How it all began...

I have to give my mom a lot of the credit because she made all of our birthday cakes growing up and dabbled in decorating as a hobby every now and again. My brother and I have an 11-year age difference and at some point I started to experiment and decided I wanted to make his birthday cake. I followed all the recipes and made a HUGE mess in my dad's tiny kitchen, but I got it done. Wish I could find the pic for that. Not bad for a beginner. Made about 5 different colors for my first cake. I stayed up all night into the wee hours of the morning making that cake and it was the best thing I ever did.

I had always looked in books and sort of built up a collection over the years, but never really did anything until I had my own child in 2005. Then I started taking things serious and decided for his 1st birthday I wanted to make his cake. The bear cake is completely self-taught. I spent hours reading about how to do a 3-d cake and how the cake needs to be firm or it will collapse. As I look back now, I'm pretty proud of that cake. It taught me a lot. And I enjoyed every minute.

Still dilly dallying with the canned icing. Why make your own if you don't have to? For this cake I didn't find it necessary to go through the ordeal of making chocolate icing. I free-handed the logos for the superbowl teams since the superbowl fell on my dad's birthday that year. I carved the football shapes out of 2 9x13 cakes. Again, a ton of reading on this one. I am not an artist, but I've been impressed with what I can do with icing. Get me to do that same thing on paper and I promise you it won't happen. This was rare for me to be a little creative.

Still self-taught for my son's 2nd birthday. The theme was Tigger and Pooh so I was set to have a Tigger AND a Pooh cake. I will say this was the last year we had his birthday at home. I wanted to be able to focus on the cake for his birthday and not on all the other things that go into having a birthday at home. Of course, if I do these cakes again today, I doubt it would take me close to as long as it took me then. I was up well past what I had expected with these cakes, the night before the party.

Disaster Story: At work we were having a baby shower for a friend of ours, Catherine. She was expecting a baby girl and I volunteered to make the cake. This was in the Spring of 2007. The cake we had picked was adorable. 4 baby blocks. Well, long story short, it didn't quite turn out so well. I was nothing short of absolutely devastated. I will say, however, that no one agreed with me. But, I refused to take a picture (regret that now), and I couldn't even be present for the shower to see it. After that experience I immediately enrolled in cake decorating classes at a bakery in Plano. Suprisingly enough, I didn't learn a whole lot in the first course, but I learned a ton in course II and in couse III the next year.

This would be the first cake I made while enrolled in course I, for my brother's HS graduation.