I will be the first person to tell you that I can't bake to save my life. My intentions are good. Luck is just never on my side. Thankfully my husband can bake fairly well.
As it is with baking cakes, decorating cakes just never goes my way. I'll cite a few examples to prove my point.
Many years ago I made a Christmas cake for a party my friends and I were planning. I decorated sugar ice cream cones to look like Christmas trees and painstakingly decorated little Teddy Gram cookies to look like elves. I even made a frozen pond out of foil (the elves needed something to ice skate on). It literally took me the entire day just to decorate this sheet cake.
I safely got the cake to my friend's house where the party was going to be. As my bad luck would have it the florescent light bulb above the sink fell and broke and pieces of shattered glass went everywhere, including all over my cake! There was no way we could risk eating the cake so we had to toss it out.
Fast forward years later. I was decorating a cake for my son's birthday. It was suppose to resemble a construction site. I even purchased new construction vehicles to top the cake with. Sadly when I was removing the cake from the pan a HUGE piece stuck, leaving a massive hole in the middle of the cake. There wasn't time to make another cake so I improvised and pretended the hole was part of the construction site. I crushed up some Oreos and put the crumbs in the hole and some in the dump truck to make it look like dirt. It ended up looking "OK", but I was so disappointed that there was a huge hole in the cake.
Decorating cakes is not my forte. My sister on the other hand is a fantastic cake decorator. I'm always impressed with her skills and she never had any formal training either. Just once I would love to decorate a cake just as impressive as my sister's cakes.
There is a super easy way to decorate any cake and it will have people thinking you are the ultimate cake decorating pro. It's called CakeVase(http://www.cakevase.com/). It's the most amazing idea!
CakeVase is a plastic "disc" which has holes on one side and "spikes" (for lack of a better description) on the other side. To use the CakeVaseall you need to do it bake a bake (or purchase a cake) and frost it (you can purchase a pre-frosted cake too). Then you insert the spiked end of the CakeVase into the cake so that it's resting on top. Then you can take real flowers, fake flowers or greenery and insert them into the "holes" on the CakeVase topper. Your cake will look amazing!
I just had to try the CakeVase for myself. I purchased a pre-made cake from the grocery store down the street. I also picked up a small bundle of mixed flowers from the florist in the grocery store too. When I got home I just took the various CakeVases I have (they come in different sizes) and found the one that best fit the top of the cake. I was a bit worried I would smash it down too much but it inserted into the cake really easy.
You can fill the wells in the CakeVase with water to keep the flowers lasting longer. I have bad luck when it comes to cakes so I omitted the water. Besides we were going to eat the cake that night anyway so it was fine.
Next I cut the stems on the flowers to fit into the well and tried to arrange them nicely around the cake with the CakeVase. It didn't exactly turn out as nice as some photos I have seen, but it was certainly much nicer then any cake I could have decorated. It was so easy too!
I did take a few pictures of the finished product. I just have to hunt them down. I have a feeling my daughter deleted them, but she's not admitting to it. Either that or she uploaded them onto her computer when she uploaded pictures from a sleep over she went to. As soon as I can find my pictures I will update this post.
I'm seriously very impressed with the CakeVase. It's so simple to use. Even my four year old neighbor could do it (although I wouldn't recommend that...ha ha). You can even use pillar candles in place of some of the flowers. I don't have any on hand so I wasn't able to try that out for myself.
For Christmas this year I want to get a cake frosted with white frosting. I want to ask the bakery if they could give it a "basket weave" design. Then I want to use some greenery and some red flowers (maybe Carnations) and decorate a cake to look very festive for Christmas. I would love to use some Evergreens. I think that would look stunning!
Here are some examples of cakes decorated with the CakeVase. I love the one that uses candy canes/candy sticks around the cake. What a fun and tasty idea!
How gorgeous are these cakes! With CakeVase anyone - including someone like me - can make the most impressive and amazing cakes.
I'd like to try and make one for Thanksgiving too. If I do I'll take pictures and post them on She Scribes.
To learn more about CakeVase you can visit http://www.cakevase.com/.CakeVases come in various sizes to fit most round and sheet cakes.
Cake Vase is available at many online retailers including Amazon,Gooseberry Patch, ChefTools.com and other locations. There is a complete list on the CakeVase web site.
Kathleen from CakeVase would love to give TWO lucky She Scribes readers their own set of CakeVases. Thanks Kathleen!
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