Our booth featured 3 large prints from the Claribel Cupcakes Photoshoot with NZPhotography, and 3 brand new Cake Designs created specifically for the Suhaag Show along with some very tasty Lemon Cake with Passionfruit Swiss Meringue Buttercream. The beautiful linens for our booth were provided by Sizzle with Decor (A BIG THANK YOU!!).

The first cake was a sweet little 3-tier design with embossed buttons hand-painted in gold around the middle tier. The tiers were finished in a sweet cherry blossom ribbon and the cake accented with a large Magnolia flower.

The second cake used a top-tier from a cake near and dear to my heart. You’ll remember the beautiful wedding of Shirin and Rasel. I was able to keep the top tier from their Wedding Cake knowing I would use it again as a show cake. I used it to create this beautiful 3-tier design. I separated the 1st and 2nd tiers with a small riser and wrapped a beautiful draping crystal ribbon around so it hung between the tiers. I added a lovely diamond embossed pattern to the middle tier and finished the 3rd tier off with some pretty Dogwood flowers and leaves hand painted in 24K edible gold and some blingy hot pink ribbon.

The final cake was my sweet Pillow Design. I did a small 3-tier with the embossed diamond pattern on the 1st tier. Beautiful fabric tassles hung from the 2nd tier with a lovely hand painted gold border design and the 3rd tier was embossed with some hand painted gold scrollwork. I finished off the 3-tiers with some small pearls and added another beautiful Magnolia as the topper to this cake.

All in all 3 very sweet cakes. All in varying shades of pink, and all accented with gold and ivory. The booth looked fantastic and we were able to make some great contacts.

Thanks to all those that came to the show!

My sisters good friend Nawshaba runs her own Photography business under the brand “NZPhotography.ca”. Her style of photography is so vast and she’s able to capture shots that you can’t imagine. In addition to this her editing skills are beyond phenomenal. So it was no surprise when Ramona and I decided what we wanted to do that we contacted her.

The photoshoot took place at Nawsh’s home and was more than anything we could have imagined. The whole day was insanely fun with so much laughter that my cheeks are still tingling!

Thank You to both Nawshaba and her amazingly wonderful husband Azaid for putting up with the Alwis Sisters for the day and making it an unforgettable experience. Can’t wait to do something this fun again!

I was contacted about a month ago by one of my 2010 brides asking if I was available for her friends’ wedding. I was more than happy to oblige. When the two came for a consult they brought a few Cake Boss inspired designs. The bride was very taken with Hex shaped tiers. After a bit of tweaking, adding and removing elements we ended up with this beautiful 5-Tier Design.

Originally we had decided on a 4″, 6″, 8″, 10″ and 12″ Hex Tiers. I only later realized my pans were sized: 3″, 6″, 9″, 12″ and 15″. So they ended up with a bit of extra cake!

The 1st Tier was hand piped with an ornate vine-like pattern. The 2nd Tier was wrapped with a royal blue pleated ribbon made from fondant and the couples initials were monogrammed and added as a brooch in the middle of the ribbon. The 3rd Tier was embossed in a swirl pattern and dusted in 24K edible Gold. The 4th Tier had Royal Blue swags that hung around the entire tier. The bottom tier was embossed with a royal icing damask stencil which was then painted in edible 24K Gold.

A lot of little details as well including gumpaste pearls and airbrushing. The cake topper was created with handmade small roses which were airbrushed in gold and then put together to create that full topper.

Flavours for this cake were Marble Cake with Belgian Chocolate Buttercream and Lemon Cake with Passionfruit Buttercream.

Best Wishes to the Happy Couple.

I suppose the biggest question most of you have is why I picked my sister to be my assistant when she had no baking/decorating experience. Well first off, I have a number of “cake” friends I could have asked, but I thought working with my sister would have been an unforgettable experience. I was right on that one! Second, keeping it in the family (for at least the first competition) seemed to be something that was necessary, especially with my business being named after my Grandmother – Claribel. I think she would have wanted it that way.

We practiced the entire cake at home, but we never ran through the 7 hour timeframe which I later regretted! Once we arrived at the studio and were given our briefing on the day of shooting. Our day was broken up into 3 rounds: The first three hours, tasting session, and last four hours. We then had the opportunity to meet Caroline Rhea who was an absolute sweetheart. She’s super down to earth and so funny! We had a riot with her the whole day! Her two “sweet” sisters as she called us.

Round One started, just like you saw it on tv, with both of us running around like crazy trying to get organized on how we were starting. Gordon came by and said hello. Dear lord he’s good looking!! I’m surprised I was able to keep such good composure while talking to him! He was pretty concerned that having an assistant who’d never dealt with cake was going to really pose a problem for us. I was still really confident at this point so no worries there! I completed most of what I had wanted to do within the first hour but as the end of hour 2 approached I realized we weren’t quite on track. At this point I think we needed to have 4 of the 7 tiers completed and I think we had only fully completed 1 tier! Alexandria had come over and mentioned that the lace I was putting on two of my tiers tends to dry quickly when left out so I made some super fast adjustments and ended up finishing some of the tiers I was saving for later in the competition after hearing that!

