Amy’s interest in cake decorating began three and a half years ago. While planning her sister’s bridal shower, she went to a very high end, upscale custom cake store to order the cake. While viewing their store portfolios for ideas, her mom kept nudging her saying, “I bet you could make this”, “Look at this one, that’s so you.” Amy admits she has a natural inclination for anything and everything sweet and has always been referred to as an “arts and crafty” type person. After ordering the bridal shower cake for 40 people for upwards of $300, she left the cake store and went straight to her local Michaels.
She bought some fondant and flower cutters and tried her hand at baking and decorating a cake. Needless to say her first cake was certainly one worthy of CakeWrecks! That first cake hooked her though, and little by little she got better. She ended up making a cake for her sister’s bridal shower and placed it with the mega-expensive one they had ordered. At the end of the shower there wasn’t a crumb left of Amy’s cake and guests were asking for business cards. It all just kind of snowballed from there!
Amy is proud to say that she has never taken one cake decorating class. She is completely self-taught. There is such a huge wealth of information and support from fellow cake decorators on the Internet. She admits she lived, breathed, ate, and slept on Cake Central for the longest time. She learned a lot on that site through their forums and helpful tutorials. She was inspired by photos in their galleries. She experimented with recipes that were shared by other decorators on the site, and never once did anyone deny answering a question she might have had. It really was like going to an online cake decorating school!
Amy makes approximately 80 to 100 pounds of buttercream frosting a week. Working with that amount of buttercream has helped her become quite efficient at crumb coating and smoothly icing a cake. Therefore, she’d have to say without a doubt that working with buttercream is her preferred medium.
All of her cakes have fondant accents on them and she does have clients that prefer a fondant finish, but the majority of her cakes are buttercream. She is proud to say that people are always assuming her cakes are a fondant finish because they look so smooth! That’s quite a compliment for a cake decorator. It always makes her smile! However, she admits that the most basic of lessons in buttercream, the standard buttercream rose, to this day is still beyond her capabilities. Go figure!
The biggest mistake Amy has ever made while decorating a cake wasn’t in the design process at all. She was making a full scale acoustic guitar birthday cake for a client. When putting the finishing touches on the completed cake, a thought occurred to her. She “thought” she might have filled the cake’s center with a cream cheese icing rather than the buttercream icing that the client had ordered.
Well, of course there was no way to be sure since the cake was pretty much completed. She was in angst over what she had possibly done. She was thinking to herself, “Do I hack it open? Do I find a precise spot that I can cut and then be able to patch up nice and neat if I didn’t make a mistake? And OMG! What if I did make a mistake?” It would be cake carnage for sure and she knew she would have to start all over again. Amy recalls cutting into the neck of the guitar and sure enough she had used cream cheese. She ended up remaking the whole cake! Thankfully she had the time to do it before the client was due for pickup.
A close second if not an even tie was one of the very first topsy turvy cakes she ever did. It was late the evening before the cake was due for delivery. All day she had been repairing a spot on the bottom tier that looked as if it was going to give way and fall apart. It was stuck with numerous skewers for support and just didn’t want to hold. On a move from one counter to another it finally just let go and fell apart all over the kitchen floor.
Most of both tiers ended up on the floor in a heap of cake. It was bad! She had no backup supplies and little time or energy to recoup. She had to start all over, from baking, making icing, restacking, decorating, etc. That night she was up until past 3 am. In the end the cake was remade and delivered on time. One of her most used lines even to this day is “It will get done, it always does!”
When asked which cake was her favorite, it was difficult for Amy to choose just one since she loves all of her cakes! They are all great as a complete cake, in part because of color scheme, design technique, etc. She approaches every cake with the same thought process…this has got to be a show stopper! She asks herself, “How can I add that extra pizzazz to put it over the top?”
Amy adds edible glitter to 99 out of 100 cakes she does. It sends every one of them over the top especially children’s cakes. If it’s a princess cake, the glitter screams glamorous. If it’s a super hero cake, the glitter screams imagination! Amy pours 110% effort into every cake. She loves making cakes, decorating them, and then sending them off to be the center of attention for the occasion or event. It’s insanely gratifying to be able to do something you love and make others happy in the process. It keeps her going, and what could be better than that?
To view more of Amy’s gorgeous cake creations, please visit her flickr photo gallery or her website:
