Opening up another session of the FNCC! Everyone is welcome to share their week, photos of their work, ask for help or provide help if needed. 

Cat

Hi everyone! We are just home from our second Christmas...out of 4! We still have another tomorrow and then again Sunday. With a spread out family and this strange midweek holiday along with a new baby in our family it was just too much to get everyone together for one!

Hope your week was fabulous!

Cat

Hi Cat, Merry Christmas.  I fully understand.  Seems so hard for me to get in the swing of things today.  I also have Christmas get togethers and  dinners until Sunday but I also have a large cake for a quinceanera due tomorrow. A 4 tiered cake with a masquerade ball theme.   As usual no pics today. But here is the mask that will go on it.

Will post pics over the weekend.

Ginn...really beautiful! Can't wait to see the whole cake. I have 4 more weeks until my broken fingers are healed enough to cake again. SIGH. My husband went out and spent a fortune restocking all of my colors, luster dusts, most used tips and bags, brushes, etc. for Christmas. He says he wants me to have all new supplies when I can start back again. I'm kinda freaked out about it still but I have a cake order for Feb 1st and I have to be able to pipe by then! The last of Feb I have my daughters 30th birthday Twilight book cake and that has a lot of printing on it so I really have to be able to have serious control over the bag by then. The doctor says that it should be ready by then but he's not so sure of the Feb 1st date. Each week I get SO envious of the work you guys are doing and want to be able to make my own too. Thank you so much for letting me live vicariously through you guys!

Cat

Cat, what happened?  I must of missed something because I didn't even know you broke your finger(s) and are not able to work at caking.  That is terrible, I'm so sorry to hear that.

Cat, I too must have missed something. I am sorry to hear about your broken fingers. I will keep you in my prayers that you will be a fast mender!!!! Hang in there and keep the faith!!! I am sure you will be piping again in no time!!!! God bless you!!!! My thoughts and prayers are with you!!!!

heaps and tons of healing being sent your way -- but maybe consider using print from the printer if your hands are not cooperating enough by then?

best to you--

ps--i did too much over christmas--and i am paying the piper--but on my behalf so is my husband, my daughter & son etc. paying the same piper--'cause they hurt when i hurt of course--so lots to consider there with your hands--nothing wrong with taking care of yourself--

hopefully you will be 110% better by then!

Thanks everyone...it was a freak accident and act of clumsiness on my behalf. I broke the middle and ring fingers on my right hand in our front door mid October. The worst part was that I still had two cakes to do that month and I simply struggled through them. I've had broken fingers before, broke the other hands same two surfing when I was 14, so I knew it takes months for it to heal up. I'm not totally helpless..I am ambidextrous but do have dominate right hand when it comes to writing/piping because when I was a kid you were not allowed to write left handed in school, only right. So most of life is ok but anything that requires two hands (like rolling out fondant) or writing/piping just sucks right now. The reason it takes broken fingers so long to heal is that you are still using that hand every day so it's about double the time it takes an arm or leg to heal. UGH. I get to take the major bandaging off mid January but still have to use a pressure cuff on the fingers for another two weeks after that and then I get to find out if I can even use them at that point. The dr says it will be about 3 months after that before I have full use again. Nothing permanent like arthritis is but half a year as a caker is not fun. I was lucky that it hit at the end of my summer season and I didn't have any scheduled in November due to my trip but I had to cancel 3 in December and refer them to other cakers. I did take that one Mater cake earlier this month but buttercream isn't as hard to work with but the rest were fondant and I knew back in October I wouldn't be able to do them. After that I just didn't schedule anything till February. So there's my saga! LOL! I'll be fine and I'm blessed with a wonderful husband who has really helped here at the house to make life easier.

Hope everyone has a very Happy New Year celebration! It's a quiet one for us this year. We are just doing a carpet picnic and watching a movie till midnight after the kid goes to sleep! We'll "ring in" the New Year at 9pm, watch the ball drop from NYC on the tv with him but nothing like last year which we made a big deal out of. Low key. What is everyone elses plans?

Cat

Good jobs on the masks Ginny. Mine were too thin and cracked while I was painting them. I did my first 3 tier cake. It was for a friends kids birthday so I didn't charge. It has it's problems but stayed stacked during the car trip. The middle tier is too busy for me but I was told it is the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. It is supposed to be busy..

Love the cake...particularly the busy middle tier because it's crazy! LOL! But then I'm a Disney Girl and "Alice" fan!

Cat

lol..I hate the middle tier. I love the cat

i love it--the middle tier too and i love the reflection of the face in the board--extra mad hatter-y.

Birthday cake for a friend. Fondant figures.

I made this for a non-profit organizations fund raiser. All edible except for the display board.

Thanks everyone. Rosie, your fondant figures are so perfect! Are they wet? They look so shiny. Today I have a young girl coming over for a baking lesson. We are going to do cake pops...I think she is 7 or 8???

Rosie! Your cakes are wonderful but I love your gingerbread village! SO cool!

K8Memphis: we are still working out what we are going to eat for New Years. Bantering things about but those ribs sure sound yummy!

Cat

Thanks Batterup. I love doing fondant/gumpaste figures. They are shiny because I put crisco on my hands as I shape them, it makes it easy to smooth out the edges. It also makes them shine for the pictures.

I love your cheshire cat!

