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...

A Fairy Tale Sandcastle Wedding Cake

www.cakelava.com

Many brides want to feel like a princess on their wedding day and castle cakes have been popular at weddings for years. Over the weekend, our clients LéMonaco and Delfino were married in Waikiki. Their wedding cake was close to 3 feet tall and combined a beachy theme with a fairy tale castle. The result was a sculpted fairy tale sandcastle. Rick sculpted the entire castle out of cake, including the turrets, which are often made from ice cream cones and made a sand-like texture on the cake. Everything on and around the cake is edible, and the inside of the cake was a pretty pink Guava. We were very pleased with the way their cake turned out and we hope the couple loves it too. Congratulations to LéMonaco and Delfino!

Gold Buddha Cake for a Vow Renewal

www.cakelava.com

We were hard at work on our cookbook when we got the request for the sculpted gold Buddha cake. The vow renewal for Romina and Arian would take place nine months later, and at the time, nine months seemed like a lifetime away because there was so much to do before then. We had an entire book to finish by the time the couple's celebration would take place, so in the meantime, it was one of the cakes Rick would look forward to making. Every few months Rick would ask me, "When is that Buddha cake?" I knew he was excited about making it and I could not wait to see it!

Romina and Arian were introduced to us by their wedding coordinator, Laura Lewis from Parasol Events. They were very sweet -- two gracious people whose tastes were particular but also gave Rick plenty of creative freedom to do what he felt was best. The couple are Buddhist and flew to Hawaii from Texas to celebrate their vow renewal, a ceremony I have always thought was such a sweet gesture. To exchange vows and say "I Love You" all over again is so romantic! We were told that the cake would be a very special part of their wedding reception and we were asked to deliver the cake at a time when we would be able to meet the couple. One of the best parts of making a cake is to be able to see the expression on someone's face when they see their cake for the first time. The couple were ecstatic when they saw their cake and were grinning from ear to ear, and their guests approached the cake table one by one to get a closer look. We were thrilled with how the cake turned out and to hear how much Arian and Romina liked it made all the hard work worth it!

Rick sculpted the entire Buddha out of our Guava cake. It was the same cake we brought to the Food Network Challenge when he made the Spongebob cake, and the guava flavor is a real crowd pleaser. The only color used on the cake aside from the gold was white, which was one of the only requests by the couple, since white was one of their primary wedding colors, they asked Rick if he could include that color somewhere on the cake. Rick made a lotus flower and gently placed it in the Buddha's hand. It was a beautiful feminine touch that worked fantastically with the design. Congratulations once again to our lovely couple Romina and Arian. We wish them both the best in their wedding and much success in both their careers!

Romantic Floral Wedding Cake

www.cakelava.com

In relation to our typical wedding cake order, which is made months in advance, our client who had recently moved to Hawaii from the mainland, had contacted us less than 2 months before her wedding date to make a cake with a "Wow" design for her 200 plus guests. She and her fiance loved one of Rick's cake designs, which he had originally designed for our bride Bree in 2009, and has been a well-requested design from brides since. It is rare that we duplicate previous designs, but certain cakes seem to have mass appeal and this is one of them. Rick has never made this specific design as large as this and spent a good amount of time making all the handcrafted flowers covering the cake. Wanting to be sure he had enough flowers, Rick made 1000 of them and ended up using roughly 700 on the cake. Between the 6-tiers covered in fondant, the hundreds of flowers all over the cake and the inclusion of on of our most weighty and rich flavors of cake, Hot Fudge Sundae on the inside, this cake weighed a ton! We estimated that the cake weighed 100 pounds, slightly less than my weight, but it felt way heavier than me. Rick and I could barely transport the cake together and we opted to have the cake delivered by Rick and another man. Even with two grown men, this cake was an exhausting delivery!

The cake was delivered to an estate on the east side of Oahu that had an extremely large front and back yard, which meant the cake had to be carried about the length of a football field to reach its destination. It was a gorgeous affair with top notch vendors and the cake looked right at home in its environment.