Welcome!

Welcome to my new address. This site should be undergoing some significant cosmetic changes in the near future, but for now it will work.

Please visit my old site for more history about who I am and how I got started, as well as pricing information, etc.

Thank you for your patience while I am "under construction!"

Happy Valentine's Day

I am in awe of this cake. Someday...when I have lots of free time...I'm going to attempt to make these. Someday.

Edible Presents

My latest cake was one of the simplest design concepts I've tackled so far...or so I thought. It ended up being one of the most difficult cakes I've made so far. Probably had something to do with the double-decker design. I was going to attempt to cover the entire thing with fondant, but after reading lots of reviews on the recipe I had found, and hearing "takes practice" over and over again, I decided not to risk it. This was my brother-in-law's 35th birthday, after all! I wasn't thrilled with the end product, but my husband mistook the cake for an actual package on the table, so I figured that's a decent start.

Chocolate Macaroon Tunnel Cake

Last week I was craving something with chocolate and coconut. So I did a search on my favorite cooking website, and came up with this recipe.

Since I don't have a regular bundt cake pan, I decided to use my individual bundt/muffin pan to make mini-chocolate cakes. And this was the final creation:

Check out that delicious layer of coconut goodness hiding inside!

If I were to make this again, I would definitely double, or triple, the ingredients for the coconut filling, because it could use more. But the cake itself was delicious! And my chocolate coconut craving was satisfied...for awhile.

Teddy Bear Fame

Okay, one more link to the teddy bears. I was thrilled today to hear that a link to my teddy bear cupcakes appeared on Cakespy.com. I just heard about this website recently, and apparently it's kind of a big deal. (Bigger than my little blog, at least.) It's not every day that an illustrator for Taste of Home, who's based in Seattle, takes note of some cupcakes made by a stay-at-home-mom in Iowa!! Click on the Cakespy link above and scroll down a bit to see where she mentions the bears.

Teddy Bear: Say Cheese!

For more (professional) pictures of the Teddy Bear cupcakes, visit:

http://hillmancrew.blogspot.com/2009/01/teddy-bear-cupcake-army.html

And to see them in all their destruction glory, check out little Jack:

http://hillmancrew.blogspot.com/2009/01/destruction-of-teddy-bear-army.html

Cupcakes never look better than when smeared on the face of a 1-year-old, no? :)

Teddy Bear Assembly Line

I dreamed about teddy bear cupcakes last night. Seriously. Probably because I decorated teddy bear cupcakes yesterday...over and over and over again. I always forget how much more work cupcake decorating is than cake decorating. Just when you finish, you realize that it was just the first one, and there's 11 more to do!

This is what cake-decorating does to my kitchen...

Actually this was probably my easiest cake order yet. These teddy bears turned out cuter than I expected, and once I got my method down, each one got easier and the work went a little bit faster. My total hands-on time was just 2 hours...my fastest decorating time yet!

This particular order was for a cute little 1-year-old's birthday. (If you click on that link and scroll down a bit, you'll see sweet Jack. My friend Mandi took his photo awhile back, and she passed my cake-biz info along to his mom. Thanks, Mandi!) Anyways, Jack's mama requested teddy bear cupcakes, and neither one of us could find an example of them anywhere. The closest I could come up with were the Panda Bear cupcakes in my "Hello, Cupcake!" book:

So I used these pandas as a rough template/idea springboard, and this is what I came up with:

(Mama couldn't decide if she wanted just teddy bear faces, or teddy bears with bodies, so she asked for a half dozen of each.)

Here are the fellas all packaged up and ready to go on a (stressful!) ride across town. I was afraid their heads might slide off during the drive. Thankfully, no casualties!