Aloha! By Popular Demand...

So I didn't plan on doing this but we had quite a few people ask.. and then Brad insisted... that I do a blog from Kauai while we're on our honeymoon.



First of all.. I'm still having a hard time realizing that the wedding actually happened! It wasn't actually that the whole thing breezed by.. though most of it did, the chaos came in waves. I definitely had a few opportunities to sit back and take it all in, but there were moments that I wouldn't be able to retell accurately if my life depended on it. Brad says he felt like the most popular kid in school and his arms literally hurt from hugging/greeting/taking photos with so many folks. He cracks me up!!!! All in all we had a wonderful time and we're so pleased with how it all came together. Our photographer already put up a sneak peek slideshow if you're interested in seeing a lot of photos of me and Brad.. ha. All photos will be available soon.



http://www.kenbuckphotography.com/data/slideshow/83/Colleen.Brad/index.html




And now we're in BEAUTIFUL Kauai!!!! It is amazing here. We stepped off the plane and the first thing I noticed was the incredibly sweet smell in the air. I wish I could bottle it up and sell it. The first thing we did upon arriving was get lost on our way to our "treehouse"- which is basically a condo in the middle of nowhere.. or the hills of Kalaheo if you happen to know where that is. We were given the address but no hint that the mailbox we were looking for didn't exist. It was pitch black, the locusts were screaming, and Brad and I were imagining what life would be like without our kidneys as we went down the wrong driveway and found what we imagined were slaughterhouses, but were probably just sheds. We called our host Neil and he met up with us after he let loose a few frustrated fucks! and other four letter words. It was funny because he is Australian.. it would have been scary if he was from anywhere else, we're sure.

Neil is a character and can't stop talking and cursing. He brought us to our honeymoon abode and we were so thrilled at how awesome it was. Neil thought it would be a good time to talk about how bad the economy is and then told Brad about cockroaches and killer centipedes. Oh Neil, why!! Surely he didn't know about Brad's insane cockroachophobia. Ha! Brad put on a brave face and mentioned how neat it would be to have a couple of beers. Suddenly Neil pulled three Coronas out of god knows where and we were sipping on beer and talking about even more ridiculous topics such as how he isn't making any money yet on his investment aka the very treehouse we were staying in. I don't know how we escaped his grasp but eventually he was gone and Brad and I were almost in tears laughing about how funny the whole thing was.

The next morning we took an amazing doors-off helicopter tour of Kauai. It was absolutely breathtaking and the perfect first thing for us to do because it gave me ideas for what we would do for the rest of our trip. There were so many good shots but I'm only going to leave you with a few due to the time it takes to upload them!

The following day, we did the most intense and crazy thing either of us has ever done.. and brace yourself for this because you will probably laugh at first: a raft ride along the Na Pali coast. Yes. Now you must know that it was more like a raft/speed boat combo and all passengers sat along the edge of the boat while it sped for an hour and a half up the coast to get us to the beautiful views and photo ops. It was really fun in the beginning- we stopped and photographed spinner dolphins and sea turtles, learned about some history, took a walk through an ancient-ish village (not a lot of ruins as it's on the coast, so they re-created a lot). Super fun! The highlight was speeding through an arch along the coast and doing an ocean donut (if that exists) within an open ceiling cave. It's the stuff I always dreamed of when thinking about my honeymoon as a little girl- yes, I thought about my honeymoon more so than the wedding, even at a young age ;)

The "Screen Saver" Shot:

Open Ceiling Cave:

After that, we went snorkeling.. which is what I was looking forward to the most. Unfortunately, after I jumped into the water, I remembered my fear of the ocean and nearly panicked completely. I only stopped when I realized that Brad was struggling with his snorkel. He kept trying to scuba dive with his snorkel and of course breathed in air. Then he had to pee and refused to do it until he could "stand on something." In Brad talk, that meant he needed his feet to touch the sand in order to pee.. so he began to swim to shore, which looked deceivingly close because we had a 2,000 foot cliff towering over the beach. I forced him to stop when we swam for 10 minutes and were still nowhere near the beach. He finally did his business and then we swam like Phelps back to the boat so we didn't end up being stranded. We had a long haul back to the harbor so we braced ourselves on the boat and held on for dear life as we sped at what felt like lightening speed over the ocean waves, dodging sea turtles and huge swells. Brad's knuckles and hands were bleeding from holding on so tight and I had to stop looking forward because our final destination was never anywhere in sight. It was like being on the Grizzly or Giant Dipper for 90 minutes straight... with no seat belt. OUCH!!!!! Still, we both agree it was the most amazing thing we've done on this trip so far and the beauty of it all made it worth it.

We weren't too tired for a trip up to the North Coast where we stopped for dinner and shopping then a photo op at Hanalei Bay during sunset. Brad was really eager to get this photo and scouted out a couple to perform the task. I almost had an anxiety attack watching him approach a young couple strolling along the beach, because I thought for sure he was interrupting a potential proposal. Fortunately for us.. that wasn't happening. But it reminded me to watch for proposals!! Good grief I wouldn't want to be responsible for ruining that moment for anybody!!

We woke up in MAJOR pain this morning but fought through it for our ATV tour through Kipu Ranch. Brad was excited to drive an ATV and I was excited to do a rope swing and swim under a real waterfall, so we booked the waterfall tour! We started out clean:

And ended up looking like this:

Fortunately, there was a waterfall to clean off under at the end. Brad and I held hands and jumped in... from a rock on the surface of the pond :)





So it has been an amazing time so far.. and we're just getting started. I had to give up on the whole "relaxing in Kauai" idea I had when booking this trip.. there are a lot of opportunities but we've been running around like Kauai chickens doing everything dangerous that we possibly can. I even had tried to remedy this with a Mai Tai and instead of feeling amazing, I passed out. Ha! We love it though and are so excited for more. What a wonderful way to start married life!!


That's it for now!

extreme cancellations

two of my four orders this week had to cancel. one is rescheduled for next week, but the other is cancelled due to.. flooding of the missouri river! crazy! my client's parents live near the missouri river and are being evacuated so she's flying out to help. the poor midwest is just taking a beating lately! if cupcakes could save homes i'd have sent her off with her order. :(

Gradumication

My last two orders have been for graduations. It's been fun making tiny diplomas for the tops of my cupcakes! Here are a few photos from the 120+ cupcakes I've made:

It's My Party Cupcake: confetti cake with vanilla buttercream and my favorite sprinkles:

My "signature cupcake": Chocolate cake, raspberry filling, chocolate dipped raspberry on top. Chech out those cutey diplomas!

The are my Lemon Blast cupcakes: lemon cake with lemon curd filling and these have lemon cream cheese frosting w/ a lemon jelly belly on top

I made this for Cinco de Mayo and they were a huge hit, so now they're on the menu and being ordered, I call them the Chocolate Doodle: chocolate cake w/vanilla swiss meringue buttercream sprinkled with cinnamon and cocoa and a milk chocolate chip

Here is the Lemon Blast with diplomas and instead of lemon cream cheese frosting, they have a vanilla swiss meringue buttercream

This coming week I have four orders.. a graduation cake, minis for a tech event, minis for a bridal shower, and regulars for a summer bbq. I don't know how I'm going to do it but it will happen! I'm pretty sure this weekend will be dedicated to figuring out what the problem is with my vanilla cake, it peels from the wrapper. I've tried a few tricks and they seem to work, but the problem inevitably comes back. I'm also freaking out just a bit because I can no longer taste my own cupcakes.. I mean, I can taste them, but I'm starting to lose my grip on whether or not they're good, if the lemony ones are lemony enough, etc. I hope I don't lose it entirely! That would be awful.

Happy Memorial Day weekend everybody!

