I'm missing my son

I have two kids - a soon to be 11 year old and a 2 year old (27 months). My oldest is in Croatia with his grandmother and has been away for two weeks and will be gone for two more weeks. While I was busy with cakes and cleaning up the mess he seemed to create all by himself, I didn't miss him too much, but now??? I am already planning what I'll do to welcome him home.

I KNOW it's a great opportunity for him to be able to go overseas. It's great for his language development (he is bilingual), and it's great to experience the culture. I just like it better when the WHOLE family goes, but as expensive as airfare is, we just can't go very often... who has a spare 10 grand on a regular basis?

Anyway... I was looking at his latest picture today. It's a candid shot from a swim meet this summer. He looks so much like his dad - just a strawberry blonde version and it's weird seeing this "boy" starting to develop some "man" features... He's growing up and while I LOVE seeing him grow into the great person he is becoming... I still can't believe that it's MY son... How could I be old enough to have a soon to be 11 year old??? Hmm.. I'm "only" 37! LOL

Buttercream is dangerous and cake ingredient musings!

The last cake was made from chocolate buttercream. Since I use all butter and high quality chocolate, I found it WAY yummy. I kept grabbing a new plastic spoon to get another taste every time I went to the kitchen! I had to put it in the freezer to stay away from it! Way dangerous stuff! Nibbling on cake is a non-issue as it always gets sent away, but leftover buttercream? DANGER CITY!!!

I've been working on a system to store buttercream too. I really don't like making buttercream because it is messy and greasy. I already told you that I make triple or quadruple batches (I think I'll stick with triple batches - fits better in my mixer). I store those in 6 cup plastic containers and freeze them if I don't have plans for right away.

Well, I've also startes storing leftover colored icing. I seem to use a lot of red, black, green, red, and royal blue. I will use what I need and the rest I will store in a ziploc and store in the freezer - taking it out for the next cake. Since it's not good to freeze and refreeze items, I store them in small batches so I can just throw away what I don't use of the already frozen buttercream.

A gal on a forum I read said that she will store them for a time and if they don't get used, she'll combine them to make an unsavory colored batch and then turn it into chocolate buttercream. This could work in a pinch, but I'm already thinking, "I don't like food coloring in the first place, why would I now taint my chocolate buttercream with food coloring". But, I'll put it out there if other people want to try it. I won't, but that's because I'm trying to bill myself as a close to earth baker.

I just bought an organic and differently formulated baking soda. I'll have to try it on an experimental cake (for home) to see how it works.

I also need to make my own vanilla. I've been buying organic vanilla, but I'm switching over in the about 10 weeks to organic homemade vanilla. It will be cheaper for me. Vanilla is one of the most expensive parts of a cake! It's about 40 cents a teaspoon and a typical cake with buttercream uses 3-4 teaspoons of vanilla - that's about $1.50 a cake... It takes about 8 weeks to make homemade vanilla extract, but I think I can get my costs down to then about 25 cents a cake for vanilla - but would need to make an initial investment in small glass bottles too.

Made a new picture for my website!

I altered the writing on my most recent cake. I LOVE trees and well, I think they are fitting for the type of cakes I make. Since it IS my cake and all the altering I did was just the writing, I don't feel I'm misleading anyone as to what I can do in cake making... I think I'm still getting better with each cake I make - progress is good and I guess practice does make perfect! The funny thing is, my handwriting is better when I used ICING than with the computer pencil! LOL

I STILL want to make a super special cake for my "logo" cake, but I need to get work done around the house first! LOL

No cakes lined up

I had a nice little run there for awhile, but now I don't have anything confirmed. The only cakes on the calendar are for my family. My oldest son is turning 11 on August 29th, but he'll still be on a trip to Europe with his grandma. He won't be back until the 30th. The kid will end up getting three cakes - one in Europe, one when he gets home, and then one for his birthday party with friends. LOTS of practice time for me!

I'm beginning to think about what I will make for the schools opening up. I think I'll send in some cake when the teachers are coming back for classroom set up before the school start day. I don't know what I want to bring though? Do I do a cupcake bouquet? Or a cupcake cake so they can just pull it apart? Or, a traditional cake? Tough call. I wanted to send something to school last year, but never had the chance to make a cake the way the toddler was sleeping. He consistently gets up at 5:30 am now, but at least he's sleeping through the night until then which is a recent development. This is a HUGE improvement.

I think I will practice with the cake projector though. I'll just make some dummy cakes or something. For once it would be nice to practice on something it's OK to mess up on instead of trying new things on customer cakes!