Well, we’ve reached the 2013 halfway mark. Thought I’d review my list of 2013 Design Goals to see how far I’ve come (or, more likely, how far I have to go).
Here’s a list of my goals and my progress on each.
1. White-on-white.
Check! I actually achieved this one recently and will be sharing the entire cake shortly. Meanwhile, here’s a teaser shot.
2. Show my girly side.
I guess this one is sort of subjective. I would argue that I have in fact shown my girly side. I did a super girly, lacey, pastely cake for Bride’s Magazine (the issue comes out in late August) , so that counts, right? I made a seriously pink-and-purple cake for a party last week, and although by “girly” I meant sort of classically feminine in an adult, women-who-take-lavender-scented-baths type way rather than a six-year old girl way, I’m counting it for this goal.
3. Use a lighter touch.
Nothing comes to mind here, so I guess it’s a no. Six more months to work on this one.
4. Use my lace molds.
Check! Not only did I use my lace molds on Ava’s baptism cake, it’s so girly I could probably use this cake for Goal # 2! Double check!
5. Sugar dahlia.
Negative, but I did buy a new dahlia cutter (that I don’t think will work, but still).
6. Juliet rose.
Nah. Kind of forgot about this one until just now. Will have to remind myself to remember this goal.
7. Further explore what interests me as an artist.
Nope. Haven’t had time to “explore” anything. I’ll try to work in some exploration time soon.
So, out of seven goals, I’ve achieved three, and I still have six months to go. I think perhaps I can do this! Thanks for checking in on me. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
We’ve listed a new Introduction to Cake Decorating class! This one runs for four consecutive Sundays from 10am to 1pm and begins on January 20th, 2013.
To register for the class, simply visit our website and follow the instructions. If you’d like to give the class as a gift–and what aspiring cake designer wouldn’t love a fabulous cake design class?–you can contact us to create a customized gift card.
We will also be adding a new sugar flower class in the near future featuring our dahlia and ranunculus, so keep an eye out for that class as well. And since sugar flower classes are quite small and tend to sell out quickly, you can contact us to request to be put on our notification list. We will email you as soon as we list the classes.
I created this DIY wedding cake as part of an ongoing project with Project Wedding. Look for more DIYs monthly.
I’m a sprinkle kind of girl, through and through. My ideal ice-cream-to-sprinkle ratio is 1:1. Actually, I’ve been known to forgo the ice cream completely and go straight for the sprinkles. And my movie theater candy? Sno-Caps, of course.
Although I love and appreciate the sprinkle for its confectionary prowess, it does lack a certain esthetic appeal, particularly the brightly colored rainbow variety that is so near and dear to my heart. Since pastel sprinkles are so hard to find, I make my own. And when Project Wedding asked me to create a wedding cake DIY, I knew exactly what I’d do.
1. Here’s what you’ll need (clockwise from left):
food-use only ruler
small sprinkles or nonpareils (available at most crafts stores)
piping gel (available at most crafts stores)
tapemeasure
small flexible cup
petal dust in desired shade (we like Crystal Colors brand)
food-use only paintbrush
ziplock bag
2. Remove shaker cap from sprinkles to speed pouring.
3. Empty into ziplock bag.
4. Pour a small amount of petal dust into bag. (Remember you can always add more, so start with a little.)
5. Shake the bag until dust is evenly distributed. If color is not dark enough, add more dust and repeat until desired depth of color is achieved.
6. Using tapemeasure, determine the spacing and width of stripes.
7. Dip paintbrush in piping gel.
8. Using ruler as a guide to acheive a straight line, brush a generous amount of piping gel onto cake with short, even strokes.
9. Repeat on the right side of line. You want the gel to be thick enough for the nonpareils to stick but not too gloppy.
10. Empty colored sprinkles into small cup. Try not to touch them so as not to rub off the petal dust.
11. Gently pour sprinkles onto cake. You will have many extra sprinkles. Pour onto a sheet of parchment creased in the middle and pour back into small cup. Repeat process until all lines are finished.
When you get an email from Anne Chertoff asking you if you want to contribute to the Vera Wang app, you jump on the chance and respond immediately with an emphatic Yes! Yes! Yes! Unless, of course, you’re me, in which case you think the email is just some mass marketing form letter and ignore it completely. Then, luckily, Anne Chertoff persists and emails you again to say she hasn’t received anything back from you, at which point you realize this is real and then you respond with Yes! Yes! Oh, if you’ll still have me, yes! And that’s the true story of how I came to make two cakes for Vera Wang’s new itunes app.
Eric Hildebrand, the stylist on the project, collaborated with Anne Chertoff, the Project Manager, and the Vera Wang art director to conceptualize several vignettes that would feature a Vera Wang dress, flatware, china, stemware, and a cake.
Eric sent over photos of the dresses and collages of the concept and asked me to present sketches. The most challenging part for me was creating a design that was true to my style but also worked with Vera Wang’s classic, sophisticated designs.
The first scenario was The Modernist and featured the Fiona dress in white with orange accents and parrot tulips.
