Baking Practice Inspires New Jewelry Shop

I mentioned a few posts ago that my sister recently became engaged (yay ^-^) and that she and I have taken on the task of her wedding cake. Neither of us have ever taken any sort of baking or cake decorating course, but we figure if we practice a lot during her three year engagement we can pull it off (if not do it well) with what knowledge we have.

So today was gum paste day. She wants to put gum paste roses on her cake, which are a little difficult to do - especially to do nicely, so we're starting practicing now. We watched a couple tutorials, and this is what I came up with.





They aren't perfect by ANY stretch of the imagination, but next time I'll roll the gum paste a little thinner and stretch them out a little more. Regardless I was happy with it for a first try. Then I had the idea to make necklaces out of them! I think I will be opening up a shop that I will connect to my shop to sell non-gemstone jewelry so I can sell jewelry with these polymer clay roses :)

This is my first attempt at a polymer clay rose in plain old boring white:





Again, not stunning, but maybe after another 100 tries :P My new shop won't be opening for a while, but I'm very excited for when it does.

Wedding Cake Designs

Today I've decided to go through wilton.com and look at all the different wedding cake styles. their website is so helpful. they even have a page that shows you a list of example cakes - what sizes the tiers are and how many people they feed. so helpful.

They also have about six pages of wedding cake design ideas - which is nice for me because I'm not only helping my sister pick out her wedding cake, but I'm helping her make it! This is pretty terrifying as the only cake I've ever decorated was an ugly mother's day cake I made for my mom one year. I do a lot of baking though, and I make chocolate and have made fondant once before... so I think she and I can pull this off if we make about a hundred practice cakes ahead of time. Here are some of my favorite designs.

I love this one. it's simple and cute and it doesn't look too hard to do.


very elegant and elaborate (yes, that's a fountain!)


I love the flowers and fondant bead work on this one

And they also have a variety of toppers and books (to teach you how to do all this fancy stuff!) that you can order on the website. Very exciting :) Also she's asked me to make her jewelry for the big day, so I'm going to try my hand at wedding jewelry. wish me luck! ^-^