Make It Work

Lauren and Nick got married this past Saturday at the Admiral Kidd Club, a military venue on Pt. Loma with an incredible view across the bay of the San Diego Skyline.  February weddings can be a little iffy with the weather, but Lauren and Nick lucked out with a gorgeous day that felt like spring.  Lauren wanted a suble tone on tone damask stencil on a buttercream frosted cake.  I’ve done stencils on buttercream many times, but always a dark color.  When I put the ivory stencil on the buttercream, it didn’t show up at all.  Since our buttercream has actual butter in it, it’s a natural ivory tone rather than pure white, so the ivory stencil was lost.  I really needed a pure white background to make the ivory stencil show up in the subtle tone that Lauren was looking for.  Fondant has that pure white tone, but Lauren didn’t want a fondant covered cake (nor had she paid for that).  There’s no way I’m calling a bride the day before her wedding to tell her I can’t get her design to work unless it’s an absolute disaster.  So I made a command decision to wrap a very thin 1/4″ thick strip of fondant around the sides of each tier.  This gave me the pure white background needed for the stencil, but still gave the couple a buttercream frosted cake.   The fondant wrap was so thin, as to be neglible.  The cake came out fantastic.  And it was so much easier than trying to stencil a buttercream frosted cake, I think I’m going to make this the standard way I do stencils on buttercream cakes in the future.  I didn’t see the couple on the big day (I rarely do), but her mother was thrilled with the result.  So was I.

Natasha’s husband Michael loves to go off-roading in his Jeep, so for Valentine’s Day she wanted a replica of his Jeep in cake.  Emily did a great job on this . . . so great that Natasha gave her a big hug when she picked up the cake. 

Angelica and Khumi got their wedding cake from Twiggs (that’s us!) back in August of 2008.  Now four and a half years later, Khumi is turning 40, their first kid, Xayden, is turning 1 and they have another on the way.  They rented a home in Mission Beach to celebrate the two big birthdays — a Saturday night party for Khumi’s big 4-0 and a Sunday afternoon party for Xayden’s first.  No birthday party is complete without a cake, so Angelica ordered two cakes from us that we delivered.  For Khumi she got a 2D tombstone marking the death of Khumi’s youth and for Xayden she got a two teir Elmo cake.  I thought they both turned out great.

Finally, a few more cakes we did this past weekend.  Lucas turned 2 and we did a train themed cake to help him celebrate.  We also did a cake that had a pretty cool argyle design on the side, a 2D sailboat and a cake with a beach / surfboard theme.  You can click on any image to see a larger one.

Well, that’s it for another week’s highlights.  Thanks for reading the blog and thanks for supporting Twiggs!!