Pizza

At Polkadots we love our pizza. So we asked ourselves, "What is better than pizza?"

A pizza made out of cake! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we went there. This cheesy creation is actually our chocolate cake covered in fondant which was then airbrushed  to give it that fresh out of the brick oven look. For sauce we used strawberry jam and then covered it in grated white chocolate. Our toppings included fondant tomatoes, mushrooms, and basil. We melted the chocolate with a torch for that ooey gooey cheesiness. Delicious!

Baby Shower!

Planning for a baby shower??? If so, we have the perfect cake for you! This week we had the privilege of creating two beautiful baby shower cakes featuring an adorable onesie and a cute blue whale. Both cakes were custom ordered and you can have one too! Order one week in advance and we can work with you to create a masterpiece that will be the cherry on top of your celebration. The cake can be simple or intricate, whatever you want to make your party perfect! We promise to make your little one an amazing cake for their shower!

Sesame street cake - updated!

Yeah August is over! We are excited to gear back our weddings, football seasons, and of course some cooler weather. We are so blessed to have a fabulous staff.. our morning baker Alex, our cake artists Natalie, Kimmi, Serena. We couldn't do it all without their fantastic help!

Sesame street cakes get requested all the time, here are a few of our new spin on the design:

 

Elmo, Cookie Monster, or Big Bird birthday theme cake is always a classic request at Polkadots!

 

There's a Snake in my Boot!

Here at polkadots we love making children's theme cakes and last week we made one from the movie Toy Story! Standing about 15 inches tall each of the three tiers is inspired from the movie. The bottom tier also has the popular etch-a-sketch which was sculpted out of colored fondant.

Every Little Thing We Do Is Magic

It's that perfect time of year for every little girl and boy to enjoy the magic and mystery that shines like mystic fairy lights on a warm summer's night. One, much loved little girl received an extra dash of magic in her Fairy Princess Birthday Cake.

The cake was colored to serve as a whimsical stage for an enchanted castle home to fairies. Cheery flowers and butterflies surround the castle in curly vines all under a veil of sparkling silver stars. The ruler is a purple haired princess with a glittery flower petal dress, a silver crown adorning her head and silver fairy wand to match.

The fairy princess was built with a wire frame that was then covered in various layers of fondant to form her body and dress. The curly "4" on top was hand carved to match the whimsical theme throughout the three tiers of the cake. Generous amounts of edible glitter and pixie dust were added to enhance little Kayla's big day.

This three cake tiered serves 60 adults with our 6", 8", and 10" cakes. All the cakes were iced in butter cream rather than fondant in green, blue, and purple that were blended by hand to achieve the graduated coloring. Once again the Polkadots Team achieved confectionery magic!

Let's Go Fishing!

Summer is finally here and boy is it going to be a hot one! Since it's the perfect time to do a little fishing this week, our team made a life size speckled trout fish for a groomsman cake. Why not enjoy a little fish on the side of a cake? Sounds a little fishy to me...

One of our sugar artists, started off with a square piece of styrofoam.  She started carving the styrofoam and added rice krispie treats to make an easier fish shape. Then, it is covered with fondant  and airbrushed detail to make the fish look as if it had just hoped out of the water! But no fresh fish can go without a little ice; therefore, we made ice cube shapes out of isomalt which is a melted form of sugar that solidifies into any shape you mold it into.

The Trout sits on top of a life size wooden tackle box made out of our popular Black Bottom cake. Black Bottom is a Chocolate cake with cream cheese and chocolate chip filling topped with cream cheese buttercream! YUM!

Polkadots Spotlight: Suitcase Cakes!

Throwing a going away party or a birthday party and looking for a suitcase cake? We have them in store for you! This week, we designed two special luggage cakes. The first one was a Harry Potter trunk birthday cake. The cake is lemon blueberry stacked on top of chocolate with nutella icing and covered in fondant. The fondant was sprayed to make it look like leather and then topped with gold accent corners, trim, and lock. We then placed the cake on a board that was painted to look like wood just to top it off! This is a great cake for a Harry Potter fan!

The other suitcase cake we designed was a Costa Rican themed suitcase. It is a quarter sheet cake of our delicious strawberries and cream covered in chocolate fondant with brown straps and gold accent. Different images were printed on edible sugar paper and placed on fondant to create "stickers" to be placed all over the suitcase, with a large print out of a Costa Rica brochure. The suitcase cake was placed on a board decorated with a map of Costa Rica out of fondant. It just puts the finishing touches on this magnificent Costa Rican Birthday cake!

