When we had our open house at the Willaby’s Loft in September, I’d planned to have a stencil with my business name and logo on the wall so visitors would have it seared into their memories.

Alas, the stencil has been sitting in my kitchen for months, unpainted. But I finally got the inspiration to get it up, and after mulling the best location for quite some time, I painted it as a wrap around the right window edge in my section of the loft space. What do you think?

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I’m hearing from other bridal service companies that jewel tones are the hot colors this season. Does that mean we finally are done with the “brown and insert color here” trend? That’s kind of too bad because I bought a lot of brown ribbon…

Anyway, I had a lot of turquoise in my designs last summer, and I think that will be one of the hot colors in the jewel-tone palette. Here’s a cake that combines turquoise, brown and orange. This design got rave reviews on the Myriad Facebook page (which you can find a link for on the Myriad home page).

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Some business owners are wary about having friends for customers, but I love it. First of all, it’s great to see someone you are friends with being so happy and in love. When former coworker Lin Ly and her fiance Denver came to see me for a consultation, I had such a great time chatting with them, the hour flew by.

Lin’s sister had created a logo for them that they were using on all their wedding items, so we incorporated that onto the cake as well. They got married in Portland but had their reception on the coast, so the logo linked the two places on a map of Oregon. Such a nice, personal touch for such a great couple.

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One of the exclusive offerings we have at Myriad is the Little White Cake. It is for a bride on a tight budget, and starts at $2 per serving for buttercream and $2.50 for fondant. It’s mostly a plain white cake (you can get polka or swiss dots in white added for free) that you or your florist or your future mother-in-law can dress up however you like: ribbon, flowers, feathers, car figurines — whatever you want.

You can find out more on the Myriad Web site. And here’s an example of how cute a Little White Cake can be. This was at Deepwood Estate in Salem, and the couple may have decorated the cake more after I delivered it, but I loved how it looked here in the gazebo where they had it.

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Leann Onopa and Michael Moore are personal friends, and I was flattered when they asked me to do their wedding cake. They were looking at a Halloween-eque cake but not over the top. We ended up with a black, white and crimson cake with sort of creepy black treeish things sticking out the sides. A little Tim Burton feel, I think.

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I absolutely loved this cake from September, which was for Kristina Pierce and her groom at Willamette Valley Vineyards. It was a biggie, with six tiers in the main cake with two side cakes. The porcelain look of the main cake juxtaposed with the fine detail work on the scroll on some of the tiers and the side cakes were so beautiful. You can’t see it really well, but there are silver dragees as well, adding just a touch of shimmer.

The design is credited to La Jocande, a bakery in Portland.

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Crooked or topsy-turvy cakes are cool to look at, and they can be fun to make. They are challenging, for sure, because of the angles. I like them best on the small scale, such as the 21er cake I made for a woman named Alma. She loves red and yellow. We threw in some gold, too.

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This was the year that high school booster clubs found out about the wonder that is Myriad’s cake sandwich. I made nearly 400 for Dallas High School and several dozen for West Salem High School. They are so wonderfully tasty: two layers of cake with a thick layer of mousse filling, all covered in dark or white chocolate. People call them a fancy Ding-Dong. I’m not sure either the Hostess people or I really like that comparison, but hey, whatever works.

Here’s a shot of the spread at the Dallas High School event. Note the Dallas Dragons color scheme.

I should mention that Sue Hamilton of SHE Designs event rental and coordination did the decor on the tables.

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For a friend’s step-daughter’s 16th birthday, she wanted a pillow cake. She was going to add a tiera to the top. Cake flavor: German chocolate with the best freshly made caramel pecan filling I’ve ever tasted (or made).

I can’t take credit for the design. It is one part of a tower of pillows for a cake created by Colette Peters.

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