Jack of All Trades...Master of None!: My Cakes

I wanted to be a chef back in the day, but never went to Culinary School to pursue my dreams. Instead, I went to work in an office - even tho I swore I never would considering I FAILED typing in high school! Never been a passion of mine to be in an office. But alas, here I am. No regrets, learned alot, love what I do now, but I still love cooking....that will always be my first love!

Working full time, raising a daughter, being a wife and running a house keeps me busy, but somehow, someway, I've found time to start a new hobby. Started 7 years ago, when my daughter had her 1st birthday. My mom made and decorated all our cakes growing up and I remember them like they were yesterday. So she flew up for her birthday and brought all her decorating tools with her and helped me make her cake. This was my FIRST cake ever decorating fancy. I don't know what design I was attempting - - - just throwing stuff on it in hopes it would look good. Even made a jack-in-the-box on top of the cake, too. It worked!

Bugg's 1st Birthday Cake

My mom thought I was a natural and left all her stuff behind when she went back to AZ. Well, needless to say, I never picked it up again until Bugg's 2nd birthday. She LOVED Spongebob so guess what the theme was that year? Yep, Spongebob! Once again, my mom flew in for her birthday and heloped me make and decorate the cake. This time, she let me do all of it. I scoured the Net for cake ideas and found this on Coolest-Birthday-Cakes. Not bad for my 2nd decorated cake. But, I made a HUGE mistake in the decorating world and used canned icing. I didn't know better then.

For her 3rd birthday, I honestly don't remember what I made, but it must not have been that special because I don't even have a picture of it. It wasn't until her 4th birthday that I really started doing research on cake decorating and found my favorite cake site yet.... Cake Central. Her party was at the local bowling alley so I wanted a cake to match the theme....only problem, she wanted an ice cream cake. I found a recipe on Food.com for a DQ Ice Cream Cake and replicated it. Not the BEST icing to work with but the kids didn't seem to mind. Then I went back to Cake Central and learned how to do a Frozen Buttercream Transfer. Best thing ever...that's how I made the bowling ball and pins and the wording!

As you can see, the icing job isn't the best, but I thought I did a pretty good on the decorations.

After that, my love for decorating grew. I think my husband saw how much fun I was having with it and bought me a gift card to Michaels for their Wilton Decorating Class. By time I started the class, I was entrenched in the Cake Central website. Reading, making notes of what I wanted to do and reading some more!

The 1st Wilton class touched on lots of things I read about and now was the time to try my hand at it. Here's final cake for the last class project.