SpongeBob Birthday Cakes Viewing Party, Pt. 1 The Cakes

All images courtesy of Dave Miyamoto & Company: Dave Miyamoto, John Hook, and Michelle Miyamoto

On Easter Sunday, April 4th, while much of America was waking up to the smells of chocolate bunnies and jelly beans and heading to Brunch with their families, Rick, myself and about 125 of our family and friends headed down to Tiki's Grill & Bar in Waikiki for a Private Viewing Party for Rick's "SpongeBob Birthday Cakes" Challenge airing for the first time on Food Network. We knew shortly after doing the Challenge that we wanted to plan a special celebration for Rick's first Food Network Challenge, but first we had to solidify an airdate and then the planning could begin!

Rick started thinking about, what else, the cake! Since he had already made a huge sculpted SpongeBob cake for his Challenge, he decided to make his super silly but lovable sidekick Patrick Star -- sculpted of course! Patrick is one of our favorite SpongeBob Squarepants characters and we thought he would be a perfect centerpiece for our party. You can't have Patrick without SpongeBob, and Rick made 2 sheet cakes with SpongeBob's face on them, one in our Guava Lava flavor, which is the same flavor we served to the judges on Challenge, and the other in our Coconut Pineapple Chunk flavor, which is always a huge hit with our clients! Luckily SpongeBob themed items are EVERYWHERE and we decided to serve our cake to our guests on plates with SpongeBob's face on them. Fun, silly, and kid like, perfectly SpongeBob Squarepants!

We have been blessed over the years with having a huge community of support here, which includes family and friends, clients and other vendors in the wedding community and once we put the word out about the party, people were immediately excited and we were astonished by the amount of support we had to assist us with our special day. On tomorrow's blog we will be showcasing images from the party, along with a list of the special group of vendors and friends who helped make it happen. Enjoy!







Aloha, 'til next time!

Koi Fish Tattoo Wedding Cake

This past week was Challenge-ing. Our Food Network Challenge: SpongeBob Birthday Cakes aired for the first time on Easter Sunday and has aired several times since. For the past couple of weeks it feels like life has revolved around a Mr. SpongeBob SquarePants, as we prepared for our viewing party for the show and the subsequent airings, the result of which made us even busier than before. Some close friends of ours flew out to celebrate with us this past week and we had a blast showing them around our little rock of Paradise! As we celebrated SpongeBob and our special day, we had a number of clients also honoring their special day with the love of their life. One of our wedding couples, Valerie and John were married the evening our Challenge aired, and we literally had to leave our party immediately after the show aired, head back to our studio then drove over an hour out to the North Shore, with our good pals in tow. Who says you can't mix business and pleasure!

Speaking of pleasure, one of our wedding couples this week made Rick very happy when he got to make their koi fish wedding cake that was based on a tattoo concept. Our clients are tattoo artists and came to us wanting a cake that would cause jaws to drop and truly represent who they are as artists. Their wedding colors were grey, purple and black but Rick decided to do their cake in white, grey and black, to play up the contrasts, and the result was one of our favorite cakes recently designed. Their wedding cake was absolutely stunning in person. My jaw definitely dropped and I wasn't even at the wedding, and we felt confident they would fall in love with it. They selected our Kona Toffee Crunch flavored cake, a couple tiers with white cake and one with chocolate cake. Congratulations to our couple! We wish them many happy years together and much success in their careers as tattoo artists!

We have many more new cakes to share as well as photos from our viewing party and Challenge!

Aloha, 'til next time!

A MidWeek Treat that's Twice as Nice

Yesterday afternoon, after another hectic day at work, Rick and I opened up our mailbox at home and saw to our delight, the current issue of MidWeek, featuring cakelava in two different articles! MidWeek is a newspaper that gets mailed every Wednesday (some households receive theirs starting as early as Monday) to all the homes on Oahu. It has an incredible circulation and is a well respected publication here that has been around for years. Excitedly, and with a new adrenaline rush, we flipped to Page 6, to find our article, "Let Them Eat (Really Fancy) Cake" by Sarah Pacheco. Our eyes and bodies were tired but boy did we perk up when we read this article. It was one of our favorite press articles yet and definitely captured the spirit of what cakelava is all about. Rick and I had a recent interview with Sarah and a photo shoot with her photographer Leah Ball and answered a lot of questions both about our business and Rick's experience with Food Network Challenge. It was fun to interview with Sarah, who loves to bake and had a particular interest in this article.




Jo McGarry's "Table Talk" column in the Food Section of MidWeek also had an article featuring cakelava. The focus of this feature was the celebration of the four Hawaii businesses being showcased on Food Network on April 4th and 5th. In what was quite a delicious coincidence, our Food Network Challenge: SpongeBob Birthday Cakes, premieres April 4th and the very next day three other Hawaii-based businesses will be shown on "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives." We'll be watching both for sure! Rick had previously done a radio interview with Jo McGarry for her "Table Talk" show, which hasn't yet been posted as a podcast on Jo's site, Wine and Dine Hawaii, but as soon as its available, we will post it.

The MidWeek features were very special to us because they were one of the first local publications to write about cakelava after we opened in 2005. Linda Dela Cruz who has a column called "Entrepreneurs" wrote about cakelava in August 2005, only 5 months after we opened and we have a framed copy of it on the wall of our studio. To have MidWeek approach us for another article at this stage in our career made us extremely happy!

Aloha, 'til next time!

Tomi's Birthday Cake

This super funky, topsy turvy animal print birthday cake was made for Tomi's 27th birthday. She requested to have both zebra and leopard prints integrated into her cake and also a "POP" of pink. She loved Rick's leopard print "Cake gone wild" design, and she wanted her cake to have a similar feel with lots of contrast. Rick handcrafted giant pink lillies with bright green leaves for her cake and put her name "Tomi" on wires playfully on the top of the cake. A chocolate lover, Tomi chose our Hot Fudge Sundae and Kona Toffee Crunch (with chocolate cake, naturally). We're not sure whether we should say "Rrrrowwww" or "Yummmm!"

Aloha, 'til next time!