Tammy's new dedicated Blog.

With Tammy getting more and more into her cakes, she's starting her own blog. I'll post in on my links on the side too, but as a post, here is where you'll find her future cakes.


TJ's Happy Cakes

Some of Tammy's Cakes from the last week

The first cake is a creation after a Christmas ornament for some friends of ours. Each year the daughter get's to pick a new Christmas ornament for the tree. The Parents and Daughter liked this years ornament so much they decided to have her Birthday cake made to look like it. It's a Curious George coming out of a present. Everything but the lid is edible, and you can see the actual ornament in the first pic. The main present is all cake, and George is molded out of Rice Crispies.



Next is a cake made for some friends this weekend. Very big Scooby fan so Tammy made it look like Scooby was coming out of the cake. You can see pieces of the frosting breaking open or on his face to add to the effect.



And the final one was for a Baby shower done this weekend as well. Another great looking cake by Tammy with a little baby sleeping on the shape of the moon. They were very pleased with this cake.

The People's Happy Cake

So, 5 weeks ago Tammy decided to take a plunge and enter this years Home and Garden show's Cake competition. She mulled for weeks/months over it and finally decided she was accomplished enough to enter the competition. The final decision was whether to enter her particular category of intermediate cake decorator or go for the gusto and enter the Theme of the Home and Garden show "Enchanted Cakes." After repeating to herself several hundred times "Go big or go home" she decided to attempt the Enchanted Cakes category. Below is the results of the 5 weeks of nightly/weekend/ and every other time work on her cake...


This is about a 22" tall tree on a 30" base. Because it is a show piece it doesn’t have to be made from cake, but has to be something you could recreate in cake. So the center of the tree is what would have been cake. The tree has a PVC pipe center for support with copper tubing for branches, its completely covered in modeling chocolate which is edible.

All of the decorations are royal icing or fondant. The lily of the valley were my flower to plant on the farm and Tiger Lilys were always my mom’s favorites. The columbine were put in because we’re in Colorado. All of the activities of the fairies are just the things I think fairies would be doing in an enchanted forest and I love the expression on the Tree who has a lovely bark mustache.

I made hard candy and poured it into little dew droplets to give it a little shine. The fairies and flowers are mostly fondant (basically edible playdough)


Carrying a little Ladybug...

Reaching out to a Butterfly

Shaking Dew off onto Mr. Mushroom
Playing Hide and Seak
A small game of Leap Frog
Riding in the Saddle
She loves me, she loves me not
Staking up Mushrooms
Swinging from the Tree
and Climbing the Tree



Come Friday the 15th of February Tammy very nervously took down the cake to the Denver Convention Center. She cautiously scoped out the competition there when she dropped off her cake and surmised she had a decent chance. Saturday she was able to finally take a breather and enjoy life again. :-) We relaxed, hung out at my parents and didn't think about the cake once. Sunday, Tammy had volunteered to work the Cake booth from 10 until the 4:30 when the awards show was.
Around 1:00 Sunday afternoon, Tammy called me very depressed. She had the opportunity to read some of the judge rankings of the cakes and found she hadn't done well enough to place. Being the supportive family we are we said we'd still come down to the award show for her.
Once down at the awards show the family all got to see the variety of cakes that had been entered. There was a great variety of talent shown as well as very creative ideas on the themes. Sitting in the theater prior to the ceremony, Grandma seized the opportunity to have Troy inform Keegan Gerhardt, one of the judges and Food Network Cake Challenge host, that he thought his Mommy made the best Happy cake in the show. This lead to a lengthy discussion between Keegan and Tammy in regards to her judging results. She learned a lot from this and believes this will definitely help her in the future.
Sitting there listening to the results it was a truly a priceless moment seeing Tammy's face light up with tears as they announced that her cake was chosen as the Peoples Choice Cake 2008 for the Denver Home and Garden show. This award was voted on by the thousands and thousands of people attending the show that weekend. Truly an honor and something Tammy will remember for a long time. It also resulted in her cake being on display the rest of the week while the show was going on.

SUPERMAN TROY

Faster than a speeding bullet, Able to Eat Large Happy Cakes in a single bite, it's a Toy, it's Play dough.. no it's another one of Tammy's awesome cakes. She made this for Troy's 4th birthday and did it amazingly while working on the Enchanted Forrest cake

So... why not some of my work

Let's start out with my Birthday cake from this year. It's almost as if Tammy knew exactly what I wanted.











Here's a few item's I've turned recently;


Last night I worked on an Ash bat for a friend of ours. She wanted to give it to her boyfriend for Christmas. It actually turned out pretty good and now Tammy wants on.
This is a Aspen vase I made to fit in a stand I had sitting around. It's not finished yet as I'm still trying to decide what kind of finish/finish work I want to do to it.
An Alder basket weave bowl I turned and burned. There's a basket weave patter on the top rim that was burned in.

A nice box elder bowl. Stands about 7" high and 10" across


One of my favorite pieces so far. A Cedar hollow form/vase that I turned, dremeled out the holes and burned with a butane torch

side view

This is one of my Elm vases I turned in the Trent class earlier this year. Finally got it dried and finished.
Some mini turnings I did. The walnut one (right) is about 2" high.

Another Mini. About 1" high, with a burned in pattern
This is from a piece of Old Pithy pine I had sitting around and decided to mess with one day. Sure glad this didn't become firewood.


And my winged aspen bowl. Turned completely on the lathe and the wings are left for artistic value on the piece.

Dr. Suess

Tammy went to the Dr. Seuss cake challenge yesterday to watch these AMAZING cakes be created. It was really hard to tell, down to the last minute who was going to win because they were all amazing.

The competitors were given all of the Dr. Seuss books 3 weeks ago and had to decide which book they were going to do. The kicker was, that one of the judges was the VP of marketing for Dr. Seuss incorporated so she knew all the exact details of the books and characters and colors and context.

The Cat in the Hat won and Green Eggs and Ham was 2nd. The comments about Horton Hears a Who, were that it was too busy and too much going on, the story and book are very simplistic, but the finished product was just amazing. The Grinch who stole Christmas just had a few issues with proportion but the details were incredible, the who people with their crazy hair, the dog and the sleigh.

I also learned a lot of Dr. Seuss trivia. Dr. Seuss started writing books in 1957 (this is the 50th anniversary of the Grinch) and at the time for children it was determined that there were 250 words that children needed to know most. He included 237 in his first book, the cat in the hat. But his editor bet him $50 that he couldn’t do a book with just 50 different words. Dr. Seuss won that bet with Green Eggs and Ham! He wrote his last book in 1990 – Oh the Places You’ll Go.

dead jack-o-lantern

Took this to work, it was a pumpkin spice cake, white chocolate buttercream frosting.

This weekends Cakes - Tammy

3 tier wedding cake for saturday, top layer is White Chocolate cake with chocolate chips, the middle is carrot cake with cream cheese filling, and the bottom is chocolate cake with rasberry filling. separated with real gerber daisies.














Did this Toyota Prius for a teenage girl's birthday....closest she is going to get to owning one. Its red velvet cake with cream cheese filling and a marshmallow fondant cover.