Another Sweet 16

How strange,
Two months ago, Gateaux had never done a Sweet 16 cake before. Now, we've done two.
Yara's sweet 16 party was a beautiful poolside affair at her home. The weather threatened rain, and it held off until 5 minutes before the party started. Being the high-maintenance cake lady that I am, I had the coordinator kick the caterers out of the only semi-covered area around the pool as soon as I heard the party was to go on outside despite the sketchy forecast. Paid off in spades! When the skies opened up, and everyone headed for cover, I hung out with this little beauty, and slid it back an inch at a time further under the overhang until the rain passed and the party started.
The rest of the evening was beautiful, and the party went off with no further hitches, and a bone-dry cake!

What inspired the design? A sixteen year old with impeccable taste! Yara loved the Parisienne cake on our website, but didn't want her birthday cake to look too much like a wedding cake. We were working through this problem, when she saw an elliptical shaped cake in our portfolio. We merged the two designs, added a ton of red rosettes (thanks to my awesome full-timer Jenna) and there it was! I just love, love, love it! Happy birthday Yara! Same time next year?

Sara and Freddy

Classic Glamour. That's what best described Sara and Freddy's wedding. When I met Sara, she brought in copies of her beautiful wedding invitations for inspiration. Well, when they're that beautiful, we'll just flat-out copy them! All of the black detailing on the cake came from somewhere on the invitations. Note to self: black royal icing is NOT forgiving. Tell that to the top tier that had to be refondanted at 7:00 the night before the wedding.

Anyway, despite a few bumps in the decorating road, the cake is one of the most beautiful I've ever had the pleasure of taking credit for. We added the frosting bows to get the accent of Robin's egg blue incorporated into the cake design, and I can't think of a prettier finishing touch.

Thanks to the incomprehensibly talentedstudio 306 for their delicious photos of the cake, check out their blog for more pictures of this fabulous event!

Let's not call it "sweet" 16.

For anyone who still thinks that sweet 16 parties are about cinderella coaches and tiaras, snap out of it! Zoe's 16th birthday party was quite honestly the coolest birthday party I'd ever seen (yes, it even surpassed my husband's surprise 30th party at Chuck E Cheese's in Edina, and mind you, that was cool. No really, it was.)
Her design scheme was everything a sweet 16 party doesn't bring to mind. Black and red decor, with grafitti panels on the walls, a (virgin)Bloody Mary bar, Oxygen bar, dueling DJ's and Cirque de Soleil style aerialists performing from the ceiling. I kept losing Jenna during the set up. She was glazed over muttering "coool, oh, cooool" for long periods of time.


Now, we knew this was going to be an awesome party from the first time I met her planners. So the pressure was on for THE MOST AWESOME CAKE EVER. So, based on a photo of a particularly well-vandalized alley, we began our design. It was supposed to be a skyscraper shape covered with airbrushed grafitti, until we decided to airbrush "grafitti skyscrapers" on the sides of the cake to create a skyline. The coordinators thought the statue of liberty would be a good addition to the design, so we Googled our fair lady and came up with the look for the bottom tier. Apparently some enterprising tagger has designed a stencil of the statue to quickly tag buildings with her likeness all over New York. So, we made our own Stencil, and drew up the sketch of the cake without ever considering how we would pull the look off (that's pretty much how we do it over here at Gateaux, if I only designed cakes that I knew how to do, it would get pretty stagnant creatively, and what fun is decorating when there is no imminent feeling of terror and "what the hell was I thinking when I pitched this?"

Luckily, the cake didn't only turn out exactly how I pictured it (rarely happens), but it was so fun to do that after airbrusing and painting the forty-odd frosting buildings for a day, I was disappointed that I didn't have more to make. I'll just have to hope for another girl as unique and cool as Zoe.

By the way...her reaction to the cake. My favorite cake comment ever... "That cake is SICK". For those of you as old and lame as me, that's a good thing.

Woodsy at the Graves 601?

There are many adjectives that come to mind about Graves 601 Hotel in Minneapolis, Chic, Modern, Elegant, Sophisticated all come to mind. "Woodsy", not so much. So what do you do when you're an outdoorsy couple who embrace all the wonders of nature but you also want your wedding reception at one of the finest locations in the Twin cities? You hire Mimi designs, and book the Graves. I was astonished with the transformation of what I'd always considered the Ultra-Mod hotel for this event. The Mimi's (as we like to call them) created the perfect blend of natural design scheme with the modern understated elegance of the space. What resulted was the first "urban woodland" wedding I had ever seen...and it was stunning!

Onto the cake. In staying true to the woodland theme, the bride brought us a photo from Martha Stewart Magazine of a chocolate panelled cake that had been textured with a woodgraining tool in white chocolate. The bride decided to reverse the colors so that the cake would look more birch, and less like realistic wood to lend itself to the urban setting. As is common at the shop, we created every last chocolate panel using the tools and instructions from Miss Martha's magazine. Then, after they were complete, I went home, looked up alternatives on line, and decided to remake every one of them using a different tool, technique, and material (yes, I'm a joy to work for). The final result was an Ivory fondant, painted with woodgrain for a much more stylized and modern feel. Of course, I sent a photo of the two panel options to the Mimi's who hands down agreed with my choice (little did they know I had already completed the first round of panels, but they wouldn't be surprised at all, they know I'm neurotic).

