The Craziest Two Months!

 It has been two months since our last blog post, and what a crazy two months it has been! In early August, our book "Extreme Cakeovers" was launched in-house by our publisher, Clarkson Potter and shared on their blog, The Recipe Club. Three times a year, about a year in advance of the book's release date, Clarkson Potter editors share the projects they have been working on with in-house editors and their marketing and sales team. "Extreme Cakeovers" is due to be released in Summer 2013, so it was our book's turn to be featured! We were very proud to on Clarkson Potter's Cookbooks for Summer 2013 list and so excited when we found out who the other authors were -- some of the best in the industry! Our editor Ashley, who has been so wonderful throughout the process actually made one of the cakes in the book that she brought to the launch with her. It was the Marketing Director's birthday and she loved her jukebox cake. Knowing that our editor who is not an experienced cake decorator, was able to recreate the cake Rick designed was special and absolutely thrilling to us. We heard the cake was a huge hit and only made us more excited for 2013!

It was the first time the public was given a sneak-peek at the cake cookbook we have been working on for over a year, and we were thrilled to put it out there! We surprised many people who were expecting an advanced cake decorating how-to book, when it fact, "Extreme Cakeovers" is a cake cookbook that anyone can pick up and use, not just professional cake decorators. We will post more on "Extreme Cakeovers" including information on how to purchase it, as we get closer to the book's release. Stay tuned!

Less than a week after our book was launched by Clarkson Potter, we had visiting family in town, and a handful of days to spend with them before we flew to London, UK, for two "Discover Your Inner Artist" classes at Exotic Fantastic Cake Decorating School. It was a lovely class and we met new friends and many talented cake artists. Students flew in from all over Europe and we even had a student fly in from the Middle East to take the class. London was amazing, as a city it is hard to compare to, except for maybe New York City, which is one of our favorite places in the world! We did a small amount of touring around, as we had a tight schedule and needed to get back to Hawaii, and had only two weeks until our next travel adventure!

No sooner had we arrived back in Hawaii, unpacked our bags, made a few cakes, then it was off on another trip for a class, this time to Allentown, PA. The Allentown class at Mother of Cakes Sugar and Cake Academy was Rick's first class in the United States, strangely enough, and it felt good to be on our home turf. The students were fabulous, and everyone was quite advanced, which seems to be pretty typical of our classes. The Pennsylvania class, like the other class had been announced about a year before we arrived and there was much anticipation to meet the students, who were also very excited! The students in the PA class came from all over the continental U.S. as well as Puerto Rico and Valencia, Spain. We even had a student join us from the Canada "Discover Your Inner Artist 2" class, which was a lot of fun. We're just launching the "Discover Your Inner Artist 3" 2013 classes and information will be posted soon!

Rick at Mother of Cakes, Sept 2012, photos by Mother of Cakes

While we were on the East Coast, only an hour and a half away from New York City, we headed into Midtown to meet our publisher! We have been working for over a year with our editor and an amazing team of people at Clarkson Potter and had never met them face to face. Crazy! It was a visit long overdue! With only less than a full day to enjoy in Manhattan, we decided that if we do nothing else there, it will be worth it to meet everyone. Our publishing team gave us a warm welcome when we arrived and gifted us with a bunch of new cookbooks. We were on cloud nine. It was so special for us to be able to share in the excitement of our book with the people who made it possible!

We want to thank our hosts, Exotic Fantastic and Mother of Cakes, for giving us the opportunity to teach there, and to all our students who have supported Rick's teaching career! 

Here we are nearing the end of September, enjoying incredible memories made with 25,000 miles flown in the past month and enjoying just being home again, at least for a little while...