Telescope

A birthday treat, and a surprise to boot! This one was for my student Kate and her dad, Mark. Kate used to always keep me up-to-date on the latest NASA tweets, and Mark is a lover of all things science-y. They recently gave me an excellent Meade reflecting telescope that we immediately put to use at an elementary school Space Night, so I figured I'd return the favor. This beauty is fully edible, right down to the mounted finder scope and focus knob. The texture on the connecting bands really helped give the whole thing some dimension. 

Treasure Chest

Avast, ye scurvy dog! Where would a pirate-themed birthday party be without its booty? Weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen, me hearties. Yo ho!

Just to peek behind the scenes: the base and lid are actually two separate cakes. The top one is mounted at an angle with posts hidden by those foil-wrapped chocolate coins. The edible gold sheen turned out better than we could have hoped. And yes, that's natural wood grain you're seeing pressed into the "planks."

Great Vol of China

A friend of ours was headed to China after his big UT graduation. The text below the wall wishes him well and also says "Go Vols!"

Frog

"Hoppy" Birthday!

Sports Car

Congratulations, Erika and Jeremie! 

Peeps!

Sometimes simpler is better. And deliciouser.

Sleeping Beauty

We started brainstorming this concept almost immediately upon learning a Sleeping Beauty themed party had been requested. The movie actually has a birthday cake scene! How could we resist?

Omnidroid!

An Incredibles-themed birthday party wouldn't be complete without a giant evil robot, right? 

Laptop

This year my very first group of fifth graders graduate from high school. Whoa. David is headed to Tuscaloosa for college, so this computer is Bama-centric. The keyboard even says "Roll Tide!" The onscreen error message is definitely my favorite part, though: "Cannot run program 'childhood.exe' - Memory full." Then you can click either restart or graduate (but restart is greyed out). Whimsy!

Opossum

After Ben got the blue guitar for his groom's cake, and Cale got Neyland Stadium, Chase was determined not to be outdone. His request says it all: 'possum.

Birthdays, Birthdays

Our kids are growing up! Here are some of the cakes from their birthday parties:

 

Farragut High School

For my high school reunion, we made this cake replica of the actual campus. Each section, and each wing of the main building, are all different flavors. 

Pokemon

Well, it's Fall again, and that means the annual Fall Fest, where Tara and I auction off our mad skillz to raise money for a good cause. This year we had a special treat--the winner was one of my current students, so I got to make his birthday cake! Very cool. Aaron came to me with a specific vision, and even loaned me one of his collectors books with the pages we'd need tabbed and everything. The actual structure of Ash's hat and the battlefield itself were pretty simple to construct, and the colors came out great. My favorite part, though, was molding the (yes, edible) figures for the top. This is Gyarados, a water pokemon, and Charizard, a fire pokemon--don't say we never taught you anything here at Caldwell Cakes. At first they didn't want to stand up straight on top of the field, but we managed to wrangle them into place without losing too many hit points. (Pause for laughter.) The overall effect fit in perfectly with the other party decorations, and the birthday boy seemed pleased. Mission accomplished.

Gone Bananas

Yes, this cake is actually banana flavored, and it's a Tara original! For Lucas' first birthday, she designed this monkey theme to celebrate. I'm particularly fond of the bunches still hanging in the trees. This one is a pretty small cake--I think we used our 6 inch pans--but you can hardly tell because of the way the colors pop. (Key to success: Tara mixes the fondant colors, too.)

Camaro

A friend of a friend called us up a few weeks ago looking for a specialty groom's cake. When she told me she wanted a replica of his prized Camaro, I pretty much automatically said yes. It's our first car, it's an antique, and it's a beauty. Lindsey sent us a batch of photos from different angles, and we got out our calculator. Turns out, sculpting a car is really hard! There are a lot of scale measurements that all have to match up if it's going to look right. All the embellishments, including the tires, are rolled fondant, so except for the toothpick antenna, this one's edible from the ground up. Instead of trying to turn white fondant red or black (which is nearly impossible), we picked up some powdered food coloring and mixed it with Everclear. The resulting "paint" was super easy to work with, and looked great when it dried. There's a support layer underneath that lifts the chassis up off the display board, and we copied his actual license plate. We had a lot of fun with this one; mazel tov, guys!

Airplanes

Frank officially retired this week after an illustrious career as an air traffic controller. The cake is a radar screen, with lots of little airplane blips traveling across the grid, and all around the perimeter of the base we piped his retirement slogan: "Half the money, twice the Frank."


We also piped the radar blips, but the blue and white grid lines are strips of fondant we ran through our pasta maker!


Our crowning achievements, of course, were the suspended airplanes overhead. They are actually made of the same cake as the base, and tasted just as delicious. Neither Frank nor his wife watch "Lost," but we do (with a vengeance), so the Oceanic and Ajira logos/colors were kind of a Caldwell Cakes inside joke.

Alabama

For a couple of Vols fans, we sure do a lot of Crimson Tide business. This one looks pretty simple in design, since that's what the client wanted, but actually took a lot of work to create. It's strawberry cake with two layers of actual cut strawberries in between, and since it's around 5 inches tall we also included a cardboard/dowel support structure.

The crimson (NOT maroon, as I've been reminded over and over) pieces are cut from fondant and embossed, while the "Bear Bryant" houndstooth pattern around the sides represents our first foray into the world of edible images. Printing them was easy--applying them vertically was the challenge. Happy Birthday, Shane!

Birthday Dots

Lori's birthday falls right around Christmas time, which is why you'll see our tree in the background of this photo. After the baby shower last month, we'd been experimenting with the whole "whimsical tiered cake" idea. This ribbon wrapped beauty (say that three times fast) is marbled twice over: purple and white fondant on the outside, yellow and chocolate cake on the inside.

Typewriter

This cake took us down memory lane to the late, great, IBM Selectric electric typewriter. An acquaintance from school asked us to help celebrate the retirement of a 40-year employee at his office, who, yes, still uses her old Selectric to print mailing labels. He wins the award for being by far the best client we've had so far, since he came to us with a specific design in mind and sent photos from every possible angle (including measurements!)

The basic shape was pretty simple, but carving out the hollow on top after the fact proved slightly more complicated than I imagined. As usual, the most fun parts were the little details--note, if you will, the notched type wheel and the other inner pieces. All classic Tara. My favorite thing is that no plastic dowels or cardboard support layers were necessary; the entire thing is completely edible (and pretty delicious, too).

Baby Shower

Yes, it's Fall Festival time again, and that means there's a Caldwell Cake to be won in the school's silent auction.

This one was requested for a baby shower, and it posed an interesting challenge. Instead of creating the design from scratch, we were asked to replicate an existing cake from another website. That meant a little reverse engineering on our part, and a whole lot of geometry measuring out those diamond patches. (I don't know if you can tell in these images, but Tara "quilted" the perimeter of each patch before placing them onto the cake--genius!)

Except for the ribbon at the base of each layer, everything on this cake is edible, from the tiny bow ties to the sneakers on top. Those shoes, by the way, marked our first foray into gumpaste construction; we were thrilled with how they came out, so I included an extra close-up photo below.

Casket

Well, this was certainly a new theme for us. Rhonda's husband was turning fifty, so several months ago she ordered a coffin-shaped cake to go along with the black balloons and other "mourning" gag decorations. We had to do some research on several funeral-home websites before we were able to settle on a model that would be easy enough to create with fondant, yet still elegant enough to get buried in.

Once we got started, it came together pretty quickly, but during the final stages we realized things could have gone smoother if we had decorated each section and then pieced them together afterwards. Oh well. The embellishments, as usual, are Tara's handiwork, including the improvised columns at the corners which turned out to be my favorite part.

Yes, the flowers on top are edible as well, but due to time constraints we chose to buy them pre-made. The stems, leaves, and ribbon, though, are Caldwell Cakes originals. :)

Ultimately, this little guy was displayed on the table along with a sign we picked out that shows a cartoon Grim Reaper saying "Relax, I'm just here for the cake!"

