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Our Grand Opening and Our Grand Opening Cake!

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Erica OBrien in Cake decorating classes NY, cake decorating design classes Connecticut, cake decorating design classes Connecticut (CT), edible cake bunting, Featured, fondant, pink cake, vintage wedding cakes, wedding cake connecticut, wedding cake connecticut (CT), wedding cake farfield county ct, wedding cake new york, wedding cake ny, wedding cakes connecticut, wedding cakes ct, wedding cakes new york, wedding cakes ny | 4 Comments

There are benefits to living in a small town, such as knowing all the guys at the town buildings department by name (no lie: Bob, Bill, Jim, Joe) and that when you open a business and hold a grand opening, like we did on April 25th, the town arranges a ribbon cutting ceremony and sends the mayor. We even got press coverage! (Okay, it was this article in the Hamden Journal, but still.)

Here we are (me on the right, my sister on the left) with Mayor Scott Jackson. And the official golden ribbon-cutting scissors.
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Our grand opening turned into a little fête of sorts. Of course the cocktails helped.

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My consultation studio is now mostly finished, with the exception of the completely bare walls. My brother-in-law took this shot.

And my friend Brooke of Brooke Allison Photography took these. She is a wedding photographer and is rapidly becoming one of the top photographers in Connecticut. Keep your eye on her.

 

I created a special cake for the grand opening. I covered the cake in pink (one of my logo colors), made gold bunting for three of the tiers (I went through a serious bunting phase about a year and a half ago that thankfully passed. This was just a brief relapse.) and hand-cut the plaque and letters. (Photos by Brooke Allison Photography.)

The community has been so supportive, and we feel extremely fortunate to be in such a great place. Thank you so much to all of you who stopped by, and thank you to those of you who wanted to but, for whatever reason, couldn’t. Don’t worry : we plan to be here for a long, long time.

Special thanks to Brooke Allison, my husband and children, my mom, sister, Scott, Zachy and Kody, and Frank. Love you guys.

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Some Recent Press

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Erica OBrien in erica obrien cake design, Featured, peony cake, photos, pink and gray wedding, sugar magnolia cake, unique wedding cakes, vintage, vintage wedding cakes, wedding cake connecticut, wedding cake connecticut (CT), wedding cake farfield county ct, wedding cakes, wedding cakes connecticut, wedding cakes ct, wedding cakes new york, wedding cakes ny, wedding cupcakes | Leave a comment

My husband says I change my mind a lot. I guess it’s kind of true. At some point, I decided not to have a press page on my website. (Read this post–it’s actually pretty funny–and you’ll see what I mean.) Then I guess I went ahead and changed my mind, ’cause now I have one.

I thought I’d share some of our most recent press here (although, of course, you could just look at my website.) I’ll not go into detail on every piece of press. Instead, I’ll just share the magazine cover and the page(s) on which my cake was featured. You’ll get the idea. 

Thanks for stopping by.

 

 

 


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On Edible Gums

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Erica OBrien in cake decorating design classes Connecticut, cake decorating design classes Connecticut (CT), Featured, fondant, for the baker, gumpaste recipe | 1 Comment

My motivation for writing this post is strictly self-serving. The differences between edible gums and their uses is precisely the kind of information I can never commit to memory. So, tired of searching repeatedly through the many sources of information on gums, I decided to create an easy to understand reference guide. I did it for me. And, okay, for you too.

CMC Powder

Carboxy Methyl Cellulose or SodiumCarboxyMethylCellulose. The chemical name for Tylose. (See Tylose below.)

Gum Arabic

  • Uses: stabilizer, edible gum, binder, emulsifying agent
  • For cake design: Add to royal icing to strengthen. Create edible glue (or “gum glue”) by mixing 2 tsp. gum arabic with 2 ounces water (source: SugarCraft.com)
  • Natural or synthetic: Natural
  • Alternative names: acacia gum, chaar gund, char goond, or meska
  • Most similar to: n/a

Gum Tex

Wilton brand name for karaya gum. (See karaya gum below.)

