Why I Decorate Cakes

I've always loved to craft. As a child I loved to color, paint, cut, sew, glue, bake, and just generally create things! It's a family trait. My maternal grandma was a talented artist - she was an oil painter and seamstress.
My mom is a jack-of-all trades - she is a talented seamstress, watercolor artist, former cake decorator, and over-all crafter. I must have inherited that desire to create. I especially liked to bake as a teenager. Whenever someone wanted cookies or brownies, I would be nominated to be the baker. Now as an adult, I have tried just about every craft imaginable, and my favorites are scrapbooking, quilting, home decorating, drawing/sketching, baking and of course, cake decorating. I guess the desire to create beautiful things is in my blood! (My sister is the same way, so really, I think it's in our blood!)

Growing up, my mom made a lot of fancy cakes. My siblings and I were lucky that we always had amazing cakes for our birthdays. I loved it when Mom was working on a wedding cake, because there was always plenty of time to watch her pipe on the frosting designs, and plenty of leftover frosting for me to play with. I picked up some of her skills by watching her and trying them out. When I had kids of my own, it seemed natural to make my own cakes for them like my mom did. It was fun each year to ask them what kind of cake they wanted and see their smiles when their vision became a reality.

I never took cake decorating classes or had special training (until recently). It was just something I liked to do and could do fairly well, but I never made cakes for other people. In the last decade or so, fondant cakes became more popular, to the point that I'd guess 90% of wedding cakes have to be fondant now! I didn't even know what fondant was until it started becoming more common. So a couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to take some cake decorating classes with her at a local store, and I learned how to do fondant and fell in love with it. It opened up a whole new world for my cake decorating! One can be so much more creative with fondant, and the outcomes look much more polished and professional!

When I started making fondant cakes, as usual I just did them for family. I did a couple of small cakes for my kids birthdays that year, but still to that point no one outside of my family knew I could decorate cakes. Then I did one for one of my older daughters' baby shower. Things went crazy after that!

Once the cat was out of the bag, I decided to be brave and do a daughter's wedding cake ("old-school buttercream, not fondant),

Cake up the nose is always fun!

and then everyone knew, and I gained confidence and started making cakes for people outside the family every chance I got.

The thing I like most about doing cakes, is that it's an art that I can share that makes people happy. Everyone loves to EAT cake, but it's even more fun when the cake also looks awesome and is a special representation of a particular person or occasion. A cake is a centerpiece, a focal point, a celebration in itself! Anyone feels special when a work of art has been created just for them.

And that's why I love to make cakes!