Sometimes, life has a wonderful sense of symmetry...I had received a request from a long-time customer asking for some sports themed cupcakes for her husband's 40th birthday, and even though I had a lot on my plate with my own Mother's birthday, I couldn't refuse!  A couple of weeks later, I received another request from another long standing customer for cupcakes for her husband's 30th birthday (apparently, Gurveen was still talking about the cupcakes I made for their wedding, and this was a sweet surprise for him).  She sent me a picture of cupcakes showing white and black letter tiles with a simple black dot border.  I really liked the design and thought I could incorporate it into both orders, with just a slight modification to the dot border.

The Sports themed cupcakes were a little more of a challenge because each one had to be hand crafted.  Being a perfectionist, this took quite a bit of concentration and attention to detail.  I made themed cupcakes in Golf, Baseball, Football, Tennis, Basketball and Hockey.  All of the elements are completely edible, except for a couple wires that are helping the sticks and clubs stand.

The time and effort was completely worth it!  When I delivered the cupcakes, my client was otheriwse occupied and couldn't come to the door.  However, she was so happy with the cupcakes, that she quickly sent me this message as soon as she saw them:
"I missed you.  Soo sorry.  I am in love with the cupcakes. They are amazing. I LOVE it. Thank you sooooo much."

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked me to lead a cupcake workshop for her Ranger troop (ages 15-17 girl guides) and it was a huge success, so she asked me to come again for a new group of girls.  I was thrilled to be able to say yes and I began working on the event right away.  I started by making kits for each of the girls including:

• A decorating kit with a piping bag and 8 different tips
  
• All types of Piping bags, parchment, plastic and re-useable
• A pallet knife
• A small spatula
• 2 gel colours
• An extra coupler
• Practice sheets in protective plastic

I also made each girl a set of 6 cupcakes (various flavours) and 4 giant tubs of icing to share between the group.  Add to that the 6 different styles of sprinkles plus the candy and chocolate hearts and I was ready to head off to the school to start the demo.

All of the girls were fantastic.  They were all very polite and seemed interested in the activity, for the most part (when they weren't playing Candy Crush).  Some girls took to the techniques faster than some of the other girls, but I think they all had fun.  At the end of the night, we had some gorgeous cupcakes for the girls to take home - and I learned a lot myself on how I can improve future workshops.

Sometime the challenge of a cake is the recipe, sometimes it’s the technical aspects of the decorating work and sometimes the challenge is the deadline.  This time, the challenge was all of the things.  Most of my cakes are one-of-a-kind creations, which means I need to sit down and puzzle out exactly how I am going to make it happen.  Once you do something once, it becomes much easier to do it a second time, but I didn’t have that luxury with the Slot Machine cake.  This one was a doozy to figure out – and I was short on time!  Once the basic construction was done, and I had the shape of the cake right, everything started to fall into place afterwards.  I “cheated” a little by using some edible images to decorate some of the aspects of the slot machine instead of making them by hand.  Personally for this cake, I think this was the right way to go.  I wanted the reel to look as authentic as possible.  Some people have asked why the Cherries are the winning symbol instead of the bars, but that answer is simple – that’s what the customer asked for!  Inside is carrot cake with cream cheese icing.

I also made some cookies as give-aways for my customer.