We then broke for the tasting round. I was trying a brand new flavour, something not traditionally on my list. I wanted to impress the judges and I wanted to impress the wedding couple by using something within their flavour profile. They said they like marble cake and that they liked fruit sauces, so I went with a Lemon-Vanilla Marble Sponge Cake with a Raspberry Whipped Cream filling and a Raspberry Coulis served on the side. As we went through the tasting I received feedback from each judge. You heard most of it, but I recall both David and Gordon saying the cake was sponge-y. HELLO??!!! It’s SPONGE CAKE!!

Enough said, we didn’t win the tasting competition but we had a bit of a break so we went back to our dressing room and started going over everything we’d done so far and everything that we had left to do. We came up with a new plan of action, one where I pretty much had to be super-human for an hour and a half in order to get 3 tiers completed and get us back on track!

Once we got back and started Round Two I dont know what came over me. I WAS super human! I powered through and finished those few tiers of cake with lightning speed and then went on to ensure all the other elements that my sister was working on were coming together. I started working on the Watercolour tier. I’ve included all the sketches here to show you just how detailed they were. All hand painted by Themba Child – an EXCELLENT now Taiwan based artist. I contacted him just after being accepted for the show and asked that each image he create be reflective of something they had told us in the couples bio.

“She had a crush on him growing up, he crushed on her as she got older and then proposed”

“They both have a love of tattoos”

“They were married on a beach, the bridesmaids wore red dresses and the groomsmen wore purple ties. She wore a puffy 50s inspired dress and he wore a coat with tails.”

“They met at church as children”

“She has a love of horses and he loves playing drums!”

In the last hour or so we noticed a significant lean in our cake which didn’t worry me at first but then started worrying me more and more as the clock ticked down. When David arrived at our station with the level I knew it was game over unless we did something to fix it. I was nervous, so the first thing that came to mind was to drive two dowels in on the two ends at an angle. If I would have taken a minute to think I would have realized that going straight down would have immediately corrected the problem as the two black dog collar tiers were both styrofoam support tiers and would have held the vertical dowels. Basically, everything said and done the middle tier even after trying to fix the lean was still a touch tilted. In the last few minutes we added a few final touches, but nothing major. We’d done extremely well with our timing once we re-assesed at the break and we finished everything required.

The competition was officially over, I only saw as much of the judging as they aired on tv. They didn’t say too much more than that other than the lean of my cake still being a bit off and the bit that David mentioned about the cream shifting as I drove in the dowels. It’s a competition, we can only do so much. In retrospect if this cake were actually for a client there would be 1000 things I would do differently, but we made due with what we had. We fought a bit, had a blast and in the end even though judging wasn’t in our favour we still won that feeling of completion and knowing that in such a short amount of time we were able to put something so extravagant together.

I’m so glad I got to experience CakeWalk with my sister. I’m keeping my fingers crossed they call us back if there is a Season 2. And if so I’ve already asked her to come with me. She’s said no everytime, but I just don’t think it will be the same without her!

The cake was covered in 2 shades of pink fondant. The bottom layer was embossed with a diamond pattern. All accents were gumpaste including the pearl borders and Magnolia. The entire cake was airbrushed in a pearl finish.

Flavour for this cake was Carrot-Pineapple-Pecan Cake with Cream Cheese SMB.

The cake was 6″, 8″ and 10″ Rounds, covered in Ivory Fondant. The centre tier was airbrushed in pearl and embossed with a criss-cross pattern, then adorned with beautiful light pink pearls. The top and bottom tiers were airbrushed in light pink pearl lustre. Small roses were inserted as accents and pink and white ribbon were added to the tiers. The gumpaste cross was also airbrushed in pearl and inserted as a topper to the cake. Flavours were Vanilla Cake with Sweet Icing and Chocolate Cake with sweet Chocolate Icing.

God Bless You Nevenka!

Flavour was Vanilla Cake with Passionfruit Buttercream.

Kristen and Devon came to see me months ago with designs for their cake. Bride-to-be wanted a very elegant and simple cake. So not straying from her wishes, we came up with this design.

The flowers were all handmade and dusted in varying shades of pink. The whole cake was pearlized and covered with pink and brown ribbon trim. Cinnamon sticks were tied together and added to the cake to encompass thier Sugar & Spice theme.

Flavours for this cake were Chocolate with Raspberry Buttercream and Lemon with Passionfruit Buttercream.

The lion, giraffe and monkey were all done with 50/50 and I tried to give each one a bit of a baby feel with the small eyes and then with the added stitching effect. The palm trees were made out of gumpaste.

Letters were cut using the Cricut Cake. Flavour for this cake was Marble Cake with Belgian Chocolate Buttercream.

Congratulations Chanel!