Nashville Sounds

The theme for the Tennessee Cake Festival this year was "Love Affair with Music City," the original date having been scheduled for Valentine's Day weekend. The event had to be postponed until nearly March, but we figured we could still work in a nod to Nashville's minor league baseball team, the Sounds.

This marks the first time we've revisited a cake design, as well as the first "behind the scenes" photograph we've posted. I prefer the glove being taller, and I was particularly pleased with the way the team logo turned out, since I piped it by hand. Tara created the grass field upon which it sits using about a thousand individual squirts of green icing. Phew!

The other image is the cake's endoskeleton support structure.

Sally

My neice, Lily, turned one last week. Naturally, we were commissioned to create a masterwork to celebrate the occasion, but agreed only on the condition that the cake's subject be a surprise to both mom and baby (although let's be honest--baby doesn't really know what cake IS at this point...)

Anyway, we had grandma ship us my sister's old doll from when SHE was a wee tot. Her name is Sally, and she looks, well, pretty much like this picture. I had fun engineering the arms to project out from either side without falling over, and as usual my wife drove home the artistic details. For example: I did the blue eyes, but Tara added the little white dots in each. The doll's hands and feet are made of a different, more plush fabric than the rest of its body, so Tara simply pressed the yellow fondant with a paper towel to give it texture. Genius!

You can't see it, but Sally even had a fondant Fisher Price tag stuck to her hindquarters.

Voting Booths

Well, here she is: our blue ribbon baby. The state fair competition was election-themed, so we sprang for the challenge. You can see an elephant's legs in the one booth and a donkey's in the other. Wocka wocka wocka.

Each booth is solid cake with a fondant curtain pasted to the front and appropriately "wrinkled." The flag base is my favorite part, but the most work certainly went into constructing the wooden support structures for the booths. They couldn't just be the four legs, because simple torque would knock them over; instead we had to brace them up under the individual booth, where it could be reinforced without being visible. (I felt like I was channeling my old Odyssey of the Mind balsa-wood-tower days.)

The blue ribbon is prominently displayed at home, along with a photocopy of our eight dollar prize check.

Neyland Stadium

Well, this was certainly the largest and most involved cake we've done. But then again, my brother's wedding deserved no less. Tara and I have now fully embraced the strategy of careful pre-planning (diagrams, blueprints, etc.), and thank goodness for it, because this baby had to be put together in four pieces.

The entirety of the stadium proper is cake, while the press boxes and jumbotron are shaped chunks of styrofoam, fondanted (inedible, of course). The cardboard support layers for the base and the upper deck were measured and cut out beforehand, so the two decks could be carved and assembled separately. We laid a first layer of cake and fit it to the base, then sawed it in half at what would eventually become the 50 yard line. Each half of the lower deck, then, was stacked and cut to match. Being able to access the middle (because the halves were apart) made carving out the "bowl" of the stadium much, much easier.

Thick, plastic dowels were placed around the perimeter to hold the upper deck later on, and thin wooden dowels were punched through both cardboard layers and all the way into the base for structural integrity. I'll be honest, though: even fondanted and assembled, none of it looked like a stadium until we marked the aisles between sections, and then it all just came together. (It's funny how the small things bring it to life).

After that, we piped every individual fan into the bleacher seats. It took forever, but I was particularly pleased that we were able to reproduce the "Orange Nation" student section and even the marching band's black uniforms. (The first thing Cale said when he saw it was, "Hey! You even put in the band section!" which was a big moment for me personally). Again, halving the lower deck totally opened up the access for piping all those tiny dots.

The trees around outside the stadium are just clusters of flat-leaf parsley stuck upright into the fondant. I loved the effect, but that staging idea may need some tweaking because after a while the parsley began to dry out and wilt. Ah well. Something to improve upon for next time, right?

Turns out, one of Cale's new in-laws actually played football at UT a few years back, and he was at the reception for the big reveal. He smiled, gave us a thumbs up, and then started snapping pictures with his cell phone, so I guess we can call this one a success.