The Costners' Kitchen

Boxes and Bows

2009-12-17T16:57:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, a friend of ours asked us to participate in a holiday home show she was hosting. There were all types of homemade gifts and decorations to purchase, and Matt and I supplied the homemade treats to go along.

We decided to get a little tiering practice under our belt in preparation for our big wedding project (this Sunday - eek!) and went with a stack of presents all in different flavors. We also got to make our first fondant bow, which took a few tries but turned out nicely I think.

Enjoy!

Natalie

Bake Sale Galore

2009-12-04T14:07:00.000-06:00

A friend from work asked Matt and I to help her out with her big committment to her son's school's bake sale a few weeks ago. This sweet girl graciously committed to MANY cookies and MANY cupcakes. We agreed to take the 6 dozen cupcakes off of her hands and had a blast with the fall theme. From what we hear, the cupcakes were a hit and raised a lot of money for the school. Someone even grabbed up all the pumpkins to use as place settings at their Thanksgiving table. Fun idea!

Stay tuned for a Christmas theme in the next post!

Natalie

Make Way for Ducklings

2009-11-18T16:30:00.005-06:00

Do you guys remember that book? I LOVED it in elementary school! My favorite librarian (and surrogate mother) would be proud to know that. It was one of those books that had a big, gold seal on the front from winning a fancy award - you knew it had to be good! In fact, I'm thinking I might need to grab a copy to read over and over to Baby Costner. (BTW, if you didn't already know, Matt and I will have a new family addition as of June 3rd!)

You are probably wondering why I'm using my cake blog to review children's literature, but I assure you it has a point. A few weeks back, Matt and I made a special birthday cake for his aunt. She is an avid duck hunter, as is her entire family, and she has been one of our biggest supporters as we've started this cake-making venture. From the start, she kept joking about wanting a duck cake for her birthday when it rolled around. And we couldn't resist! We loved making the fish before, so we were thrilled to have a similar challenge on hand.

Matt and I both agree that this one was the most fun so far to make! Everything from start to finish ran smoothly with no hiccups or unexpected results. I think Mallards are just gorgeous, too, so we had a lot of fun looking at photos and getting our color inspiration. Hope you enjoy!

PS - Do take note of the two bands on the duck's feet. This was the feature of the cake for our aunt...she even saved the feet after we ate the cake! You see, she is the only one in the family to have earned the bragging rights from catching a duck with two bands around his feet. Quite an accomplishment in the world of duck hunting!

PPS - I had to go find an image of the book while I was at this! Memory lane is so fun!

The Last of the Catch Up

2009-10-02T12:00:00.000-05:00

And...I'm back, as promised! This post should get us caught up all the way and even includes a cake from this week. I don't think we have an cakes on-tap for this weekend, but there should be some exciting ones coming up, so stay tuned.

First, you'll see the cupcake theme continued. A few weeks ago, our friend Ashley had a full schedule of celebrations with a mid-week baby shower and a surprise 50th celebration for her mom on the weekend. So we pulled together two batches of cupcakes for her...and when I say "we," I mean "Matt." The first set is for baby Molly's shower (in pink and green) and the second set is for Miss Judy's 50th birthday (in red and blue). Both are yellow cake with vanilla buttercream. And both feature a mixture of buttercream and fondant decorations.

Next up was a wedding shower from some friends of ours - Nicholas and Angela. They are both former co-workers of ours who have since moved to Nashville and are planning a wedding back here in Fayetteville later this month. Matt and I (yes, I actually worked on this one a bit!) created a vanilla cake that was covered in fondant with a quilted impression and the couple's future monogram, along with chocolate cupcakes covered in buttercream and the matching monogram - all in the couple's beautiful wedding colors. This was a fun project for us and got us inspired to try some wedding cake ideas in the future!

And last for the new post is a cake we made just this past week for our dear friend, Jennifer. She celebrated a birthday last Saturday, but most of our group of friends was traveling, so we celebrated on Wednesday night with a homecooked meal (from Ashley) and desert from the Costners. We kept this one all in buttercream with a whimsical feel of paislies and polkadots.

Thanks for checking in...and hopefully, I won't keep you waiting so long next time!

Natalie

Call Off the Search Party

2009-10-01T14:54:00.000-05:00

I know, I know...I'm not being consistent AT ALL with these posts. It's certainly not due to a lack of content - we've been busy working away at many cake projects since my last post. Life just seems to get in the way of me blogging about it. I won't bore you with all the details, but know that I've thought about posting often. After all, it is the thought that counts, right?!

