Sweet Tea

I just love the internet, don’t you?  It’s like having the world right at your fingertips.  How did we ever get along without it?  Really, it’s hard to imagine our world before “dot com.”

I get soooo many creative ideas and inspiration from surfing the web.  Recipes, sewing, crafts, and decorating… the list goes on and on.  People tell me all the time how creative I am.  But really I think I do more RE-creating than creating.  And wasn’t it Einstein who said that creativity is just knowing how to hide your sources?  Ha ha.  I’ll agree with that.

When it comes to cake decorating, I get tons of ideas through online searches.  Sometimes I find a cake that I’d like to copy exactly, and sometimes I draw inspiration from several cakes in order to create one that’s just right.  But sometimes, even after looking through hundreds of photos, I just can’t find what I’m looking for.  That’s sort of the story with this cake.

For her fifth birthday, Anna Kate was living every little girl’s dream of having her very own real tea party!  Mom had carefully planned the menu, ordered the invitations, and selected the decorations.  But she couldn’t seem to find a cake that was just right for the party.

So she gave me a call, and spilled her cake vision to me.  We discussed theme, decorations, menu, guests, what she liked and what she didn’t.  I gradually began to get a feel of what she had in mind for the cake.  Then she sent me some pics of her invitations.  They were so adorable I knew that I had to use them in designing the perfect cake for the tea party.  You can see the invites and things here at the Tom Kat Studio etsy shop.

Here’s the sketch that I came up with after seeing the invitations. Mom loved it, so I immediately went to work making decorations for the tea party cake.

And here’s my finished product.

I think it looks pretty similar to my original sketch.

The  butterflies and hearts are cut from gum paste.

To make the butterflies wings stand out, I dried the cutouts in the valleys of some cardstock that I had accordion folded.

As you might have guessed already, the Tool Man helped me roll all the beads on this cake.

The teapot topper was also cut from gum paste.  First I drew a teapot onto cardstock and cut that out.  Then I used that piece as a pattern to cut the teapot design out of the gum paste.  The result was a one-of-kind topper that perfectly matched the party décor.

This cake was made of 4, 6, and 8 inch tiers and served approximately 35 people.  It was filled and iced with buttercream, and the decorations were made of fondant and gum paste. 

Lindsey