The Modernist cake sketch originally featured three square tiers (I ended up adding a fourth tier but I can’t remember why) because I thought squares more contemporary than round. I incorporated the pleating from the dress and pops of orange found in the invitation around the plaque and dots on the pleats and edible parrot tulips.
In the end, the art director nixed the orange dots in the sketch so the pleats were plain white, and my lovingly hand-crafted gumpaste parrot tulips were replaced with real tulips.
Johnny Miller was the photographer on the project. You’ve definitely seen Johnny’s work before in Martha Stewart’s magazines and books, and while he obviously has a gift for bringing food to life through photographs, it is his personal work that really moves me. His photos are artistic and emotional, and the subjects seem so real (even when they’re not). There’s a rawness to his work that makes it accessible and not pretentious. I’m proud to say I’ve had my work photographed by him.
The Romanticist scenario featured the Hanna dress, shades of mauve, and platinum.
The cake I sketched was three tiers of ivory with a cluster of sugar roses and platinum scroll work.
I ended up with a fourth tier on this cake too. My sugar roses were beautiful, but were again replaced with real roses. (I still have them though and might need to photograph them in the future.) I do love this photo.
Growing up, we usually got ice cream cakes for our birthday parties. (My mom was always really good about ordering them in advance so we could special-order the flavors we wanted rather than having to settle for the pre-made ones.) Although I remember not liking cake much–it wasn’t until I was much older that I understood how good a cake made from scratch and filled with French buttercream can be–you couldn’t tell from this picture of me in 1973 at four years old:
Okay, so I started cake design with Wilton, and I was pretty good. (You can read How I Got Started Part I here.) I got a really solid foundation from the Wilton classes, but I was well aware that Wilton is sometimes frowned on in the cake industry as somewhat amateurish, and, truth be told, it made me self-conscious. So I went on to take more professional-level classes at various schools in New York City. I remember once, at a gumpaste flower class at The New School, the instructor asked us to introduce ourselves and tell a little about our cake design backgrounds. I sheepishly mentioned that my only cake design experience thus far was with Wilton, to which she replied–and I’ve always been grateful she said this–”Everyone starts with Wilton!” I never felt self-conscious about my humble beginnings again.
I was introduced to fondant at a store in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I bought a lot of my supplies. Fondant had already gained popularity in South America, and was widely used in England and Australia. I liked the look of fondant and took the class. This was my first fondant cake (again, very Wilton), for my sister’s baby shower. My nephew (my sister’s first ”baby”) is almost 10 now, so I guess I did this about 11 years ago.
Once I had the designing down, I had to tackle the baking. At first, I used box cakes. Real cakes seemed too intimidating, and besides, everyone told me they liked my cakes better when I used Duncan Hines. (With all those yummy artificial flavors and preservatives, could you blame them?) I finally took a cake baking class at ICES, and realized that the problem was both my technique and my recipes. Cake baking, unlike cookie baking or other types of cooking, is a true science. There’s no such thing as eyeballing measurements, adding a pinch here or a tweak there. All of the ingredients in a cake interact in very specific ways, each causing different chemical reactions, so it is absolutely imperative to follow a cake recipe exactly and measure accurately. That said, just because a recipe is in print, doesn’t mean that its been tested or is even very good. It took a lot of experimentation to find recipes that worked for me. I didn’t invent my own (although my carrot cake does have a secret ingredient), and I am happy with the recipes I now use.
I specifically remember that this cake, from 1996, was a Duncan Hines yellow cake.
An old boyfriend bought me my first KitchenAid, and it served me well until, at age 35, I met my soon-to-be husband. He was 25, lived with his dad, worked only part-time, and owned his very own KitchenAid. I fell in love and moved to California to be with him, bringing my KitchenAid along with me. (We eventually sold mine for fear that it would bring bad karma.) I got a job teaching at a high school in Los Angeles and made the mistake of announcing to my students on the first day that I was from New York, thinking they’d find me cool. Instead, things rapidly deteriorated into a Biggie Smalls vs. Tupac style rap war, with me representing the east coast and my students the west. You’d be amazed how often our coastal difference surfaced, and my focus on New York history only confirmed their suspicion that I thought the east coast superior. (The fact that I was teaching early American history and most of it takes place on the east coast was a moot point.) I went home crying almost every day.
This is where the zaniest, craziest thing I ever did for cake comes in. You can read more about it here.
I’ve been at it for about 15 years, and I’ve come a long way. At first, I did cakes for free, for $10, for coworkers, for family, and for friends. I practiced for 10 years before I had the confidence to do it professionally. Once, when a magazine contacted me and asked if I had any designs inspired by family heirlooms, I lied and said yes. I made four cakes in a day, had my husband photograph them, and got three of them published. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never had a disaster befallen one of my cakes (more about that in a future post), but I’ve learned so much from every single one. And the best part is, I’m still learning.
A lot of people ask me how I got started in cake design. Here’s the first part of the two-part story.