If you're looking for a suitcase cake for your next birthday cake or going away cake or Harry Potter movie night, don't hesitate to give us a call! You can come with your own ideas and we can create a special cake just for you!

Adorable Custom Cakes

I love making any themed birthday cakes, but my favorite is working on animal theme cake. This past week we made a small cake topper for a duckie baby shower theme. I love the different pastel color stripes with the accent stitches. The 3D duck on top was designed after the party napkin and adding the little pink bonnet and dangling banner "Welcome Kennedy" around the top side of the cake. This was a 6" round honey and chai cake - serves 12 adults.

Next is Alexis's butterflies birthday party from last year! You can see her fabulous party details on her blog The Cul-de-Sac. This was an 8" round blackbottom cake - serves 20 adults.

 
She always does joint birthday party for her daughters. This year she came up with a silhouette birthday theme  and used light pink silhouette fabric for the background display. It's so darling!

Children's birthday cakes are so much fun especially when I can incorporate design from other artists. The next cake was for Layla this past week, and it was a 10" round strawberry and cream cake decorated simply with pink and purple banner around the top and bottom of the cake with detailed stitches. The cute felt bunny was provided by our client from artist Myko Bocek.

Last, Robert did an excellent job on the figurines for Aaron's Cake. The little amp box, details on the guitar, and of course the cute monkey on top. Congratulations Aaron!

Thank you for reading! Hope everyone is having a great summer :)

Hot, hot, hot with no electricity for a bit?

Hot hot hot that is all I can say today! When you run a shop there is always something broken or missing. Today was 95F outside, and guess what? We had no electricity for about 1 hr around 3PM. Fondant started sweating buttercream were soft and melting, no phone, no credit card machine, cash register was locked and the worst no AC. We survived today and finished the iPhone birthday cake for tomorrow's pick up:

The cake serves 30 adults. It is a vanilla cake with chocolate swiss buttercream. It took us a good 5 hrs to complete this cake from start to finish. Olga scaled the size of the iPhone. Carly baked the cake and filled with buttercream. Julia covered the cake with fondant. Kristen and Robert worked on the apps decoration. Word... that's a lot of people for one cake!

As our kitchen getting hotter, we grabbed a bag of ice and put it on our necks. Don't laugh, it worked :)

Oh not to forget these cute duckies and little mermaid sugar cookies.

 
We are glad that we got our power back. Thanks Austin Energy!

Pretty pattern, flowers, and Anthropologie inspired!

We are so excited that we have more gum paste flowers cake this year. Here are a few that we've done recently for our clients:

Moth Orchids flowers on top of three tier cake. This cake was a surprise for one lady that turned 60 recently. Instead of number "60" on top, the husband especially requested for "The New 40." How sweet is that?

During our meeting he mentioned that he wanted the look to be classy, modern, and elegant.  We threw in some giraffe gold print, antique brooches, and sugar pearls accent for the border. This cake was all gluten free - flavors are blackbottom and strawberries and cream.

 

The next cake was a 6" pink, grey, and silver combination. We meant to make an anemone flower on top of the cake, but due to Austin's humidity the petals weren't dry fast enough. They ended up all breaking :( Instead of making new petals flowers ,we were able to use some rose petals from another project. We are going to call this one fantasy flower cake! It was a strawberry shortcake, vanilla cake with strawberry buttercream and fresh strawberries inside. YUM!

 

I recently took a sewing class at stitch lab . Not only do they offer sewing classes, but they also sell various fun fabrics.  This cake was inspired by one of the fabric patterns that I saw there. The original fabric was green, white, and turquoise. This fabric image was "Free Spirit Anna Maria Horner Little Folks Voile Little Honey Meadow" taken from Stitch Lab flickr page.

We tweaked the color combination and here's what we came up with:

 

Happy 27th Birthday again Erin!

We designed a small cake cutting for Sabrina and Geoffrey at the Allan House a few weeks back. Our inspiration was a tan cardigan from my favorite store, Anthropologie!  We made a 6" lemon and cream cake covered with white fondant and topped it with grey and tan ruffled flowers.  Congratulations Sabrina and Geoffrey!

As always, thank you for stopping by!

Countdown to Christmas!

Wow, the past couple of weeks have been a blur. It sure has been hustling and bustling here at Polkadots, filling many a holiday order on top of the usual ones for birthdays, baby showers, graduations, etc. Sometimes, we joke that our kitchen is like Santa's workshop, and all of our helpers are the jolly little elves! It sure feels that way during this time of the year, and even though it can be stressful now and then, we always manage to have fun together.

Last week, we completed an order calling for 60 dozen gingerbread men for 2 days!  Yes, that would be 720 cookies, individually iced. Being that we do everything the old-fashioned way (made from scratch, and decorated by hand), this was quite a timely task. But we pulled together as a team, and ended up finishing them well ahead of time.

We also baked and decorated a wide variety of really cute, scrumptious Yuletide cookies. The selection included ornaments, reindeer, soldiers, Christmas trees, Santas, snowmen, angels, candy canes, snowflakes, wreaths, and stockings. They are like edible little works of art. A fun and little-known fact is that decorating just one of our more complex cookies can take upwards of 15 minutes!

Apart from all of the holiday requests, we've received an interesting and diverse selection of orders recently. Take for example, a rainbow post-impressionistic tie dye birthday cake.

 We also made a batch of "El Toro Loco" cookies and a coordinating cake for a monster truck enthusiast. That project was definitely something different, and they turned out to be quite elegant somehow, despite the "dirt" on top of the cake!

The next project gave us all a good laugh - a "Harry Potter the sea otter" birthday cake, covered with a selection of happy fondant sea creatures. It is great to know that we have such interesting and creative customers! So next time you need a cake, consult us and let your imagination run wild, because we can do just about anything here.

 Thanks for stopping by!

Under Pressure!

Last week was a total whirlwind. My whole body was dying from baking, stacking, icing cakes and racing the time. Totally underpressure like the Queen lyrics! " Pressure pushing down on me Pressing down on you no man ask for Under pressure - that burns a building down Splits a family in two" Nah.. Ben and I still together :)

Ben always told me that I shouldn't over promised, but I told him I love challanges especially on the cake that I never made/know/ think about making it. I took a topsy turvy graduation cake order  that served 200 guests for the first time. The only thing I know about topsy turvy is "slanted" cake. That's it.

So what did I do? I researched on you tube, watching many topsy turvy tutorials and read cake blogs about topsy turvy cake. On top of all of this,  the cake will be picked up and delivered to Giddings which is one hour away from Austin. It has to be sturdy! Oh.. I also have to covered this cake with fondant. Mmmm,  I never covered cake with fondant bigger than 10" round and this 200 serving cake will have a 16" round. Anyway.. the more I think on how doing this cake the more streess I became. Honestly, I never seen pimple on my face since my teenager years! Guess what? I produced four this past weekend.

So, did I survived? Yeah.. I am pretty happy for the first time result. Will I do it again? Yes!! yes!! Now I know how to do it. Here it is:

From top to bottom 6" round strawberry shortcake, 10" round devils food chocolate, and 14" & 16" round red velvet with cream cheese frosting.

I am so glad that last week went well considering the all nighter, aching body, and last but not least my finger got stuck into pastry tip while washing it. I'll be back with this coming weekend celebration cakes (wine bottle, willy wonka, and fiesta cake).

Summer Break is almost here!

I can't wait to get a week break, yes in two days! Busy, busy, busy for sure before I leave the shop this week. I managed to finish few cakes that are schedule to be picked up tomorrow afternoon. The first cake was the barnyard theme, for a 3 yr old:

I love all the farm animals, here are the details:

Which one is your favorite farm animal?

The next one is pirate themed birthday cake. I sketched it couple days ago and wanted to put lots of pirate theme. I changed my mind... and I ended up with more simpler design, just stripes, pirate, skull flag, treasure chest, coins, parrot, and palm trees.

I am pretty pleased on how it turned out, simple but still festive! Happy Birthday Cole and Will!

Last but not least, I got the honor to do a wedding cake for a very fun couple. They are getting married this weekend at the marina on Lake Travis. I just love these birds. The design was taken off from their wedding invitation. At first I wasn't paying attention, while I was working on the fondant work...I realized that these birds are wearing swim suits. I am very pleased with the result. It  looks clean, yet fun too. Congrats to Chris and Aaron.

Thanks for stopping by our blog! We'll be back next week on the 15th. Back and refresh, yes we'll be celebrating our 2nd year anniversary for Polkadots. Thank you Austin!