One of my favorite things growing up was Thanksgiving Day…not just because of the incredible food and family time, but because my birthday is in November and we always celebrated it on Thanksgiving. Now normally that meant birthday pumpkin pie, which I was (and still am) ALL about…but one year I thought I’d mix it up and asked my mom for a 3-tier funfetti cake. Somehow she pulled it off and totally wowed me…all those rainbow colored white chocolate chips 😍 I didn’t even know we had 3 different sized pans! That year in particular, the news had been warning us about the possibility that we would feel significant aftershocks from an earthquake on December 3. It was kind of a big deal, since in southern Ohio we didn’t often have to deal with earthquakes. One of the times I went to the counter to admire my cake, I was shocked to see it leaning severely to the right, having gotten too warm from the heat of the oven. My Mom said, “the earthquake came early.” I should have taken that as an early warning that in baking, as in life, things don’t always go according to plan!

My personal cake-baking journey started 16 years ago, when I was planning my son’s first birthday and saw a 3-tier, homemade fondant-covered beauty of a cake on the cover of a magazine. For some inexplicable reason, I thought, I can do that. Let’s just stop and shake our heads at the naivete of my younger self. The cake turned out fine, although I don’t even have a picture of it because I stayed up all night to make it, and still had not even put on makeup or fixed my hair by the time the guests started arriving. Good thing I was 25 and could still *kind of* get away with that.

At some point, I decided to start a little home business and started baking for birthday parties, etc, and then…my first wedding cake. Again, I was a little over-confident in my abilities and ended up in tears somewhere around bedtime, covered in frosting and staring down a hideously iced wedding cake like it had insulted my mother. Brian called his aunt, who had been making wedding cakes forever (and had, in fact, made our delicious and beautiful wedding cake) who talked me down off the ledge and gave me the best cake advice I’ve ever received. “Don’t mess with it too much.”

Much to Brian’s surprise, I continued to take orders, even though each timed I swore I’d never bake another wedding cake as long as I lived. I think it’s something like having babies…in the heat of the moment, you swear you’ll never go through it again. Then after the pain subsides a little and you see the sweet little thing, you forget how bad it really got.

I slowly got better and faster, although it took me many years to actually charge enough to make it anywhere near worth my time. There were triumphs and at least 2 total disasters. At a certain point, though, there wasn’t enough money in all of Florida to make it worth the stress and I mostly stopped baking. I’d do an order here and there for a while, and then I stopped all together. The thought of baking the layers, making the buttercream, filling a pastry bag made me feel physically ill. How sad I let it get to that point! And let me take this opportunity to say that my customers were NEVER the problem. Somehow I was blessed with wonderful clients every time, and not even one single bridezilla, ever. Here are a couple of my favorite cakes from over the years.

I took a nice long break, did 2 baby shower cakes for dear friends, and then went on hiatus again for almost a year. Then last month, for the first time in a very long time, I got excited to bake again. It started when I found a pin my sister-in-law sent me 10 months earlier. Thanks, Beth! (I clearly don’t know how to use Pinterest 😬)

Shortly after, I realized a friend’s birthday was coinciding with a girl’s night. So I decided to give this new look a shot. I’m sure you’re seeing a pattern here, but I decided to go for it and didn’t bother to research or read anything about this method, and tried to “paint” flowers on the cake with a butter knife. Thankfully, my sweet friend didn’t see the inspiration picture and was thrilled with my version. It helped me remember that friendships aren’t about perfection or being impressive, but about showing your love in all sorts of big and small ways.

After I *shockingly* could not make my cake look like the inspiration, I started to look into it. The method I was trying to duplicate is called palette-knife painting. There are some stunning examples on Pinterest and YouTube. I was really intrigued and wanted to learn more about it, so I ordered a palette knife set and started watching videos.

We had a trip coming up to see our friends in Tallahassee, so I decided to set up a cake decorating class of sorts with my friend and her daughter. I had the cakes prepped, we watched YouTube videos and decorated a cake each. Look how cute they turned out! I realized pretty early on that the videos made it look much easier than it really is, but we had a lot of fun and I’m inspired to keep learning and trying!

Keep an eye out for future cakes. Now that I’ve got my groove back, I’ll be baking occasionally…but first I’m going to take a few tutorials and learn how to actually use these palette knives! LOL.

Thanks for reading!