Exciting News!

Big stuff has been in the works for weeks around my house and I'm excited to announce that in September, NOURISH by bourbonbaker will finally be my only job!

HUGE thanks to all my customers over the years that have encouraged and supported me, to my hubby who has faithfully stayed home raising our kids while I worked every hour of every day and to Christine Reid, whose photos of my cooking parties have finally helped tell the story of what happens when you throw me into a kitchen with a group of people: DELICIOUS FUN!

I am currently negotiating some deals that will see my signature recipe energy bars hit stores all across Ontario, my cakes in some local gourmet food stores and even more restaurants will soon be carrying desserts made by me!

Looking forward to September and all the new ventures! Long live good food!

WPA Cake Auction 2011

Well, it's been a busy week in my world of cake. This morning we held a Cake and Dessert Auction at WPA to raise funds for our "Heart of a Teacher" outreach in April. With this outreach project, we are inviting local teachers from Waterloo Region to come to our place, have desserts, receive a free book, movie and fill a goodie bag full of those items teachers love to use in their class but usually have to pay for from their own pocket.

^^^Valentines Cakes made by ME!^^^

Without further ado, here are some pictures of this mornings auction...

We were blessed with so many donations:

Cupcakes from Yvonne Zensner at The Cake Box

Cake from Bonnie P

Cake and a gift certificate from Bev Kesselring of Latasia

Cake from Kathy, this one was just itching to go to a party house!

Picking up the winnings!

Excited? Scared? Wondering how he was going to hide his lemon bars from the family?

and my monkeys... wondering why the heck I was making them sit nicely when they could have been eating cake!

In the end, our WPA family was very generous, helping us to surpass our fundraising goal.

Now we have a very real and tangible way of showing the teachers in Waterloo Region how much they mean to us.

Thank you to everyone who participated.

A Really Fast Cake

When Peggy and Kerry told me they were Nascar fans, they weren't joking.

When we were trying to set up a consult for their wedding cake and the only day I was available was a Sunday, they said, "No way, that's race day". So we waited another week before I went to their home to talk cake.

Peggy was prepared, she wanted a traditional cake with a Nascar twist. She showed me pictures she had found on the net of cakes she liked, the problem was, none of them went together very well. One was a traditional wedding cake, surrounded by red roses, another was a modern black and white cake with a ton of filgaree work and the last one, well that was the only Nascar wedding cake she could find online. It was a poor job, that is for sure, but it did include the one major element that she wanted on her cake... the checkered flag top tier.

So bourbonbaker pulls out her sketch pad and starts drawing. We have a nice cake with a black and white diamond pattern on top to mimic the checkered flag more traditionally and lower tiers covered in red roses. We have another that has a large red draping coming down from the checkered flag tier. None of them are working.

Finally we realize that Peggy's idea of traditional and mine are different... let's find a way to meet in the middle. So the final cake gets sketched. The top tier of course, is checkered. The middle tier, has a large "S" in red, their new family name and that colour that she so desperately wanted to include and the bottom tier, well, we're a little stuck on. We talk about roses, but Peggy doesn't think they'll fit in. We throw a few ideas around until bourbonbaker gets one that sticks... mini checkered flags.

So Peggy and Kerry's cake wasn't as traditional as she had planned for it to be, but I don't think you could have pulled off traditional and Nascar in the same cake. There is definitely some traditional in there with the initial, but the rest of the cake was just fun, and well-suited for the couple that commissioned it.