Thanks Cat- this was my first gingerbread project and I procrastinated for 2 weeks before I finally jumped in. Once I got startted- I was only going to make one house- I couldn't stop! It was a blast. The best part was that it was for an elderly living facility and the residents just raved about the displays we did. Can't wait til next year!

Cat, I didn't realize you had broken fingers, either!  That's what happens when you mostly  lurk, I guess!  I didn't know you were left handed.  I am, too, strictly!!  There's very little I do with my right hand and I do remember having problems in third grade with my teacher.  He refused to have a left handed person in his class and kept grabbing the pencil out of my left hand and forcing me to write right handed.....then flunked me in handwriting because it was so horrible!!!  My mom finally believed that he was doing that to me when another girl told her that he did it all the time.  She finally went to the school and said she'd sue if he kept it up, that I was left handed and that was the way it was going to stay.  They transferred me out of his class and into one where the teacher didn't care what hand I wrote with as long as I learned how to write!  All my borders on the bottom of cakes go in the opposite direction of everyone else's because I do them with my left hand.  No one I do cakes for seems to notice, though, so I don't let it bother me.

But back to your fingers....hope they heal very quickly for you and you're back to normal soon.  You have a wonderful family to support you the way they do, so enjoy that, too.  Have a wonderful New Years no matter what you do!!

Auntginn, LOVE your masks!  They turned out beautiful!  Batterup, I agree with K8-Memphis about the cat's face reflection on the board.  I, too, like the cat layer, but I also love the teapot on top.  Cute cake overall.  And Rosie, one of these days I'm going to tackle gingerbread houses.  Yours are very cute and inspirational!

New Year's Eve:

I have vague memories of when Johnny Carson taped late enough on New Year's Eve to go out live to the East Coast, and include a live Times Square remote at midnight. Then I remember watching just enough of Guy Lombardo's program to catch the live-to-the-East-Coast remote.

In my family, New Year's Day was always a much bigger thing than New Year's Eve: we're teetotalers, and heavy drinking isn't exactly a very entertaining spectator sport; besides which, my maternal grandmother was born on January 1st, so the typical drill when I was a kid was (1) watch the Rose Parade at least once, (2) Grandma's birthday dinner, which was also a chance to exchange Christmas presents with those we didn't see on Christmas Day.

Then I grew older, and realized that the Rose Parade was slightly less entertaining than watching paint dry. So I started a new tradition of not leaving my room, New Years Day morning until I was sure I'd missed the last rebroadcast of the Rose Parade.

And my grandmother eventually died, which kind of put a damper on her birthday dinner.

When I worked part-time for the late lamented Costa Mesa Ice Capades Chalet, I found out that we had a church group that rented the place every New Year's Eve, for a combined skating/broomball party. I had nowhere else to go, really, and they needed responsible staff to work the party, so I started working it, and eventually served as acting manager for it, since none of the real assistant managers particularly wanted to work the party. They were nice enough people, and it was good to be surrounded by a group that was every bit as stone-cold-sober as I was.

Eventually (not all that long before I quit the part-time job altogether), that got old, and I started spending New Year's Eve in Disneyland, since I was an annual passholder. That ended in 2005/06, when I got there, and overcrowding had put Disneyland into the fullest lockdown state I've ever seen it in (I understand that for a time that evening, they weren't even allowing re-entry of passholders or hotel guests. I had to forfeit a dinner reservation at the Blue Bayou, and spend the evening wandering Downtown Disney and Disney's California Adventure. I had a lot of time to introspect, that evening, and I realized that I was no longer getting enough use out of my pass to justify keeping it, so six months later, I let it lapse.

Since then, I've deliberately ignored New Year's Eve, and done my best to be asleep well before midnight.

----------

Sorry about your finger, Cat. I broke an arm once, and it wasn't much fun. Also slammed a finger in a car door once, and ended up having to regrow a fingernail, once the swelling went down.

----------

Haven't baked a cake since this year's Leland Award cake. But I've been baking lots of cookies, including a batch of oatmeal yesterday afternoon (with which I refreshed that portion of the last undelivered gift bucket).

----------

"BatterUp": is your Alice in Wonderland cake designed so that the Cheshire Cat tier disappears, leaving only the smile?

----------

"Rosie93095": I sincerely hope the "birthday cake for a friend" didn't end up "tasting like Pooh." And that gingerbread display is amazing. Is it on top of a sheet cake, or just on top of a board? And how big is it?

Thanks all, the gingerbread village is on a covered board and is 24"x24"

BatterUp, I love your cake, especially the cat.

Rosie, your winnie is adorable, is that chocolate clay (modeling chocolate)?  Great job on the gingerbread houses.

Here's the finished cake. I made the mistake of not covering the bottom tier with fondant only because I thought it would be too much.  My bc softened way more than I expected.

Also I placed the magnolia on the cake without thinking about he mask.  A mask should have been there, sigh.... My my little neighbor, her family and guest were ecstatic over the cake.

Beautiful piping Auntginn. The Winnie is 50/50 gumpaste/fondant. I enjoy making the figures. I actually ended up making several, between the gingerbread village and this cake.

Ginny your masks turned out so well! I remember when I tried to make them and they kept cracking on me. The reason of course is that I was anxious to do them and wouldn't leave them alone long enough to properly harden.

Here is a little cake I finished last night just to practice squares. It is approximately 4"x4". I used scrap fondant which is why the colors are so crazy. The cake is ganached. Now I am going to pull the fondant off and start over.