I'm going to break these up into a couple of posts. Most of the projects in this post are either recreations of something you've seen on here before (hello, tennis cakes!) or cupcakes. What's funny is, we never really thought about cupcakes much, but there seems to be a fair amount of interest in them, and they are a lot of fun to make.

It's only fair for me to mention that most of the creations you are about to see are mostly due to Matt's effort. As I said, life gets in the way sometimes, so he's had to carry a lot of the load for the cakes lately. It actually works out well because he's definitely the more talented of the two of us. I keep telling him he needs to open his own bakery called "I don't need my wife" ...well, at least not my help!

First up, a set of birthday cupcakes. The week we made these was extemely humid, which made our buttercream a little "testy" to deal with. Let's just say that a humid week is NOT a week for a cupcake sculpute...the pretty decorations just slide right off! I suppose it was a good lesson to learn, and the improvised solution turned out great in the long-run.

Just two days later, we had another fondant tennis cake to deliver. We made this for a friend of a friend who was celebrating her son's and husband's birthdays. The cake is Devil's Food with chocolate filling. I actually helped out on this one...up until we got the tennis ball covered. The rest is Matt's doing.

And just two days after that (if you are counting, that's 3 orders in one week!), we made another batch of cupcakes to take to some friends of ours in Texas. We actually imposed the third order on ourselves, but our friends have a precious little boy that we had never met at the time and are pregnant with another boy, so we really wanted to celebrate their family. Elijah was just about to celebrate is 3rd birthday, so Matt designed a camoflouge cupcake for him, along with coordinating cupcakes for baby Josiah who will be here in a matter of days, now! They are both yellow cake with chocolate buttercream. Hearing Elijah talk about his "pup-cakes" all weekend was well worth the effort to make and transport them!

Last, we have another tennis ball. In the process of making the last fondant tennis ball, we decided that the cake shape just wasn't made for covering in fondant. Sure, you can see that we make it work, but the frustration that goes into making it work is just no good. So, for the sake of sanity, we put a "cease and desist" order on fondant tennis balls. On the brightside, from all of our cupcake work, we had been having a lot fun piping buttercream, so we decided to try our hand at a piped tennis ball. And I LOVE how it turned out! Matt even free-handed a Wilson logo (like I said, he is good!). All I can take credit for is the baking and the white lines for the ball. Everything else goes to the husband once again!

The next post will have a few more orders of cupcakes and a couple of cakes. Stay tuned for those...hopefully I won't go MIA before I get them posted. :)

Natalie

Strike a Pose

2009-07-31T10:17:00.005-05:00

Matt and I have been interested in creating a sculpture for a couple of weeks. Nothing like The David, just a cupcake sculpture. Two of my nieces had big birthdays last week (16 and 13), and we were heading down to Little Rock to celebrate, so we decided it was the perfect occassion to try our hand at the sculpture.

My 16 year-old niece, Blair, is very artsy and has lots of artwork she has created on her wall. So, my designer husband sketched out a cupcake that reflected some of her abstract work. For my 13 year-old niece, Taylor, you can never go wrong with anything girly, so we created pink sparkly swirls with green swirl accents. We mounted all the cupcakes on a piece of styrofome, and tada! The sculpture was a hit, and the cupcakes disappeared quickly. (We might have even had leftovers for breakfast the next morning!)

Hope you enjoy! It's a little departure from our fondant work, but fun nonetheless!

Fat Chick Part Deux

2009-07-28T13:52:00.007-05:00

Right after we made the tennis cake, we received our second order for a replica of the original birdie cake. (Yea!) A friend of mine was going to be in town for a big birthday bash, so we recreated the fat chick - this time in red and light blue - for her.

The cake is three layers of white cake with vanilla buttercream - my favorite, just like wedding cake. Speaking of, we made this cake on the weekend of our first anniversary and had one layer left over...so we gobbled it up in celebration. I haven't tasted many of our cakes as I've tinkered with them, and I must say, this one was YUMMY! I might have made a fool of myself shoveling it down I like it so much!

Hope you enjoy another fat blue bird!

PS - I'm a couple of weeks behind on posting the things we've been doing. I will get you caught up quickly, though. Looks like we will have this week off, so we are going to focus on practicing some piping skills, I think. Stay tuned for a cupcake sculpture from last weekend.

Game, Set, Match!

2009-07-11T20:44:00.000-05:00

My dear friend, Erin, has been one of our biggest cheerleaders since we started making cakes. I think she is as excited about our new hobby as we are! (In fact, we've really appreciated the support we've gotten from all of our friends! Thanks for all of the publicity you've stirred up!) Erin has followed our journey with each cake and decided last week that she wanted to be our first paying customer. Her mom is in town this weekend to celebrate her birthday, so Erin decided to have us make her mom's birthday cake. Both Erin and her mother are avid tennis fans and players, so presto...we have a tennis cake.

