This is actually my second lab coat cake I’ve made. The first one was a last minute order and I made it in one day.  It came out great, but with a little bit of planning,  was able to make one I loved even more!

In this version I made a striped neck tie and left off the buttons.  I also added scissors to the top pocket instead of a prescription pad.  I made the collar a few days in advance so it would keep a nice standing shape.

Here is a better look at the neck tie. I used my linguini pasta cutter attachment for my kitchen-aid to make the stripes.  The tie itself was just a long strip of fondant that got folded under on each side.  The “knot” was just another strip of fondant folded over the top of the tie.  I made the bottom skinnier than the top to form a triangle shape.  The only difficult part was remembering to place the stripes on the “knot” at another angle than the rest of the tie.

Here you can see all the stitching detail I added around the collar and the pocket.  I used a roller stitching tool that was originally designed as a sewing tool!

This was a 30th birthday cake so I added a number 30 to the bottom of the pocket.  Happy birthday Jonathan!

This cake was made to celebrate a 40th wedding anniversary.  The lucky couple had a party thrown for them by their children.  Their oldest daughter was taking charge of the cake design.  She had tons of great ideas and was really fun to work with.  Often times customers will give me a general idea of the design they want, or they will send me inspiration pictures.  For this cake, my customer knew what she wanted.  She wanted an ombre rose cake.  Easy enough, I’ve done those!  She also wanted a silhouette of her parents and she wanted ruby red on the cake since the 40th anniversary is ruby.  The most difficult request was that she wanted the roses to be fondant, not buttercream.  Now is where I needed to get creative!  I had some ideas, but had a tough time explaining them, so I sketched the design up on my Ipad and sent them over.

Here is the sketch of the design that she chose!  You can see how it turned from a design into a cake!  She wanted the bow to be fancier than the one I sketched which was not a problem.

I added tylose powder to red Satin Ice fondant and made all the parts of the bow.  I let  all the pieces dry for a few days to keep their shape, then arranged them on the cake.  I added little red rosettes to the center of the bow to match the cake design.

Here is how I made the roses.  I started with stiff royal icing and used a Wilton 1M tip to pipe some roses on parchement paper.  I let those roses dry for a few days to get hard.  Then I used food safe silicone plastique (a silicone mold kit) to cast the roses in the silicone.  Once the silicone was cured, I had a rose mold!  I actually made three different ones so I would have options and variations on the cake.  Then I used the mold and gray fondant to make all the roses.  It took a long time, which I didn’t mind.  But it also took a whole lot more fondant than I realized!  The cake ended up being so so so heavy and much wider than I expected.  It still came out gorgeous, but a bit different than expected.

The heart cake topper had a silhouette of a man and woman and the number 40 to celebrate the cute couple.  But the daughter wanted all their kids to be represented on the cake, so I added their 4 kids and their spouses and kiddies to the top of the cake.  You can see this part unless you are looking straight down from a birds eye view.  I like that this family tree is a bit hidden and a special surprise.  Happy Anniversary!  You can find all these silhouette cutters in my shop!

I’ve gotten some pretty specific cake requests in the past, but this one was the cutest!  This little 3 year old birthday boy loves trains.  He gets a train cake for his birthday each year, but this year he needed a very specific train.  He is obsessed with the Acela Express Train.  He goes to the train yard and watches this specific train so the cake had to be right.   His mom wanted the cake to look authentic, not too cartoon like.

I was nervous about making this cake because the train is so simple and clean, I really couldn’t make any mistakes!  I baked a rectangle cake for the base and covered it in green fondant.  This gives the cake a larger look and adding servings to the cake without having to make the train unbelievably large.  The train itself was about 4″ wide and 10″ long.  I stacked the train out of a few sheet cakes and carved it down to the proper shape.  I covered the train in gray fondant and then airbrushed it with silver color to make it look shiny and metallic.  Then I added all the other details.

I cut the Acela logo out of thin blue fondant and a paper template I printed.  The little fondant trees were really fun to make.  I shaped some green fondant into a cone shape and then used a tiny scissor to snip into the fondant in an uneven pattern.  These never actually dried out so I was able to insert a paper lollipop stick inside to help them stay in place on the cake.

I made gravel to surround the train out of different shades of gray fondant.  I just cut the fondant into tiny pebbles and let them dry.  Then I glued them to the cake with royal icing.  You really can’t tell that there are 3 or 4 colors of gray here but it makes all the difference. If I had used all the same color, it would have looked a bit flat.  The railroad signs were made out of fondant and attached to lollipop sticks.  The sticks start out white so I just colored them black using an edible food coloring pen.  The last detail the cake needed was the mountains for a backdrop.  I cut mountains out of fondant or gum paste and let them dry.  Then I attached them to lollipop sticks and placed them behind the train to really set the scene.  Happy 3rd birthday!