PhDCupcaker

Okay, so it was my friend Aaron’s birthday this past weekend. I had these grand plans to re-create something I found on the Charm City Cakes website (this is the “Ace of Cakes” bakery). Who was I kidding! I spend a week trying to figure out how I was going to re-create the TI-84 Graphing Calculator Cake you see below. I had some of it figured out – I even did some math to do this. I used my scanner to scan in my own graphing calculator. I then enlarged the image so that it was about the size of a 9 x 13 in. cake. I was then able to print it and use it as a template for cutting out my fondant pieces. That all worked out fine, but when it came to being able to write on all the little fondant pieces the only success I had was the white keys. For these I was able to use my black food writer. However, most of the keys are gray or black and I was not able to find a good way to write such small text on these keys since none of my food writers would work. Then came trying to get the right color gray fondant and being able to use this to cover the 9 x 13 in cake. I got the fondant to be on okay gray color, but man of man, did it look pretty bad when I put it all on the actual cake. Believe me – nobody would have wanted to eat it! :-) Sorry, no pictures! So, I decided I just couldn’t do this. All hail Ace of Cakes! You are amazing! How cool is this cake?!?! So, I decided that since I agreed to make the cake that I would quickly swap out the calculator cake with some birthday cupcakes instead. These are my usual chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I decided to do something different than my usual star tip for the icing. I piped these on without a tip to create little mounds of icing. I then used my Wilton Alphabet and Number Fondant Cutters to cut out the letters and numbers for “Happy 31st Birthday Aaron!” These were a little rushed, but in the end I think they were cute and people thought they were tasty. So, that is a plus! Here’s one more picture – a close up. From now on, I think I’ll stick to cupcakes, or at least simple cakes for now! :-)