This past week has been full of baking, baking, and more baking, so look forward to many posts this coming week. The first of many posts is probably my favorite! This past weekend I had the pleasure of making more treats for my friend Karrie’s second bridal shower. This time the shower was in San Diego, CA and it was at Tea Upon Chatsworth. I had never been to a tea house before and had an absolutely wonderful time. Tea and yummy treats…what could be better! I was asked to make about 40 bridal shower favors for the ladies and decided that trying out mini cakes was the route I was going to take. My wonderful friend April from culinary school came over to help me with the project, but when midnight came she had to leave and that left me to finish them…lets just say that my head didn’t hit the pillow until around 4:30am…I don’t think I would’ve finished without April! I do have to say that I still ended up having a lovely day at the shower, even on 2 1/2 hours sleep, and I was pretty happy with how my little cakes turned out. The circle cakes were chocolate cake with chocolate mousse buttercream and fresh strawberries and the square cakes were buttermilk cake with passion fruit mousse and fresh strawberries. I took photos at my house and also at the shower, so sorry for the overload of photos, but I love taking pictures of my goodies…please let me know your favorite photo, so I can see which one I should put on my official website!

To make them I baked the cake in 13 x 9 pans and then used cookie cutters to cut circles out of the cooled cake. I used a serrated bread knife to make the squares out of the other cake. One I had enough cut outs for each cake to have two layers I piped on a outer ring of vanilla buttercream with a piping bag on the bottom layer and then piped in the filling for the cakes and added the sliced strawberries. Next I placed the second cake layer on top and piped buttercream around the cake before I smoothed it down. Piping the buttercream on the mini cakes is easier than trying to frost them completely with only a offset spatula because the cakes are not as stable as larger ones. After covering the cakes with buttercream I rolled out fondant, I prefer using Satin Ice Fondant, and smoothed it over the cakes. (Side note: I am really happy with Satin Ice Fondant and got many compliments on how the fondant tasted…since many people have a mad mindset about it. Also I have tried marshmallow fondant, but found that I didn’t like the consistency as much as regular fondant…so I’m sticking with Satin Ice). After the fondant is on the cake and smoothed I use a pizza wheel to go around the bottom edge of the cake and cut off the excess.

I then adhered different color ribbon around the bottom of each cake with a dab of buttercream. I also piped three small dots of buttercream at the seam of the ribbon and then adhered three silver dragees to the buttercream dots.

For a decorating accent I rolled out some gray fondant and then stamped the flower design onto the fondant and lust dusted the whole mini cake. As you can see in the photos I used three different flower stamps on the fondant. (For more info about these kind of stamps check out my other posts on cupcakes). I then used circle cookie cutters to cut out neat circles and adhered them to the cake with a dab of water. To package the mini cakes I used 4″x4″x4″ clear boxes, which you can get from Garnish, and tied them with different color ribbons. On some of the boxes I cut fresh button mums and stuck them underneath the ribbon.

And lastly here are some more photos from the shower that were too fun not to post…hope you enjoy them!