It’s ironic that I bake. My mom was not the type to have a home-baked snack on the table for us when we came home from school. She was more the health food type, going to great lengths to incorporate some wheat germ (the kale of the 1970s) into our meals whenever possible. If anything, whipping up a batch of cookies from scratch seemed a task akin to cutting crown molding (which, if you’ve never done it, is basically impossible. Seriously, check out this link and tell me if you think you could do it.) She did encourage us to be creative, however, and was never a stickler for a clean kitchen (though I know she’d disagree). Combine that with the fact that she was a single parent with a full time job, and that gave my sister and I a lot of time home alone to experiment.
Our first mixer was a hand-held one. I assume my mother got it as a wedding gift, but I’ll have to ask her. It looked a lot–though not exactly–like this:
It worked fine early on from what I remember, but in its later years, it became somewhat possessed, turning on spontaneously and without warning, always while resting in a bowl of runny batter, causing the batter to splatter all over the kitchen. In one particularly traumatizing run-in with the mixer, I was demonstrating for my sister how it tickled to gently run ones finger along the blades of a rotating beater, only to have my entire hand rotate along with it and wind up stuck between the two beaters. We had to go over to the next apartment (my mom, needless to say, was not home), with my hand still stuck in the hand mixer, so that our neighbor Joe could free my hand by bending the beaters.
While some of my friends had lifelong ambitions and knew since second grade what their career path would be, I never had any aspirations and never wanted to be anything in particular. Even the career choices most popular among my elementary school counterparts–veterinarian, pediatrician, teacher, lawyer–held no allure for me. My mom encouraged me to pursue whatever made me happy.
In college, I majored in Liberal Studies. Here is a picture of me that I just had to include because, well, it’s friggin’ hilarious. I’m the one with the big hair…Oh, sorry. I’m the one in the center with the big hair.
I graduated in 1991, in the midst of a deep recession and with no clue what I wanted to be or do. I got a job at a real estate law publishing company in Manhattan (I thought maybe I wanted to be a writer; receptionist at a publishing company seemed close enough), and the walk from the 23rd Street F Train exit to my job on 21st and Broadway took me right past New York Cake and Bake. I frequently found myself wandering in, in awe of all the gadgets, tools, and equipment. I had no idea what any of them did, but I was deeply intrigued. The store was like a museum to me, a place to just wonder at all the things you’ll never be able to master. One day in 1995, I walked by and they were advertising an inexpensive Wilton class. I signed up.
I loved the class, like I knew I would, and to make it even better, I was good at it. This is a picture of my very first tiered cake, in the pre-fondant days. Note the quality photography and classic Wilton drop flowers, string work, and ruffle border. I remember that I loved this cake, though looking at it now it’s hard to remember what it was exactly that I loved about it.
Lest this blog post should go on forever, I’ll be telling the rest of the story in a separate post. Please read the rest of my story in Part II.
Well, that didn’t take long. I tweeted only one clue–female cake designer–and Nicole correctly guessed the author (Margaret Braun) and title (Cakewalk) of the book I’m giving away.Like the last giveaway, this book traveled all the way to California from New York with me and lost its jacket in the move. Other than that, it’s in perfect condition.
Congratulations Nicole! Please email me your mailing address and I’ll get your book to you. And, if you could, kindly let us all know how you guessed with just one clue!
It’s spring cleaning time, and that means less stuff for me and more stuff for you. First up, Victoria Wedding Cakes by Kathleen Hackett from my personal collection. It travelled to California with me from New York, losing its book jacket in the move, and it’s time it found a new home.
I’ve also been looking for a reason to use the random number generator I saw on another blog, and this is the perfect opportunity.
We’ll do this one the easy way: Leave a comment sometime between now and Thursday, March 31st at midnight. I’ll announce the winner–to be selected randomly–on Friday, April 1st (no joke).
Our next book giveaway will be a bit of a challenge: I’ll be tweeting clues and the first person to guess the book will win it. Make sure you follow us on twitter so you can catch all the hints.
We just scheduled our first Tier I: Introduction to Cake Design class for 2011. The class will begin on Saturday, January 8 and runs four consecutive weeks {1/8/11, 1/15/11, 1/22/11, and 1/29/11} from 11am to 2pm. For more information, or to register for one of our classes, please visit our website: http://ericaobrien.com/classes.html. Our classes make great gifts, so please let us know if you need a gift certificate.
We just added a new class to the schedule. The next Tier I: Introduction to Cake Design will begin on Saturday, November 13. We’ll skip Thanksgiving weekend and continue on December 4, 11, and 18. For more information, or to register for one of our classes, please visit our website: http://ericaobrien.com/classes.html. These classes sell out quickly, so be sure to sign up soon.
We would love to answer all of your questions! Feel free to contact Erica OBrien Cake Design. We’ll either email you directly or post your question on our blog.
Ready to step up from my old Rebel. Want to stick with Cannon. Obviously not a pro photog. What's my next camera? Recommendations?04:33:36 PM June 09, 2013from web
5. Sugar dahlia. 
2. Remove shaker cap from sprinkles to speed pouring. 
The cake I sketched was three tiers of ivory with a cluster of sugar roses and platinum scroll work.
I’ve also been looking for a reason to use the random number generator I saw on another blog, and this is the perfect opportunity.
