes I enjoy working on the most at Twiggs are ones that have a design I’ve never done.   It’s particularly fun when I get to come up with the design myself.  The most common inspiration sources for the cake design are the wedding dress or invitations.  But I had a first this past weekend.

Molly and Derick got married this past Saturday at the Sheraton in Carlsbad.  Molly wanted me to use not her dress, but her bridesmaid dresses as inspiration.  The dresses were quite cool — something you could legitimately see someone wearing to a party without anyone thinking they were wearing a bridesmaid dress.  The dress was a cocktail dress which had a single circular medallion on the side of the dress.  The medallion was quite large (about 16″ in diameter) and very detailed.  There’s just no way to condense a design like that down to a 3″ circle that will be on the side of a cake without losing a lot of the detail.  Fortunately, Molly understood this and just wanted her cake design to capture the feel of the bridesmaid dresses.  I drew some sketches and we corresponded over e-mail until Molly was happy with the design.  I was super happy with the result.

So if you want to personalize your cake but aren’t sure how — look to other elements of your wedding for inspiration.  Let us know what you’re thinking about and we’ll go from there.  Personalizing designs is what really makes this work fun.

The inspiration:

The Cake:

If you came to Twiggs University Heights location anytime in the past decade before 10am, you knew Nial Castle.  Nial was a fixture every morning holding court in the front corner of our shop with long time friend Richard.  I thought of Nial and Richard as Waldorf and Statler — the two curmudgeonly muppets who sat in the balcony on the muppet show making comments on the passing parade.  People would join their their circle and then move on to their day.  At times, Nial and Richard sat alone.  At other times there’d be 10 people around them.

Nial was a fighter pilot during World War II with the Black Sheep Squadron fighting in the Pacific theatre.  He won 3 Distinguished Flying Cross medals for missions over the Phillipines and was honored in a parade in the Phillipines on the 50th anniversary of their liberation in 2004.  Nial was very proud of his service and spoke of it often.  He subsequently fought in the Korean War before leaving the military in 1960.

Nial was a pistol.  Five years ago when he was 86, he went on a 4 hour motorcycle ride with some of our staff.  A couple of years ago, he stopped riding his motorcycle and would drive his camper van to Twiggs.  Nial also was an artist who specialized in copying the work of some of the great masters.  For the last couple of years, a huge recreation of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party that Nial had done hung on our back wall.  For years while in his 80′s, Nial would take his art to the Kobey Swap Meet to sell.  We should all be so lucky to be so active in our 80′s.

Nial passed away Aug 1 just a couple months short of his 91st birthday.

There will be a celebration of Nial’s life on Sunday, August 28 at noon at Twiggs in University Heights.  Everyone who knew Nial is invited to come and share stories of our very unique friend.

We’ll miss you, Nial.  Mornings aren’t the same without you.  Rest in peace.

By far the most popular design for wedding cakes we do at Twiggs is the triple swiss dot. We did two of these just last weekend.  In fact, I’d estimate 20% of the wedding cakes we do are triple swiss dot and it’s easy to understand why.  Triple Swiss Dot is like the black tuxedo — simple, classic and never out of style.  Whether you’re looking at your cake on your wedding day or in pictures on your 25th anniversary, your wedding cake will never look dated.  Honestly, I’ve done so many of these that I don’t always appreciate them for what they are.

Recently, however, we did a triple swiss dot wedding cake for Sarah and Flavio at the La Jolla Women’s Club.  Their combination of an aqua ribbon and bright yellow flowers along with two very cute folk art birds and a great cake stand really made me see my old friend, the triple swiss dot, with new eyes.

So if you’re in the market for a simple, classic and timeless design for your wedding cake, you can’t go wrong with the triple swiss dot.  Personalize it with ribbon and flowers that match your wedding design and colors.

Welcome to the Twiggs Blog!

You’ll be sure to read the word Twiggs a lot, as our web designer tells us we need to say Twiggs a lot in the blog as this helps in getting Twiggs positioned higher in search results.  As much as Twiggs hates people who refer to themselves in the 3rd person, Twiggs will be referring to Twiggs as Twiggs rather than “us” or “we” so we can climb up in those search engine results.  Sorry.

Hopefully, you’ll find our blog entertaining.  We do a ton of fun cakes — from weddings to birthdays, so there’s lots to talk about.  Now we just have to keep our posting up.  Nothing is lamer than going to some website’s blog to see their last entry was from 2 years ago.  That won’t be Twiggs!  (Notice how we squeezed another “Twiggs” in there?  And we did it again!  HA!)

So here are four cakes we did just this past weekend (August 6, 2011)

We won’t insult you by telling you what the cake below was for, since the inscription is on the cake.  But we made the medallions on top by hand from fondant.  We delivered the cake to a Hornblower yacht for their big night out.

The next cake was for a group that bicycled from Charleston, South Carolina to San Diego.  They ordered their cake from Twiggs to celebrate the big finish at Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma.

Next is an elegant gold gift box ordered from Los Angeles.

Finally, here’s a Hungry Caterpillar cake.  The mom gave us the Hungry Caterpillar book and we replicated all the things the Hungry Caterpillar ate through the course of the book.  If you haven’t read the book and you’re over 2 years old, I have to say it’s not very compelling reading.  But it was a fun cake.

Well that’s it for now.  There were actually a few other very fun cakes, including a three tier cake featuring Jessie from Toy Story.  But I don’t want these posts to get too long.  Plus this coming weekend is insane.  I don’t know why August 13, 2011 is such an incredibly popular date to get married, but it’s actually the busiest weekend we’ve ever had for wedding cakes at Twiggs.  That is until September 10 rolls around.

Thanks for reading the Twiggs blog!

It was a great project to work on with Dan and Bernie.  We feel the organization/flow and overall “look and feel” are a fantastic improvement to the Twiggs Bakery online presence.  The new website truly exemplifies the atmosphere at both Twiggs Bakery locations !

Again, thank you Dan and Bernie, it was a pleasure and we look forward to seeing you soon for coffee and working on the site whenever called upon in the immediate future !

Franc D Alonso
CEO
SIXeed.com