Alex's 40th Birthday Art Cake

cakelava.com

As a cake designer, Rick's specialty is custom art cakes.  He has a background in fine art and pastry and loves sculpting, hand painting and airbrushing on cakes. For Alex's 40th birthday, Rick employed some of his favorite art techniques to make an unforgettable, truly personalized cake for a man we greatly admire and who, along with his lovely wife Yvonne, is one of Hawaii's top wedding vendors.  Alex and Yvonne own two companies, Yvonne Design and Mood Event and they have been wowing us and our clients with their amazing talent for years! Just look at their websites and you'll see what we mean! Alex is a man of many interests and one he is most passionate about is competitive running, which is the area we focused on for his cake.

When Yvonne ordered the cake for Alex's surprise birthday party, we knew the cake needed to be fantastic! It was for Alex G, afterall! The cake would be sculpted with a running theme, and a custom figurine of Alex on a woodsy trail about to cross the finish line of his 40 K. The idea of 40 K trail worked great since it was close to the length of an actual marathon and also represented Alex's big birthday! Rick studied many photos of Alex when he was making the figure and spent quite some time getting everything just right. We both felt the pressure of creating a likeness of someone everyone in the wedding industry knows and who we greatly respect!

The cake was a huge success! We received compliments from Yvonne and Alex and their guests. We attended the party as guests, and were very impressed at how beautiful everything looked! The party was brilliantly designed by Yvonne and the Mood design team - even Alex unknowingly contributed to making his own decor.  The party was filled with Alex's favorite things and different aspects of his life that would be honored in some way. Guests dined on Alex's favorite foods and for dessert, the awesome cake in his favorite flavor, Peanut butter and chocolate, an unbeatable combination that makes my mouth water just thinking of it! Happy Birthday, Alex G. It was an honor to immortalize you in cake!

Leave it to Beaver

This adorable sculpted beaver was one of the many beautiful cakes made for the 6-7-08 wedding date. Ordered as a Groom's cake, we were asked to design a sculpted Oregon State University Beaver which included the University's colors of orange and black. I love the little OSU hat! Little did the beaver know that he would get such a reaction from the guests. Even the bride let out a shriek of joy when she saw her groom's cake and it didn't take her long to come over to admire it with her bridesmaids. Before long, Rick had a small crowd of admirers complimenting the cake -- "it's so cool, we don't want to cut it!" The beaver was placed in a prominent position at the entry to the reception where he would greet each and every guest. Alas, all creatures of cake must eventually meet the knife of fate, and when he did, hopefully our Kona Toffee Crunch made with chocolate cake helped alleviate any attachment our bride and her guests had towards the little guy. Incidentally, not long after the OSU sculpted beaver cake went up on cakelava.com, we received a call from a someone inquiring about a sculpted University of Oregon Duck cake. College rivalry is alive and well in the land of cake!

Nick's Toys

When we think of "toys", images of our iPod, cellphone or perhaps our car come to mind. In the case of Nick, his toys include his own helicopter, an ATV, surfboard, jet ski, his gold Rolex, and other luxury items. For his 50th Birthday party last Saturday, we were hired to recreate Nick's toys as a composition in cake, with a custom figure of Nick wearing a gold crown. The event took place at the Loulu Palm Estate on the North Shore. The Loulu Palm Estate is a new venue which is about to be made available for weddings and other events. It can accommodate up to 500 people and is on 2-acres of oceanfront land. Their official website is in the works and for now can be seen at www.loulupalm.info.

When we arrived with Nick's birthday cake, it was partially set up (see above) and looked quite elegant. We noticed Nick's helicopter parked near the house but we didn't get to meet the man of the hour, as he would arrive later. Sculpting the helicopter and all its necessary structure was a fun and challenging art project for Rick. We wish Nick the happiest of birthdays and hope the cake made for a memorable 50th!

Nick's cake isn't up on cakelava.com yet, but there are many other new sculpted cakes recently posted for your viewing pleasure.

Aloha!

The Underwater Invertebrates Cake

The cake! - Dave Miyamoto Photography


Rick working on cake - photo by Sasha

On Saturday, June 14th it was Ricki and Mike’s wedding day, which they celebrated with a colorful custom underwater invertebrates wedding cake. You’ll recall from a previous blog titled “Godzilla and Israel Kamakawiwaole” that the components of Ricki and Mike’s wedding were quite unusual. They were married in a Japanese themed hotel banquet room, their brilliant handmade invitations featured Godzilla on them and included a CD of Hawaiian songs to be played at the wedding, and they had an underwater invertebrates sculpted wedding cake. This past weekend we had two very complicated cakes on the same night, this being one of them.

Leaving nothing to chance, we brought in the truly fabulous Dave Miyamoto Photography to capture both of Saturday’s cakes, which are already up on cakelava.com.
Dave, who is one of the nicest guys we know and an immensely talented photographer, shot images worthy of a magazine feature.

This cake was a lot of fun for Rick to make and the colors really popped! So what kind of flavors does an underwater invertebrates cake have? Ricki and Mike chose tropical flavors -- the pink colored Guava Lava for their cake cutting and Hawaii Five-0 on the top 2 tiers.
We hope their wedding was everything they dreamed it would be!

Ipo and Gary - "The Kiss", part Un - The Cake

photo courtesy of Christen Vidanovic for Susanne Pridoehl Photography

Ipo and Gary were married on May 10, 2008 at a lovely home in Ka’a’awa, on the Windward side of Oahu. When we met with the couple initially, they expressed how important art was to them and how they wanted to have Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss” (Le Baiser) sculpted for their wedding cake. We knew it would be a tremendous feat to make “The Kiss” but Rick embraced the challenge to make one of the most difficult and recognizable sculptures out there.

To bring a Hawaiian element to the cake, handcrafted plumeria flowers were added both at the base of the cake and in the woman's hair.

For the cake filling, there was two ways it could be done -- we could either fill the cake with buttercream which can be easier to work with but something we choose not to do for our cakes -- or to fill the cake with the couple’s chosen flavor, “Local Kine Special” and what Rick opted to do for Ipo and Gary. He didn’t want to sacrifice any of the flavor for the sake of the look of the cake.

Our “Local Kine Special” flavor is coconut cake with sweet taro cream filling. Taro is a nutritious starch commonly used in Hawaii and is found in poi, a Hawaiian staple food.

According to Rick, Rodin’s “The Kiss” sculpted, was one of the most difficult cakes he has ever had to make. We are thankful to Ipo and Gary for the opportunity.

See this and many other new photos on cakelava.com soon!

and tomorrow, a selection of Ipo and Gary’s wedding photos artfully captured by Christen Vidanovic...