Jennifer has been decorating cakes for ten years now and her work is amazing!    

The first cake she ever decorated was a Scooby Doo cake for her son’s 1st birthday.  After creating that cake, she was hooked!

Jennifer is self-taught and has never attended any cake decorating courses.   When she first became interested in the art of cake decorating, she wanted to attend some classes.   However, like many of us, was never able to find a convenient time.   And, when she did finally find some free time to go, her cake decorating skills were too advanced for the courses being offered.  So, now she teaches the classes!

She is currently a part-time cake decorator.  She sells her cakes and finds that she receives the most money for her wedding cakes and carved cakes.  For example, a castle cake she did for a little girl’s birthday was carved and had lots of details.  A cake like that takes forever to do and she receives the most money for that type of cake.

Everyone is always telling her that she should open her own bakery, but she feels she is busy enough doing the cakes she is doing.     Also, if she opened her own bakery,  she would need to hire a staff to help her fill the orders.  Jennifer is a self-proclaimed perfectionist and feels she would end up doing all the cakes herself.  This would not work well in a busy bakery.

The best advice she could give someone interested in getting into cake decorating is to practice, practice, and practice some more.   You aren’t going to improve or perfect your skills if you don’t do a LOT of practice….and when you mess up really, REALLY bad, it’s a good thing.  You can learn a lot from those big mistakes.

The biggest cake decorating mishap she ever had was with her Dr. Pepper cake.  She made the cake to look like a glass of Dr. Pepper with a can suspended in air over top of it.  It gave the effect of the soda pouring out of the can.   She was in a hurry when decorating this cake and didn’t support it as well as she should have.  The next morning when she got up, the entire cake had collapsed.  She could have cried, but finally recovered, and re-did the cake. 

Jennifer uses buttercream on nearly all of her sheet cakes.    But, she is starting to use fondant on more and more of the stacked cakes simply because they look so much more clean and professional.  The decorating possibilities are endless with fondant.

Jennifer’s favorite cakes are the ones where she gets the biggest reactions from the people she made it for.  For example, she recently made a pink gumball machine for a little girl’s 2nd birthday.  They were absolutely thrilled with it.  Everyone at the party kept asking where the birthday cake was.  When they would point at the gumball machine, people wouldn’t believe that was the cake.  They’d say, “No, that’s a gumball machine, where’s the CAKE?”  One little girl even turned the knob to get some gum.  You know you did a good job on a cake when people can’t even tell that it’s a cake.  That’s what makes it fun.

You can view more of Jennifer’s gorgeous cake creations by visiting her flickr photo gallery!

Related Links:
Find Custom Scooby-Doo Birthday Supplies on Ebay!
Scooby-Doo Deluxe Party Pack
Princess Theme Party Ideas & Supplies

Tags: birthday, birthday cakes, cake, cake artist, cake decorating, cake decorator, cake photos, cakes by jen, carved cakes, castle cake, fondant, party, scooby doo birthday, wedding cakes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Featured Cake Decorators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.