pattie cake remix

i think i may have mentioned before that my grammie (who's first name is fortuitously pattie...pattie cakes, get it?) ran a fabulous cake-decorating business out of her north hollywood home for more than 20 years. she was basically famous...she'd do party cakes for the studios, wedding cakes for just about every person in town (including some celebs like jan from the brady bunch, who lived down the street), and every single one of my birthday cakes throughout my life.

just about all of my memories of gram have to do with her decorating cakes. i'd always get to visit them for a week each summer, all by myself, and she was always working on cakes when we weren't out on some fantastic adventure. typically she'd give me some tubes and frosting and my own little cake and let me go at it, decorating my own -- though i wasn't very good. not to mention the fact that her frosting is SO DELICIOUS that i grew up literally eating bowls of it, as you can see in the picture below (circa 1986) -- i blame my sugar addiction on this habit:



anyway, when the grandparents moved to arizona a few years ago, grammie retired from the cake business (although she now teaches decorating classes for the city when she's not traveling the world). she did however make my beautiful wedding cake, which people still talk about. bottom line -- grammie is amazingly talented.





basically, the main point of this post is that i've wanted to get more into cake decorating, and for christmas grammie gave me a totally sweet decorating starter kit that sadly i have not had time to use until NOW -- this weekend i sat down and actually made a batch of frosting from scratch, baked some cupcakes and got out my kit!

first i must say that spending a saturday afternoon decorating cupcakes is really the best activity one could find. i was pretty proud that the frosting turned out just as good as her version although i was seriously grossed out by the amount of sugar in it (and crisco? YUCK. yeah, i still ate a tub of it). my final conclusion was that while i am slightly better at decorating as a 24-year-old and not an 11-year-old, i'm still definitely a beginner as you will see in the following pictures.

i made allll kinds of cupcakes.




some blue & white ones for jeff & laura's goodbye party:




some nintendo-themed ones, per the request of the birthday boy:




some other more abstract ones so i could try out the different tips:



and a bunch more that are already in my tummy. yeah, so essentially i learned i need to work on it if i ever want to open up a second-generation pattie cakes, but this was definitely a fun (and yummy) way to start out. thanks again gram!