This past year we were invited to help celebrate many birthdays along with our usual weddings, and this special Carnivale-themed cake was made for a soiree designed by Hidden Garden in Santa Monica.

The California Club in Downtown L.A. was completely transformed: Large centerpieces of flowers, feathers and [...]]]>

This past year we were invited to help celebrate many birthdays along with our usual weddings, and this special Carnivale-themed cake was made for a soiree designed by Hidden Garden in Santa Monica.

The California Club in Downtown L.A. was completely transformed: Large centerpieces of flowers, feathers and masks towered over the room filled with round tables. Each place setting had an ornate Carnivale half-mask (eyes only) of a variety of bright colors and glittery accents. I loved the room so much during delivery, I wanted to slip on a mask and try to blend in with the rest of the revelers, but the chef’s coat would have given me away  ~:\  .

This confection was done in almond cake with pistachio icing (lots of nuts were lovingly salted, roasted and hand-chopped for this one), and stood four tiers high.

The bottom tier was covered in a diamond harlequin pattern made with five different colors in the warm shades the client preferred. Once the diamonds were applied, we loosely edged them in gold to give them an antiqued look.

Whenever we’re doing a geometric pattern like this, let’s face it, that math we thought we would never need comes in handy. If you don’t measure and apply the diamonds carefully, you end up with a wonky overlap in the back of the cake and really, who wants a wonky overlap? We don’t.

The three tiers on top featured sugar “splashes” going up the side, hand-painted in gold. A low patterned border at the base of each tier helped root the look of each color within the cake, and gave it an overall sense of visual stability.

Our favorite and most challenging part of the cake was likely the life-size sugar mask on top of the cake. It was our good fortune to start work in the month before Halloween, so it was easy for us to find a $.99 plain plastic white mask at the local craft store. We covered it with a very light layer of Crisco, then flattened plastic wrap over the top and cut out the eyes and mouth.

It looks pretty spooky (and maybe a little gruesome) at this stage, but I promise it gets better!

After we prepared the surface of the plastic, we laid a thin sheet of sugar paste over top and smoothed it down all the way to the edges. Some gentle repeated pressure over the lips, cheekbone, and nose areas helped us get good definition from the model underneath. A few cuts with an x-acto knife, and voila, we had the mask’s shape in sugar.

The sugar mask in its box, ready for delivery.

Left to dry for a couple of days, the surface hardened enough to remove it and place it on another surface to allow the underside to dry. It takes a long time — don’t think you can do this the night before! Once dried thoroughly, we pulled some pictures from around the web of other Carnivale masks and free-painted the surface with red, gold, and orange icing to match the cake. Yep, not only can you actually *wear* the mask, you can eat it! The final result was stabilized on top of the cake and the gold paint reflected the warm lighting all around the room.

We were honored to find, upon delivery, that the cake was to be the grand centerpiece of a long, winding 25-foot dessert buffet! We loved doing this cake and working with the amazing folks at Hidden Garden. Stay tuned for a full video tutorial on YouTube for the mask! And if there’s a tutorial you’d like to see from us, please comment and let us know.

Love from L.A.,

Andrea

I have a deep and abiding love of fonts, letters, and literature. Whether a clean mainstream font like Century Gothic, or an ornate hand-painted Japanese Kanji, the shapes of letters numbers and ampersands in their various fonts is an art form. I love text in my paintings too. Maybe it’s [...]]]>

Photo: Sara Allen, OneLove-Photo.com

I have a deep and abiding love of fonts, letters, and literature. Whether a clean mainstream font like Century Gothic, or an ornate hand-painted Japanese Kanji, the shapes of letters numbers and ampersands in their various fonts is an art form. I love text in my paintings too. Maybe it’s the English major in me, or maybe it’s my mid-century modern appreciation of clean form. I’m not sure. But fonts, typography, and their role in literature has always held a compelling magnetism for me.

I don’t participate in many photo shoots these days, but when Event Planner Kristeen LaBrot and Photographer Sara Allen called me to talk about making cakes for a typography shoot, I didn’t take much convincing.

Photo: Sara Allen, OneLove-Photo.com

A monogram was the immediate, obvious treatment for the cakes, as they’re always in fashion, but I like to take something that’s a standard and spin it somehow. Reinvent it. Innovate. Why be just like everyone else, right? Sometimes it means going bigger, sometimes smaller, sometimes beyond the predictable space a wedding cake typically occupies.

Now maybe nine cakes is a lot for anyone to take on, but it was the only design that satisfied all my requirements: Typography, all edible, and something I hadn’t seen before. I came up with the bride and groom’s names, Anne and Adam, after learning one of my favorite actresses, Anne Hathaway, was recently engaged (congrats, Annie!). Plus their names were short — I really didn’t want to do this treatment for “Elizabeth & Remington.” WHEW — that cake table would have fed about 500.

This cake set feeds about 150 people and was featured on GreenWeddingShoes.com and includes the full set of photos including gorgeous florals by Gilly Flowers, a paper dress by couture dress designer Beane and Co., and gorgeous hair and makeup by Susie Chhuor.

The sugar flowers on the cake include bright versions of poppies, peonies, sweet peas, sugar ranunculus, and various buds and hydrangea. Here are closeups of the clusters on the first “A” cake and the final “M” cake:

Photo: Sara Allen, OneLove-Photo.com

The ampersand cake was also displayed in our booth at the recent Cream Event at the Book Bindery in Culver City. Thank you to Erin J. Saldana for this lovely shot taken in the booth, alongside our plates of the North Beach Torte set out for the masses:

Photo: ErinJSaldana.com

This month California Wedding Day magazine featured a long-loved design that’s lived in my head for two years or so. Inspired by the spaghetti-haired girls, plants and reeds of the Art Nouveau movement, we created this gentle homage to the era.

I was particularly excited about this feature [...]]]>

This month California Wedding Day magazine featured a long-loved design that’s lived in my head for two years or so. Inspired by the spaghetti-haired girls, plants and reeds of the Art Nouveau movement, we created this gentle homage to the era.

I was particularly excited about this feature because the focus is on flavor, and how the flavor reflects the colors and design on the exterior. The outer design features hand-painted reeds and gardenias and various shades of olive, lime green, and pink accents, all outlined in 18K gold. Sugar gardenias adorn the side of the cake and the table (yes, even those petals on the table are sugar!) and occur in a more figurative style on the cake, so we created the Pink Gardenia flavor for the interior: Pink Velvet cake layered with raspberry puree, whole raspberries and gardenia aromatic buttercream. Slight whiffs of gardenia along with the sweet soft cake and whole raspberries conjure a Summer-garden feel.

If you look closely at the plated piece of cake, you’ll notice the leaves under the raspberries are also sugar — yum!

Behind-the-scenes: Things frequently change during a shoot due to unforseeable circumstances. This time, the four-layer cake slice was *too long* for the plate, so the photographer had to carefully cut off the bottom layer! Luckily the way the image was cropped for publication, it simply looks like the cake continues off the page. Clever, no?

Floral flavors like gardenia (and more commonly lavender and rose) can be very polarizing: People either love them or hate them. I think they’re good if done EXTREMELY subtly. What are your thoughts?

Many thanks to Lara Burnap at CWD and to High Tea for Alice for the lovely vintage cake stand.

We’re thrilled to announce that Superfine has been chosen as the exclusive wedding cake house to grace the floor of The Cream curated wedding show on March 1 at the Book Bindery in Culver City, CA! There will be GOOD gift bags, wine, Superfine cake, sudden bursts of confetti, delicious ice cream, jaw-dropping [...]]]> Hi All!

We’re thrilled to announce that Superfine has been chosen as the exclusive wedding cake house to grace the floor of The Cream curated wedding show on March 1 at the Book Bindery in Culver City, CA! There will be GOOD gift bags, wine, Superfine cake, sudden bursts of confetti, delicious ice cream, jaw-dropping table designs, nouveau florals, perfect music, hott fashion, and unique furniture and decor all for rent at your event!!

The Cream is a curated wedding show featuring the latest stylings of the L.A.-based duo at Bash, Please, Kelly Harris and Paige Appel. The shows are recognized in national print and on-air media as the go-to for the engaged art & fashion set throughout the US, and having recently completed a successful fourth show in Austin, Texas, they’re bringing their magic back to Los Angeles.

The Culver City Book Bindery will be the largest of their shows yet. All previous shows have averaged a capacity of 300-350, but this one invites 800 lucky ticket holders to hang with the largest crop ever of hand-picked wedding vendors gathered for this event. All previous shows have sold out, so buy your tickets now!

Come by and say Hi to the chef (that’s me, Andrea, over there in the gold sequin shorts), taste some DECADENT cake, nosh on some of our wildly popular Fleur de Sel caramels, and pick up a secret code ONLY FOR THE CREAM ATTENDEES for 25% off our caramels when purchased from our Etsy shop!!

Hope to see you there!

One last thing: We have chosen the winner of our ticket giveaway. The lucky gal is Maria Valentin! Congratulations, Maria!

A little Art Deco with a twist of modern sugar succulents on top was just the ticket for Victor and Richard’s wedding on the 54th floor of the Wells Fargo building in downtown LA, also known as the City Club. A shimmery lilac decorated the whole event from the linens [...]]]>

A little Art Deco with a twist of modern sugar succulents on top was just the ticket for Victor and Richard’s wedding on the 54th floor of the Wells Fargo building in downtown LA, also known as the City Club. A shimmery lilac decorated the whole event from the linens to the lighting, so I opted to create a lilac Art Deco pattern on their cake and brushed it with a little shimmer.

The Art Deco movement in LA is similar to the style that evolved in another coastal city, Miami. It’s softer shapes that echo clouds and waves, as opposed to the “Zig-Zag Deco” style popular in New York as expresssed with chevrons and sharp sculpted embellishments. Since this cake is in LA, I wanted to make it more architecturally relevant, so here we have the soft cloud motif.

The sugar succulents (yes, they’re all sugar), were made using life models bought at my local garden center. I bought a variety and copied them, all the way down to dusting the color on: Pale blue at the center, and light touches of green on the bottom leaves’ edges. Succulents are great to work on because they’re so varied and strange, some looking like plants from another planet. It’s impossible to make them look bad! I can’t wait to do more…

The stunning florals (like the arrangement above!) were provided by Meg McCarter of The Little Branch, event photography (and the portrait below!) by Leah Lee Photography, and event design was beautifully executed by Seth Matheson of Seth Matheson Designs. Congratulations, Victor and Richard!!

Superfine Bakery supports art programs in K-12 schools, groups involved in animal rescue, and marriage for all. In the spirit of love and marriage for all, we ran a contest on Facebook and Twitter offering a free wedding cake for the first same-gender California couple to get married under the new New York laws, and return to LA for their ceremony. Victor and Richard were our winners!

Staci and Rob chose an outdoor setting under a pergola at the gorgeous Ojai Valley Inn and Spa for their wedding dinner for 30, and wanted a rustic sweet cake to go along with it. She’s based in NYC, so we worked completely via email and phone. Staci sent fantastic inspiration [...]]]>

Staci and Rob chose an outdoor setting under a pergola at the gorgeous Ojai Valley Inn and Spa for their wedding dinner for 30, and wanted a rustic sweet cake to go along with it. She’s based in NYC, so we worked completely via email and phone. Staci sent fantastic inspiration pictures for me to draw from, so I created this pink sugar peony, a watermelon-red poppy, and an orange poppy (based on our California state flower!) to create the energy on this cake.

I love big bold flowers, but also believe they need some contrast in color and small detail, so I added a few groups of small green buds and bright yellow to offset the deeper sunset colors of the large-flower grouping. The buttercream exterior was really fun to detail, but after being so oriented to making things perfectly straight and flat, I have to admit it was *hard* for me to snap out of that mode and free up my wrists and brain to make something more randomly textured like this! I love the way it came out though, and can’t wait to do another cake like this for a very special birthday girl in April (hi Karina!).

I loved working with Ariel Yve of Ariel Yve Designs, and can’t wait to work with her again.

Big hugs to you all and happy 2012!

Simple and clean was the order of the day. Our bride, Hillary, ordered [...]]]> Campanile, one of L.A.’s top restaurants, is housed in a historic building constructed in 1929 for the one and only Charlie Chaplin. Owned and operated by a Who’s Who of chefs, it also happened to be the site of today’s Superfine wedding.

 

The main white cake was a stack of Red Velvet, Carrot Cake, and Vanilla with Three-Berry icing (the bride’s favorite). When I do sugar straps or ribbons like these on a cake, I don’t like to leave the back plain: Two straight ends that simply meet at a seam. So I usually take the opportunity to add secret detail that somehow enhances and reflects the mood of the cake and the event.

This white cake had loose flowing ribbons around it, so I ended them with a slant cut and rippled them like loose ribbon ends. I added small sugar buttons as a closure and varied the heights of the ribbons to add some visual interest.

This is the interior of the Royal Salon aboard the Queen [...]]]>

Imagine a large passenger ship something on the scale of the Titanic, but more Art Deco than victorian inside. “Waterfall” style built-in woodwork (rounded corners and edges), high ceilings, and copper and brass details to finish off the look.

click for larger view

This is the interior of the Royal Salon aboard the Queen Mary, docked in Long Beach Harbor since 1967. It’s also the setting for this week’s wedding cake table designed for Margie and Morgen, two architects from New York.

The Royal Salon has a lovely built-in buffet with a copper back and half-moon shape across the front. It served as the perfect space for the six cake set up Margie requested: All in vintage style, made with buttercream but for one. The center cutting cake (pictured at left) would be decorated with fondant tiers and delicate ruffles.

Margie had little ribbon flags made with various ribbons in her colors, seafoam and coral, and sent them to me to insert in the tops of the cakes. For her central cake, she had a very special paper flag made: It’s been calligraphed with “Margie & Morgen.” (click the picture for a closer view).

The flavor for this one was a fresh almond cake layered with Pistachio icing. An upscale and beautiful choice for Margie and Morgen to feed eachother for pictures.

Alongside the main ruffle cake is a version of the currently popular Frill cake, seen just to the left and back a little. I first saw this design in Martha Stewart, and it’s beautiful done in vintage pastels like yellow or pink, or white as in this photo (the dark room makes it look a tad yellow, but all cakes were white

This one was a carrot cake, a flavor popular with guests young and old.

Under a glass cloche, a round buttercream cake decorated with simple coral sugar buttons is elevated from just a cake to a precious object. Fun to make and sweet to look at, this cake was a sweet lemon cake (flavored only with fresh lemon juice and lemon zest), iced with vanilla bean icing.

Below you’ll see that on the far right end of the buffet we placed a cake covered top to bottom with sweet buttercream rosettes, and situated it next to the cake that, around the bakery, came to be known as the “Tiki Hut.” Vertical fluting on the sides and top angle of the Tiki Hut cake created a great structural statement among the softer cakes surrounding it, and placing it under a second cloche added balance to the larger one over the button cake. The rose cake was our Pink Velvet iced with Three-berry icing, and the Tiki Hut was a small carrot cake, the bride and groom’s favorite flavor.

Last, but not least, is our sixth cake below, a sweet stack of lemon cake and vanilla bean icing featuring simple Swiss dots on the bottom tier. As any cake-maker will tell you, Swiss dots appear simple and easy, but in fact take a lot of measuring and a steady hand. The eye seeks order, and if one dot is even 1/4 inch off its mark, the pattern appears off and the effect is ruined. And this table is not about odd patterns: It’s about order and grace. The beauty of math.

Adorable calligraphy and intricate letterpress of the main flag by Betsy Dunlap and Blackbird Letterpress, respectively. The flowers were done by Rebecca of Holly Flora who had beautiful dahlias, roses and more to dress the bases of the cake stands as well as the whole room. Thanks Rebecca, for the gorgeous finishing touches to the cake table, and to Margie and Morgen: Congratulations!!