Lord of the Rings in Fallbrook

We recently had the enormous honor of making a bride and groom's dream come true with a cake that resembled the city of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings.

When I met with them, I knew what an undertaking it would be, but they were so nice, and it kind of looked like a wedding cake anyway, so I said we'd take on the challenge!  You may have noticed we don't do a lot of gravity defying cakes, but since the structure was more traditional I was happy to attempt this challenge.






We drove through the winding roads of Fallbrook up to an incredible wedding venue, the Enchanted Forest to see a perfect setting for the wedding.

The bride and groom adapted some toppers with a likeness of themselves with their utterly adorable dog, Omelette for the top of the cake.

We also served mini desserts to go alongside, tiramisu in chocolate cups, profiteroles, macarons, cupcakes and fruit tarts.  They clearly invited a lot of hungry hobbits, as everything was demolished quickly!








In progress shots:

This is what we started with, a mock up of the entire cake, the top tier and the bottom tier were made of styrofoam, so they were covered in fondant, then we started on the buildings on the bottom tier.








We had multiple print-outs to compare to the original, so we could model the buildings on the walled city










The cake was decorated in white to be more wedding like, instead of the grey in the original city in the film.










There were many pieces to create, Alvin took most of a week just making pieces like these.

 

We then started cutting pieces to add to the top of the wall.












Here you can see Kelsea, Holly and Alvin starting to add the pieces to the stacked and finished cake.  You can make out the 'wall' which was made of rice krispy treats on a cardboard center, which was then spackled with white chocolate to make it look like the stone in the original.

Here are some more in progress shots to show the wall and the buildings being added.

Catering to special diets.

Here's the good news, we have finally nailed down a few vegan recipes, so we're able to make lemon cake, strawberry cake and a truly scrumptious chocolate cake.  We've found a frosting recipe that is almost as good as our buttercream.  This lovely 'exploding rose' cake had a vegan top tier for the groom.

We do use lots and lots of flour in our bakery, and our hazelnut almond cake is one of our most popular cakes, so I wanted to take a moment to point out what we can't do.

We are not a nut free bakery-so if you are deathly allergic to nuts, we are not the best choice.  We love Milli's sweets in Escondido.  We do generally avoid using peanuts, and we are extra careful about segregating those, since that is a common allergy.

We are also not a gluten free bakery, when we make most of our cakes on Wednesday the flour flies into the air, and quite often we come in on Thursday and it has only just started to settle.  This makes us nervous about serving celiac patients.  We do have some gluten free recipes if a small amount of cross-contamination is ok, but we always warn people of this.  We have heard that 2Good2Be in Encinitas is a fantastic gluten free bakery.

I also wanted to bring this up so that my customers could make an informed choice about where to buy their cakes.  If you have a severe allergy or intolerance, please consider asking whether these items are produced in a gluten free facility.

This is probably also a good time to remind customers that we don't make sugar free cakes.  We have a couple of recipes that don't spike your blood sugar as much, a wholemeal honey apple cake, and we can cut back the sugar on our orange almond cake, but we don't like using artificial sweeteners.

Do you have any favorite gluten free or nut free bakeries we can refer people to?

Carousel first birthday party!

We were recently invited to create lots of fun desserts and cakes for a very special birthday boy.  The event took place at a lovely local resort, the Lakehouse Hotel and Resort, a new venue to us, and a lovely place for a small party with a view of San Marcos Lake.

Ariane had some amazing ideas with a carousel theme.  We created a 3 tiered cake with carousel horses, cupcakes with gold horse toppers, cake pops with custom created sticks, and cute cupcake/cake pop combos with fun paper horses to decorate.  We included blue vanilla bean macarons with chocolate ganache, and cinnamon macarons with dulce de leche

The whole place was decorated with a lovely sparkly gold, red and blue color scheme.

We also made a small cake for Ariane since she was celebrating her birthday too!

Bringing children to the bakery

I've been struggling with this a little, and I thought I'd share some thoughts....

We love kiddies, and we absolutely love seeing their little faces light up when they see their cakes!

We've found that recently, parents have brought their children to help pick out their cakes, and somehow it often gets a bit stressful for everyone, trying to keep them sitting still, not touching things they shouldn't or getting into the bakery, which isn't really safe for them.

I wonder if it is better to discuss their cake in the comfort of your home, browsing through our flickr page and looking for fun designs, we'll be happy for you to take a sample pack home of the flavors we're baking that week, then you can sit down and enjoy at your leisure.

We totally understand that sometimes it is just not possible to get childcare, so the kids come on your errands, and we welcome supervised children to the bakery, but if it is possible, it might be less stressful for everyone if you figure everything out together before you come to the bakery.

We'd love to hear your thoughts...

Under the sea with a twist

Apparently this cake was an 'in joke' in reference to the comedy series 'Saved by the bell' but we were a little baffled by this message!

 I think you'll agree that everyone did a wonderful job making the adorable sea creatures for this very special baby shower cake!

We made a refreshing lemon cake with lemon curd and vanilla cream with swiss meringue buttercream under the fondant.

This is the kind of cake we love to make, please give us at least 3 weeks notice to make sure we have plenty of time to make all the little details for your cake!

Jennywennycakes Grand Opening!

What a great time we had at our grand opening!  We wanted to celebrate the fact that we finally found a home in Carmel Mountain Ranch.  We have been looking for a year or so, but nowhere came along.

When I found out that Sumi had decided to call it a day, I looked around and it was the perfect space.  Initially it was a bit of a worry to have to commute up to North County San Diego, but I remembered that a lot of my customers come from there to pick up their cakes from Claremont, and it is a lovely community.

There is a nice big kitchen, then a central room where we can do our decorating, a tasting room/office and a lovely reception room which Tara from Twinkle and Toast did her magic with the calligraphy, a quote from my dear grandma.

We served lots of delicious desserts, and drinks with lots of help on the florals and event design from Desiree from Penny Blooms who paired vibrant orange and yellow spring blooms with splashes of gold to complement our logo.

We got quite carried away with the baking, we wanted to showcase some of our favorite cakes, so we had our lemon cake, chocolate cake and our hazelnut in the form of a frangelico trifle with praline and chocolate mousse.

We also had cake pops and macarons with fun sprinkles, hummingbird and guinness mini cupcakes.

Our other table had profiteroles, donut muffins, banoffee pie, to honor pi day, along with our delicious hot cross buns, we did a different spin on those with choc chips, nutella and hazelnuts.

There was a gluten free table showcasing our orange almond cake pops, sparkle cookies and our friend Paula's gluten free coconut mini cupcakes.

It was a really fun day, and we enjoyed seeing new faces and some old friends and now we're ready to bake up a storm.

The new facility gives us lots of flexibility, but we've decided not to include retail in our operation since the office park doesn't have a lot of walk-through trade.  You can still email us to place an order though, and we can usually accommodate a simple order with a weeks notice, with larger complex orders needing a month's notice, especially when we get into the busy wedding season.

Our email is jennywennycakes@gmail.com so give us a shout if you have an order.

Jennywennycakes is located at
12265 World Trade Dr, Suite D, San Diego CA 92128
619-356-0536

Funfetti Cupcake tower at the Ultimate Skybox

I just wanted to share these lovely pictures from Cindi and Dave's wedding at the Ultimate Skybox.  They were such a sweet couple, and its one of my favorite venues, modern and fun, with a fabulous view of the San Diego skyline, and sometimes a view of the ballgame!

They chose to have a cupcake tower, and wanted to match the yellow and grey theme, with some additional flair, so we went with a mixture of edible and fondant garnishes for the cupcakes.

Dave loves funfetti cake, so we made vanilla cupcakes from scratch and added sprinkles to the mixture before baking, and on top of the cupcakes.






Other flavors included:

• Chocolate cupcakes with caramel, chocolate peanut butter and a delicious peanut tuile on top.
• Almond cupcakes with cherry jam, vanilla buttercream and a candied cherry on top
• Red velvet with cream cheese frosting and a yellow fondant plumeria on top

Congratulations, Cindi and Dave, wishing you a long and happy life together.