As usual, this one was a lot of work. We keep waiting for the day this will go quicker, but we keep trying lots of new things, so it's a learning process every time. Regardless, we are having fun...even if we are a little sleep deprived!

The cake is vanilla with strawberry fruit filling. Happy Birthday, George Ann!

Natalie

Oh Say Can You See?

2009-07-06T17:49:00.000-05:00

Yet another practice cake for Matt and me. We spent our holiday weekend with the Costner clan in Branson and thought we would take a cake in honor of the holiday to celebrate. I must confess that I only saw half of the cake decorating through to fruition. At 1:30 a.m. Friday, I gave in and went to bed and left my fantastic husband to finish the last several stripes. We had a couple of hiccups with our homemade fondant...last time it was great, this time, humidity got the best of us...but we managed to work with it in the long-run and are pretty pleased with the results.

The cake consisted of three tiers of Devil's Food with Cookies and Cream filling between each layer.

Keep your eyes peeled later this week for our first custom-order!
Natalie

Something's Fishy

2009-06-29T09:25:00.079-05:00

After much anticipation, Matt and I have tackled another cake in tandem. And we have officially decided that we love this cake making thing! We had been planning to spend this past weekend practicing a new type of cake and mentioned to some of our friends that they were going to have to take the cake off our hands when we finished. Afterall, we can't have a constant supply of cake sitting around the house, or this hobby will cause lots of problems for the waistline! Our willing friend, Sarah, piped in, "My dad's birthday is this weekend. I should have had you make him a cake!" Great, problem solved! We have a taker.

Now, up until this point, we had been planning to make a square cake with a fondant bow on top...much like a gift-wrapped present. But, once we had our male subject lined out, we were thinking that a fancy bow probably wouldn't bowl him over. So Sarah threw out what she thought was a joke, but definitely got the creative wheels turning, "Can you make a trout?" Sarah's dad is an avid fly fisher, so anything with a trout on it is a trophy.

I will confess (now) that I initally panicked. Trout?! We were thinking of a neat, little square with a bow, and now we are going to shoot for a trout?! Yikes. But once Matt and I started brainstorming, we got excited and had LOTS of ideas. So we guarateed Sarah a trout for Sunday delivery. We baked the cakes Friday night (4 - 8 x 8 squares that were pieced together and layered) and then spent the majority of Saturday (and maybe even the early hours of Sunday morning, but don't tell Sarah!) decorating our little trout. Matt and I had a blast, learned a lot, and were really pleased with our end result. I think we may be on to something that will be a long-lasting hobby of ours.

We documented the cake start to finish, so bare with me on all the photos. If you want, you can just skip to the end and see the final result. Hope you enjoy!

We started with four 8x8 square yellow cakes, then leveled them, and attached them all with good layer of chocolate icing.

A little carving to make a fish shape...

Adding the fondant...

Working on all the details...

He's starting to really look like a fish...

Some added color, and tada...he's done!

Here is a large picture of the final result:

Now, off to brainstorm the Fourth of July cake...

Natalie

My First Fondant Cake

2009-06-03T16:28:00.007-05:00

So here it is, the real inspiration for starting this blog - my first fondant cake! I've been a big fan of baking for years and have always loved making cakes. For Matt's last birthday, I decided to try my hand at a carved cake in the shape of an acoustic guitar. I loved it, but the buttercream icing was tedious, and I felt like I could have decorated with much more detail had I used fondant. But fondant also seemed...scary.

I started doing research to better understand the do's and don'ts of fondant. Duff makes it look easy on "Ace of Cakes," but I knew better than to believe that. I started pricing out all the tools and gadgets I would need to get started, and it was just too pricey to do off the cuff. So...I made a request for my birthday, and my mom and my brother came through BIG TIME. They stocked me with all the supplies a girl could want...and then my grandmother cleaned out her cupboard to give me all of her old shaped pans. You should have seen my happy dance!

I decided it would be "safe" to try out the first cake for myself. Yes, I made my own birthday cake. Actually...Matt and I made it together. He is very artistic, so he is a big help with the free-handed stuff! We had a blast...made some freshman mistakes...but the sign of a good baker/decorator is the ability to improvise and "fix" those mistakes (so I have learned). I was so thrilled with the final result and am ready to make tons more now! So...with no further ado, here is the first cake...

First, the inspiration - my new birdy necklace that Matt gave me that I adore (I like to call her "fat chick"):

And the cake with a fat chick topper:

I am now searching for any and every excuse to make a cake...so watch out!