Recently my friend Telle and her mom opened Damascus Road, a Christian Bookstore in Natomas (Sacramento) and way back before the store even opened I told her she had to let me make them a cake for their grand opening. So after being open for a little while and working out the kinks, they scheduled their Grand Opening shindig for this weekend, with the ribbon cutting ceremony being today (Feb 18).

You would think that I would have had plenty of time to design and put together the cake for them, but things don't always work out that way. As it was I ended up with just about two weeks to design and create, which in my mind is a tight squeeze. I am good with deadlines, but art can't always be rushed and I started stressing about the design, or lack thereof. A friend of mine (Kaaren, another cake artist from across the country) helped me come up with a basic idea and I let it take me from there (sometimes kicking and screaming, but along the journey nonetheless).

In the end I am pretty happy with the end result, and Telle's heartfelt reaction to the cake upon delivery was enough to make all the difficulties I had worth every second.

Let me start by saying, I really don't like making people; I learned that when I did Stephen's birthday cake. But my latest creation was to be an Ariel cake... not only a person, but an iconic one. People are hard, iconic people are worse. So I decided to play to my strengths and make her castle. This week was not a great week for me personally, and for awhile I was wondering how I was going to pull all the pieces of the cake together and make everything work, but everything finally started coming together Thursday and I was getting excited about it again. When you are using the talents God gave you, it is amazing how quickly joy can return to your life.

So, without further ado, I present Ariel's Castle:































Kudos to my wonderful husband who did the photography for this cake!!