Tattoo Birthday Cake

So.. two lawyers, two firefighters and a drag queen walk in to a bar.

...no seriously.

This cake was exactly for the people mentioned above. The only stipulations they had were that it had to be a tier for each person and they wanted each of their names and professions included somehow. Of course none of these things really have anything in common, so I went with old sailor tattoos, which I drew out on separate pieces of fondant. I used a gold and black airbrush to put some shading behind the tattoos and used food color markers to do cross hatch shading along the layers and around the tattoos. The cake fed 200, which was by far my largest cake. Its a strawberry-amaretto cake with vanilla-almond frosting.

Penguin!

So... This is incredibly easy to make. I poured cake batter into a 4 cup pyrex measuring cup and bam-o, penguin shaped cake (well, once you turn it upside down). This was for a friend's friend's birthday.  The cake is a caramel butter cake with vanilla frosting and raspberry white chocolate fondant.

Overall I totally love this little guy and I hate that someone had to eat him. But, I am glad my friend found the design online, because this shape really opens up a lot of doors for doe-eyed adorable critter cakes in the future.