Fondant Covered Cake List

I had an order for a 3 tiered fondant covered red velvet cake that feeds 60 this weekend... decorated in the theme of Dr. Seuss. There were a lot of firsts for me:

-First time a friend of a sister's friend reached out to me for a cake (this was basically a stranger)
-First time I made a cake this big and covered it entirely in fondant
-First time I almost had a full blown panic attach in the middle of a cakespedition
-First time I forgot to eat dinner during a cakespedition

This could potentially be the longest blog ever, so I am just doing another list to explain how it all went down:

-12" square cakes came out BROWN. Not red. Curse you wilton no taste red food color
-Second batch of buttercream came out salty. Curse you trader joe's for having oddly colored butter packaging, I wanted unsalted, not salted butter!
-Started in on the round cakes at 5pm, wondered why I suddenly felt faint and starved, and it happened to be 9:30pm... ALREADY
-Brad came home while I was up to my ears in fondant.. which was stretching, cracking.. basically doing all the things nobody wants it to do (rebel) and I felt the beginnings of a panic attack but I stuffed them down (conveniently as Brad brought out the video camera)
-Design was ill fated, switched things up at the last minute and ended up with two cakes instead of one
-This was to everybody's benefit, as Green Eggs and Ham made an appearance, and it was amazing!
-Got lost looking for San Bruno park, despite it being two blocks from where my Grandma used to live
-Forgot my camera at home, so Molly kindly came with hers to take pictures of the assembled cake
-Everybody loved it!

I am not doing another one of these before the wedding.. it literally took over an entire week and I just have too much to do (like working out so I don't feel like a slob in my dress, and finding shoes that don't make me taller than Brad).

Iron Cupcake.. passing the torch

Ha just reading the blog title makes me laugh. It is mostly a joke. Mostly. ;)

I went to Iron Cupcake this past week after failing to place the month before. Last month, the theme was breakfast, and I did a coffee and donuts cupcake. It was a vanilla cake dipped in butter, then cinnamon sugar, topped with a coffee buttercream and an all cake "donut" dipped in chocolate glaze with pretty colored sprinkles on top (not a real donut.. this is a cupcake competition, after all). I was one of 5 people with the EXACT SAME IDEA. Hahaha. I had no chance, though I firmly believe mine tasted the best out of the five (it certainly didn't look the best though). I was kind of sad but surprised at how much I didn't care and how fun it was to just hang out and try cupcakes. A lot of them were god awful, and I'm not naming any names.. except to say a couple of those awfuls won. I think they had fan clubs in tow.

My Grapefruit Lemon Cupcakes

So this month was the citrus challenge and I was just excited to go and kick back again. I made a grapefruit cupcake with lemon curd filling, grapefruit frosting, rimmed with coconut and topped with alternating pink and yellow giant sprinkles. The cake wasn't very grapefruity but it did taste citrusy. The rest was bomb, but I had a feeling it wasn't quite stand-out enough for Iron Cupcake. Those hipsters want off the wall flavors (think vanilla-bacon cake with tangerine frosting and jalapeno jelly filling). I can't go for that. No can do.

I really like this new top, and I look skinny with all those cupcakes, bonus.

At the competition, there was one clear winner in my mind, and she happened to be sitting at our table. She made a key lime pie cupcake that was just fantastic, complete with a graham cracker crust. And it was actually a cupcake version of key lime pie, no cheating at all. It was her first time baking in the competition and she did an amazing job. I liked it so much I voted for her, which I never do. Ha! Mom even voted for her and kept saying she was going to win 1st (gee, thanks mom! ;) )Winner announcement time came around and I fully expected not to place, but I did! 2nd! And Ms. Key Lime Pie took first, which was so well deserved and adorable. She wasn't a smug brat like I was when I won! :D tee hee.

Mine is top left. #1 Key Lime Pie is center row far right.. you can NEVER guess the winners just by looking at them:

Next month the theme is movies, and so far my favorite Willful suggestion is: Sucker Punch cupcake: a hawaiian punch cupcake with a dum dum sticking out. HILARIOUS!

More Practice with Real People!