Gum Tragacenth

  • Uses: Drying agent. Adds strength and stretch.
  • For cake design: Used in making gumpaste and pastillage. Can be added to fondant to speed drying (sometimes called “emergency gumpaste“, see recipe under Tylose)
  • Natural or synthetic: Natural
  • Alternative names: gum trag, gum elect, gum dragon
  • Most similar to: Tylose

Karaya Gum

  • Uses: thickener and emulsifier, used to adulterate gum tragacenth due to their similar physical characteristics
  • For cake design: Ingredient in some gumpaste recipes. Can be added to fondant to speed drying (sometimes called “emergency gumpaste“, see recipe under Tylose)
  • Natural or synthetic: Natural
  • Alternative names: Gum-Tex (Wilton brand)
  • Most similar to:  gum tragacanth

Tylose

  • Uses:  thickener, binder, stabilizer, and suspending agent in glazes. Helps products retain moisture and gives a gum-like texture. Also acts as drying agent in fondant and gumpaste. Tylose is said to hold up better in humidity and is whiter in color. The more tylose you use, the stiffer and stronger the resulting fondant.
  • For cake design:  Ingredient in some gumpaste recipes (including the one I use, Nicholas Lodge’s gumpaste recipe). Can be added to fondant to speed drying, sometimes called “emergency gumpaste“. To create emergency gumpaste, add 2 -3 tsp of Tylose powder to 1lb of fondant. The more tylose you use, the stiffer and stronger the resulting fondant. Tylose is said to hold up better in humidity and is whiter in color than gum tragacenth.
  • Natural or synthetic: Synthetic
  • Alternative names: Super gum, cellulose gum
  • Most similar to: Gum tragacenth
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Cake Trios (and a Couple of Quintets)

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Erica OBrien in cake trio, erica obrien cake design, fall wedding cake, Featured, photo cake, vintage wedding cakes, wedding cakes ny, weeding cakes ct | 4 Comments

I’ve noticed lately that one wedding cake is no longer sufficient. Here are some cake trios we’ve worked on recently (although not thatrecently, because my roses have gotten considerably better).

And who could forget this classic?

Does five count as a trio?

I think I spot a trend.

Photo credit (from top): Lane Dittoe, Braedon Flynn, Henry Chen, T & H Photography, and Ja Tecson.

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Introducing Our New Look

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Erica OBrien in erica obrien cake design, logo design, Paper Cut Industries, wedding cake | 4 Comments
You may have noticed that our blog has a new look. Our website will soon be revamped as well. Please visit Erica OBrien Cake Design soon for updates.

Skilled artisans make their craft look easy–effortless even. A good musician offers no indication of the hours and hours of time spent practicing. The same is true for cakes. I often get calls from potential clients–fans, no doubt, of popular television shows like Ace of Cakes–who request a cake for 30 guests in the shape of a Prada shoe sitting atop a Ferrari. When I tell them the price, they’re floored. I don’t blame them: On television, a 40 hour job is edited down to 20 minutes. Combine that with the artists’ expertise, and a challenging cake design looks ridiculously easy.

Logo design is no exception. Effective logos are eye catching, artistic, and memorable, all while accurately representing the organization or business. If you’ve ever thought, “I could do that myself”, you’d be wrong. There is a whole process to logo design. There are fonts to consider, issues of balance, design principles and theories, not to mention the psychology of branding. Color, I found out, is the last step. A good graphic designer, like any artist, makes the whole process look deceptively simple.

I turned to graphic designer Monica Majors of Paper Cut Industries to design my new logo. Hers is an in-depth process that begins with a questionnaire (I just love a questionnaire) about your business. The answers help her identify your style, taste, brand, and look. Then, after careful consideration, she presents “Round 1″ of your logos.

Round 1 includes three options, all in color and black and white. A good logo, Monica explained, should stand on its own and not be dependent on color. She further fine tunes and tweaks the logo in subsequent rounds until she arrives at the perfect design.

These are my “Round 1″ logos. I really liked Option No. 1, but I wanted the logo to somehow be more symbolic of cake. I asked Monica to create variations of Option No. 3 using different fonts and colors.

I narrowed down the colors to pink and a greenish aqua. I liked the round shape because I felt it best represented cake. I thought perhaps we could create a border around the circle to symbolize the piped border found on a cake. Here’s “Round 2″.

Finally, “Round 3″. My idea for a piped border around the logo didn’t have that “clean” look I really like, so we scratched that. While I like a lot of the script fonts Monica chose, they too lacked the streamlined style I’m known for, so I opted for two different sans serif fonts. I had a really hard time choosing between Option No. 3 and Option No. 6 in the Round 2 logos, but I finally settled on Option No. 3. In Round 3, Monica recreated the final design in a variety of color combinations.

And finally, introducing my new (larger-than-life) logo.

Thank you so much Monica. I love it.

Please note: All images are copyright material of Paper Cut Industries and are not intended for reproduction without their express written consent.

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How I Got Started in Cake Design {Part I}

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Erica OBrien in cake decorating, erica obrien cake design, wedding cake long beach, wedding cake los angeles, wedding cake orange county, wilton | 7 Comments
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.

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