Viva the Fabulous Las Vegas Cakes!

www.cakelava.com

When in Vegas, order a Vegas themed cake! cakelava has been officially open in Las Vegas for less than 6 months, and we're already starting to rack up a nice collection of Vegas themed cakes. We're not complaining, we love doing the Vegas theme! They are colorful, artistic, the design possibilities are endless, and it is all some version of Fabulous! Here are some of our recent favorites...

Our "Vegas, baby" cake, shown above, is Rick's retro and rockabilly inspired design complete with flames, a classic car with checkerboard flags, dice, devil themed poker chips, and plenty of pin up girls! He went a little crazy with this one, but we're in Vegas, so crazy is totally acceptable, and encouraged!

www.cakelava.com

Turning 40 can be pretty fabulous in itself, but if you want to really celebrate in style, head to Vegas and order a Fabulous Fortieth Birthday cake, which is what Robbie and his family did. You're turning Forty, you've earned the bragging rights, so why not announce your milestone on your cake. There is no better place to flaunt your stuff than Vegas! Like Robbie, Rick and I chose Las Vegas to celebrate my Fabulous Fortieth Birthday. It was a birthday I will never forget!

www.cakelava.com

Like Robbie, Rory also celebrated his birthday in Vegas with a Fabulous Vegas themed cake. You can revisit our post of Rory's cake on the blog.

www.cakelava.com

We're in Vegas, and it was only a matter of time before we got a request for dice cakes, and this order came shortly after we opened. Rick made these dice cakes with the "Married in Fabulous Las Vegas" signage for a gay couple who recently celebrated their marriage at the Neon Museum. If you want to celebrate the fabulosity of vintage Las Vegas, being surrounded by the most amazing neon signs from the casinos, a visit to the Neon Museum is a must! When we arrived at the Neon Museum, we walked past a pair of Vegas showgirls who looked at least 10 feet tall! There was much excitement in the air and it was pretty clear, these gentlemen and their guests were ready to party!

Once, Twice, Three Times a Wedding Cake - The Fabulous Trio

www.cakelava.com

We began getting to know our wedding couple Bronwen and Matt before we opened our shop in Las Vegas. We had communicated with them while we were building out our shop and arranged a time to meet with them once we opened. By the time we met this talented couple, it felt like we knew a lot about them and could jump right into the cake design! The couple are amazing sculptors who appreciate art in all its forms, and their wedding cake was very important to them. Bronwen loves cake and confessed she began collecting cake photos years earlier. She had an extensive collection of photos to share with us. They wanted their cake to tell a story of them as a couple, and provided us a backstory, an introduction to who they were in text and photos that would help explain why they wanted to incorporate certain themes and colors into the cake. While we won't share the couple's private details, we can share the themes and colors they chose to tell their story:

sawblade
skulls
starry night
turquoise, magenta, black and gold
full bloomed flowers
pearls
anything shiny
vintage

After discussing their themes and noticing how different they all were, we knew it would be almost impossible to put everything they wanted together on one cake, so we decided it would be best to make a wedding cake trio that together would tell the story of Bronwen and Matt.

Style Me Pretty Comes to cakelava for Facebook Live!

Style Me Pretty at cakelava for Facebook Live!

Yesterday, cakelava had a very special visitor come through our kitchen - Style Me Pretty! Yes, that Style Me Pretty! They came to shoot Rick decorating a marbled fondant desert inspired cake for Facebook live, and we all had a great time! We've had a mega crush on the site for years, and it was an honor to host them in our new Las Vegas shop. You can watch the whole experience unfold by visiting Style Me Pretty's Facebook Videos. We've also shared their video on the cakelava Facebook page. We'd love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to like, comment, share, or just say "Hello!"

A Desert Inspired Wedding Cake

Nevada's Valley of Fire State Park 

My list of Must See places to visit in Nevada is ever growing! Currently, at the top of the list is the magnificent Valley of Fire State Park, which is just over an hour drive from Las Vegas. I'm constantly seeing incredible photos of the Valley of Fire, and hearing from our clients getting married there how amazing this place is! I'm dying to see it in person! With the scorching desert temperatures this time of year, it will have to wait until the cooler temperatures arrive, so for now, I will appreciate its spectacular beauty from afar.

The Valley of Fire is a popular wedding destination with unbelievable natural beauty, whose landscape and colors are a perfect muse to inspire artists and designers to create and people to fall in love. I'm feeling fluttery just thinking about it!

If you are planning a desert wedding, the Valley of Fire State Park provides an array of colors, textures and patterns that would be a perfect starting place for a bride or wedding coordinator's inspiration board. When our clients Sarah and Joe provided their inspirations for their wedding cake, we were told they would be marrying at Valley of Fire and wanted Rick to incorporate that element into the cake. Like many couples marrying in Las Vegas, they were having a destination wedding and worked through the design process with us from afar.

www.cakelava.com

Rick's design of Sarah and Joe's desert inspired wedding cake started with a similar shape and floral placement borrowed from one of his earlier designs, called "Alana", (shown below), which Sarah said she loved! He included the Valley of Fire desert inspiration on the middle tier. Continuing with the desert theme, Rick made delicate handcrafted flowers that the bride's florist planned to use in her bouquet. The cake turned out beautifully and both the couple and we were extremely happy with the result!

Rick and I enjoyed exploring the desert theme, after working so often with the tropical theme in Hawaii. In our short time living in Nevada, we have really grown to love the beauty of the desert here, in the same way we fell in love with the tropics. We have to remind ourselves, as we did in Hawaii, how important it is to take time away from work to enjoy and explore the beauty that surrounds us!

www.cakelava.com

cakelava Las Vegas is on Instagram!

@cakelava

About a week ago, cakelava joined Instagram @cakelava . If you are wondering why we waited so long to join, there is a little story here. Several years ago I looked into putting cakelava on Instagram, and I didn't get very far. Not getting very far is an understatement. I didn't get past choosing our username, because someone with no association to our company, or to cakes, already had it. At the time I could have chosen another username, but decided to put the process on hold. It wasn't meant to be. I was also turned off by the idea that the photos posted on Instagram don't belong to the individual or company posting them, so I treaded this avenue carefully. We already had a few other social media accounts to maintain and I thought "why add another one." My hands were full with running a cake business and various social media accounts. Why make more work for myself?

Then, our company and cakes started getting tagged quite regularly, which has been the case on Pinterest for many years. People were making comments and we weren't seeing them until much, much later. Sometimes, years! These were clients of ours, students of Rick's and many appreciative bakers in the cake community. It was important to be a part of the dialog and let the people leaving comments know we appreciated them taking the time. In addition to the cakes getting tagged, our clients began asking us if we were on Instagram. "No, but we're on facebook, twitter, and pinterest". cakelava was still based in Hawaii when this began happening.

If you've been following our cake adventures, you know that we moved cakelava to Las Vegas from Hawaii and spent part of last year building out our new custom cake studio at the Montage Shopping Center in Las Vegas. We opened earlier this year. During the period we transitioned cakelava from Hawaii to Las Vegas, we took a hiatus from making cakes and also largely from social media. If there was a time to join instagram, it certainly wasn't then.

We finally decided to take the plunge and join Instagram after we had established our new cake shop in Las Vegas. It was time. We were settling into our new home of Las Vegas and were regularly making cakes we wanted to share. We're enjoying being a part of the Instagram community and happy to see many friends there as well. We're excited to see what Las Vegas has in store for us and invite you to come along for the ride! See you on Instagram!