My good friend, Geneva, and her husband Carlo are the owners of Savor Oakland Food Tours. Not only do you get some good food on their tours, you get some of the rich history Oakland, California has to offer.

I love Oakland -- I love its diversity, I love its people (yes, even the crazies)! I love that Oakland has its own culture and vibe, and most of all, I love the sense of community - many people at the party were folks they met on their journey building their business!

Not only is Carlo a business owner, he's also an avid photographer! So Geneva asked if I could make a cake with a lomography camera. I thought it would also be great to include some of his photos, as well as some throwback photos of Carlo and his family.

I whipped out that wafer paper idea again, and had the pictures Geneva sent me printed onto wafer paper. I pressed them into fondant and cut out the pictures. The cake was a vanilla cake with lemon curd buttercream  filling covered in gray fondant (which unfortunately was more than a little bit too thick). The camera was shaped out of rice cereal treats and covered with fondant with some of the details printed onto wafer paper as well. With this and the previous project using wafer paper, I may be in the market for my own food color ink printer!

My friend who ordered the Mummy Boy Cookies, and the Friday the 13th Cake asked for some cookies to take with her to Comic Con in SD this year. She sent me these images, and I thought, how am I going to be able to get these images onto a cookie, especially with all the color and details, given the limited amount of time I have? Then i remembered wafer paper, and had the images printed. They turned out great! I iced the cookies with plain white royal icing, and then used a light spread of piping gel to get the images on to the cookie, then piped a red royal icing border to finish it off. I was wary of using wafer paper because the last time i used it on a cake, it wrinkled due to the moisture. (Now i know there's a difference between wafer paper, and icing sheets!)

Out of all the cakes that I've done, and that I've wanted to do, I've always wanted to do this one:

..... and on a side note, I'm caught up with my posts-to-date. If you didn't know, I changed jobs about three and a half months ago. I'm working for the Oakland Fire Department as a dispatcher!

My shifts have been weird and wonky, and I'm tired almost all of the time - learning and processing lots of new things. So thank you all for your patience, and a special shout out to Training Battalion Chief Sheppard for his support and encouragement in my new job, and of Chu On Cakes!