My hobbies change a lot. One month I’m painting TOMS and the next I’m screen printing. Then I’m decorating cakes or learning to knit. Or scuba diving. The point is, I like to try things out. I love starting a new project to learn how to do something new. I’ve been painting a lot this year but before that I was decorating cakes. Lots of cakes. I started taking a basic cake decorating class but soon went out on my own and started playing with fondant. I’m not one of those people who starts out easy and builds up my skills, I just skip ahead and move into the more advanced stuff. I was looking at a blog I made when I was cake decorating and was pretty impressed with my skills. It’s been awhile since I’ve decorated a cake… I wonder if I can still do it. Here’s some of my favorites from the past:

#1: Every time I see these Hello Kitty cupcakes I just want to die of cuteness overload. I made these red velvet cupcakes for a friend’s birthday and even though they took a million hours to make, I am so happy with the end result. This was my last cake decorating project.

#2: Since I showed you my last project, I think it’s only fair to show you my first one too. Here it is, my Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus cake. This was my first ever cake and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I bought some fondant and icing colors and a cake board and a few other tools and just went for it. I was pretty happy with it. I used to have a lot of horror movie nights with some friends of mine and this one was made for our screening of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. All I can say is that the cake was way better than the movie. If I remember correctly I made lemon-vanilla cake with fresh stawberries and chocolate ganache. Yea, that was a tasty one.

#3: Here is a picture of my first 3D cake, a hard hat with the Strike Construction logo. This was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be but my best friend who ordered the cake said it was really great. I made the most seriously moist and tasty cake ever. The trick is a little coffee to intensify the chocolate flavor and a small tub of sour cream. Sounds weird but it’s sooo good.

#4: I made this Hibiscus cake for my parent’s 30th wedding anniversary. They met in Corpus Christi and honeymooned in Hawaii and the tropical flowers just seemed appropriate. Making the flowers was quite a challenge and if you take a look at the blog post for this cake you will see that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was going to try using wire to put the flowers together but ended up just pressing the petals together and keeping my fingers crossed that they didn’t fall apart on me. Thankfully it worked out in my favor.

#5: This was my first wedding style cake and I made it for a friend’s sister’s 25th wedding anniversary (hence the silver). It was a reimagined version of the top tier of their original wedding cake which had an absolute ton of piping on it.

#6: Here’s my second cake. As you can see my skills improved quite a bit from one cake to the next. This cake was for my best friend’s birthday. I wanted to make something super girly and fun and also use gumpaste. All of the pieces on the top of the cake were made with gumpaste. The cake was chocolate but the filling was the best part… it was a nutella filling with chopped hazelnuts. It was like biting into one of those Ferrero Rocher candies. So good.

#7: This graveyard cake turned out pretty cute but was actually kind of a failure. I wanted to make a cake for Halloween that was filled with blood — well, OK strawberry puree — that poured out of the cake when you cut into it. I made it the night before the party it was intended for and I guess the puree sort of congealed overnight and did not flow when cut into. It would have been no big deal except for the fact that a bunch of kids were really dissappointed that the cake did not flow blood. Oh well. Those kids have no idea how many hours I spent making the rocks on the side of the cake alone.