Anyway, the final result...one of the most interesting and Graves 601-Worthy cake I've ever produced. The best part, the awesome catering crew at the Graves cut the panels into strips and garnished each slice with a pristine strip of wood-grained fondant. I just love it when the caterers carry through the look of the design in such a creative way. Kudos guys!

Justin and Krista

Okay, this was just about the coolest take on a "black tie" wedding I've seen in awhile. When I first met with Krista, she showed me a picture of her dream cake from a magazine. We, of course had to tweak it to make it her own, so we changed the colors of the cake to match her Black, white, and red color scheme. We also turned the cake into a torted five-tier tower, and topped it with a frosting monogram.

It wasn't until a couple of weeks later, that she mentioned that maybe the cake should be black with white details and red flowers. Now you're speaking my language! The upside...an amazing, unique and dramatic winter wedding cake. The downside...turning 20 pounds of chocolate fondant black. Needless to say, Jenna and I got quite the upper body workout, and had food-colored hands for 3 days straight(that stuff colors more than just food). But it was all worth it. This was hand's down one of my favorite cakes in years. I just love the chance to produce the unexpected, especially when the unexpected is so incredibly tall that it is visible clear across the ballroom! A ballroom impeccably decked out under the guidance of the coordinating genius of Joan from Ambiente Design Group, one of our favorite planners (and mom to Max and Coco, every one who knows Gateaux, knows we're a collective puddle when it comes to cute doggies).

Here's the best part...these guys were nice enough to let their photographer the fabulous Olive Juice Studios release photos to all of us hard-working vendors so that we could strut our(and their) stuff. Thanks guys, you're the best!

Justin and Krista Part 2

But our bride wasn't done with me yet. A surprise groom's cake was in order as well. You see, the groom travels a lot for his job, is a native Canadian, and proposed to the bride, while in Hawaii, by writing his proposal in the sand. Sounds like a lot to get onto one cake, but when the cake looks like a stack of suitcases, it's hardly enough.

So we added a couple of frosting dog collars and tags peeking out of one of the suitcases to honor the bride's dogs who come along with them quite frequently in their travels. The top tier, let's just make it into a cake shaped like a crate holding another cake shaped, and hand-painted to resemble their favorite champagne. For Canada, we had to honor the great northern tradition of Ketchup chips (don't ask me, just google it)a favorite Canadian delicacy of the groom's. For personal affects, we included frosting replica of the groom's Minnesota Twins ball cap as well as a copy (again, frosting)of his favorite AC DC money clip, complete with frosting canadian money.

Set the whole thing in a base(hand made by my father in law "Magic Phil") filled with brown sugar and white chocolate seashells and you have it! Proposal and all.

Looks like he liked it.

Again, thanks to Olive Juice Studios for the fab shots!

Kristen and Luke

This couple had such a beautiful, tailored event style that when Kristen mentioned her ideas for Luke's surprise grooms cake, I nearly fell off my chair!

Let's start with the invitations. We copied an engraved motif from their Kate Spade cake knife set to create a background graphic for their letterpressed invitations. Keeping with their chocolate brown and ivory color scheme, we dropped the motif behind the text in taupe ink. Once they were in, and stunning, we had to copy the same pattern onto their cake. We had sketched several designs for their cake prior to their invitation appointment (when the cake knife made its first appearance)but once we saw how beautifully the invitations turned out, I just had to offer them a matching cake design.

They loved the new cake design, so we switched over to it resulting in one of my favorite cakes of the year.

Now onto the craziness. Kristin wanted to surprise Luke with a cake in honor of his Alma Mater, so we sketched up a cheese-head shaped cake. As the secret appointment progressed, the cake developed quickly to reflect more about Luke than I ever thought a mere slab of cake/cheese could contain. We added the many sports he enjoys, their two pet cats, and then, the mob of neighborhood kids that seem to follow this poor guy around whenever he's out around their house. Kristen laughed about how Luke can hardly make it to their front door without several kids climbing on him asking him to come out and play.

I'll take it! With my usual caveat, that trying to make realisting people out of frosting can often result in just plain creepiness, I set off to make Luke (widow's peak and all) into a frosting cartoon. The random kids followed. Every time we walked into the shop there was a new face peeking out from the baker's rack at us. It took about two weeks to make all of the varying parts, let them dry, and then royal-icing them together. Needless to say, the day after the Groom's cake went out, I looked over to my favorite baker's rack peanut gallery and was saddened by the empty space. We really miss the gang, but I suppose that's just incentive to do an equally weird groom's cake again soon, if for nothing other than the companionship.