Blast from the past... Cakes of 2008

My aunt, the photographer, was going through her photo files and found a few pictures of cakes I had done back in 2008.

This one was inspired by Jack Skellington from the movie "The Nightmare Before Christmas". My boyfriend and I love that movie so much that I created this Jack cake as a surprise for my boyfriend's 20th birthday party. Everyone thought it was awesome and my boyfriend loved it!

I created this one for Thanksgiving 2008. It was a yellow & caramel cake with caramel-flavored frosting. This one was of my first endeavors in fondant. I used fondant to create a cornucopia with pumpkins, grapes, and corn spilling from it onto the cake. I then used green, yellow, and orange fondant to create the two banners. Oh, and you can't see it from this photo, but I made 5 Autumn leaves out of yellow and orange fondant, which I had mixed together to create a marble effect. This made the leaves look more realistic.





Christmas 2008 inspired me to make a very festive cake. On the outside, I covered the entire cake in white frosting. I crushed candy canes and pressed the candy "crumbs" onto all sides of the cake... well it's round, so it doesn't really have sides, but you get what I mean. LOL. I kept the top of the cake quite simple. I used two mini candy canes to form a heart. The inside of the cake was made with a butter-yellow cake recipe. I used red food coloring to tint the bottom layer and green food coloring to tint the top layer.





Finally, my New Year's Eve 2008 cake. The inside was a basic chocolate cake. I frosted the whole cake with the whitest frosting I could find. I created a border out of mini Hershey Kisses Hugs to outline the top of the cake. For those who don't know, a Hug is a typical Hershey Kiss that has a white-chocolate swirl to it. Using the mini Hugs, I "wrote" 2008 on the face of the cake. The final step, which is a bit hard to see in the photo, was sprinkling the entire face of the cake with clear sugar crystals (the kind of sugar often used to decorate cookies). This made the cake have a snowy-frost look.