Today I completed an order for my first repeat customer. She contacted me for another bridal shower and ordered 120 mini cupcakes... I was so excited! Repeat business AND a lot of cupcakes to play with. This lady is very laid back and only gave me her color scheme to go by: lavender, lilac, and lime. AWESOME colors, but I didn't know what to do about decorations. I looked up the color scheme online and most people who throw parties in that scheme use a lot of floral decor, so I decided on piped flowers.
Lilac was not an easy color to achieve.. it is bright and dark at the same time. I panic when I see a ton of food color going into my buttercream and I'm not getting the color I'm going for. This happened with my lilac color, which I added to my already naturally pink raspberry buttercream. I stopped adding color when I felt I was not getting a lot of bang for the amount of food color I put in; taste over appearance, I always say. And they looked cute enough not to worry to much.

My lime was also not very punchy.. which is what you need when using it with lilac and lavender. But again, I couldn't justify adding a half a bottle of food color so I kept it simple. It did pop nicely on the purples, though.

(the camera didn't capture the green very well above) I try to decorate each flavor in one consistent design. Two cupcake flavors were filled, so I couldn't get too fancy on them. With minis, I do not carve out the center of the cupcake to make room for filling- it just takes too much cake out of an already tiny cupcake. So I dam up some filling on top and then pipe over it. On those flavors, I had to keep the decor simple. But on the plain vanilla, I had a little fun with my lavender color and piped pretty flowers:

It's hard to maintain a color scheme that doesn't include brown when you have a chocolate frosting. But I did my best to make it work.

And I'm SO EXCITED to finally have packaging and labels! It's neat to pretend I am official and use professional packaging and cute labels. Initially I was worried about these because it seemed hard to get the cupcakes out once they were in. I was actually almost in a complete panic about it, but then Brad came home from work. I explained my distress and he immediately turned into a salesman and explained how neat the package is because if you push the bottom up, the cupcake pops up for easy access. I almost cried with relief. He is such a good man! Especially during a freak out!! <3

So, there you have it. 120 cupcakes. It doesn't look like it though, right? Amazing how they all fit into those neat little packages!

Happy Easter!!

Wow

It's been another month and I have been so busy! Between the wedding, work, and baking, there's not a whole lot of time for writing. Plus, the sun is playing hide and seek and when it comes out on the weekend, I use the opportunity to sit and read in the sunshine. I just got through reading one of my new favorites, The Shadow of the Wind and am in the middle of the first Sookie Stackhouse novel Dead Until Dark and a completely different selection, The Forgotten Garden- both very good in their own ways. I never knew Sookie was such a trashy read! Love it.

As far as baking.. it's been off the hook. So far in this past month I have completed three orders- a baby shower, cupcakes for teacher appreciation week, and a kids birthday party- all with custom decorations. All together that was 12 dozen cupcakes. I have a 120 mini cupcake order coming up this weekend for a bridal shower, and a multi-tiered fondant covered cake order the weekend after that for another baby shower. There are two other orders in May in addition to a bridal show where I'll be passing out freebies alongside a Stella & Dot stylist as a ploy to get people to her booth.

All this baking has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience. I'm looking forward to my "launch" in the fall and becoming official. So far I'm having a lot of fun working through all the little things that need to be in order before my little side business is legit- what kind of containers to use for the cupcakes, what my business cards and labels should look like, how I will market myself, how much I need to produce in order to make a profit, where I will set up shop, etc. I've already run through a lot of this and have learned tons about what works and what doesn't. One of the more exciting things has been using my winnings from the Iron Cupcake championship in December to fund my new business account. It's all the money I have and I'm not touching it! Ha. Silly the things we hold on to.

So, I am just super grateful for all the practice business I've been getting from friends and friends of friends. Things are really looking good for a fall launch. Yay for side businesses!
Here are some photos to enjoy (or not):

Wedding Cake Testing (sprinkles will not be included):

Birthday Party Cupcakes:

Dr Seuss cake test (cat in the hat hat):

Children's Literature Themed Baby Shower: