Guinea Pigs...

It is rough to live with a creative cook.  I cannot leave any recipe alone, I must tinker with it.  I tried out a new recipe I found today for a sugar-free red velvet cake.  It is ok.... but.... it needs some tweaking.  Luckily, it doesn't make much batter (enough for two 6" round layers), so my husband, the guinea pig, will not have to eat too terribly much of the "in-process" work, haha!  He tells me to keep tweaking, keep right on tweaking...

New decorating efforts

So I've taken some Wilton cake decorating classes recently, and have started to take pictures of some of the results.  Most of these are full sugar recipes, but I am learning the techniques used in decorating them and will start applying them to diabetic-friendly ingredients.

This one is from the first class for basic decorating skills.

 

 This is another one from the basic decorating class, a little later in the game so a little more detailed.

 This was the final cake for my Flowers & Cake Design class.

 Top view of the same cake

 I did this one for my Tall Cakes class, which covered different ways to stack cakes.  

Yes, it is a duck.  The entire thing is edible.

 

 I learned how to make fondant/gumpaste pansies in the Flowers and Cake Design class just two days before my in-laws 60th wedding anniversary.  I was asked to make a wedding style cake for them as they had never had a wedding cake, complete with a topper.  These pansies came in handy.

 

 The bottom tier of my inlaw's 60th Anniversary cake

 The whole cake.  They are in their 80s and they still trail-ride regularly, so when we found this cake topper, we knew that was the one we had to have for the cake.  The statue now resides in their living room and my mother-in-law still tells visitors about the cake that it came on.  Everything on this cake, except for the flowers, is diabetic friendly, too, which was a challenge in and of itself.