Year in Review – 2013

I can hardly believe that 2013 has come and gone.  It’s been an amazing year for our team at A Cake Life, with a lot of opportunities and growth.  But then again, when you’re doing something you love, it’s not work!

Card photo courtesy of ARIA Studios

Christmas Card

This year we created

400 WEDDING CAKES and

50 CAKES for BIRTHDAYS and other SPECIAL EVENTS.

That’s a lot of cake!

Hera are a few of our favorite Wedding Cakes from the past year:

Fav wed cakes 1

Fav wed cakes 2

Fav wed cakes 3

Fav wed cakes 4

Fav wed cakes 5

Fav wed cakes 6A few of our favorite Cupcakes Cakes:

Fav cupcakes 1

fav cupcakes 2

fav cupcakes3

And a few of our favorite Birthday Cakes:

fav bday cakes 1

Another big project we did was for the Toyopet company anniversary.  Toyopet is the parent company of Toyota.  In April they brought in 1,000 employees from Japan for an anniversary party at the Sheraton Waikiki.  They commissioned us to create a huge display of 800 cupcakes, highlighting their company logo on each cupcake, and instructed us to “make it look like Cupcake Wars“- a HUGE display!

Toyopet1

Toyopet2

Toyopet3

This year some of our most popular and requested designs were the Garden Rose Petal Cascade cake:

Petal Cascade Cake

The Rustic Stucco Textured cake.

Popular3

The “Jung” cake. Stucco texture in white

Popular2

Stucco texture in ivory

And the Buttercream Rosette Textured cake.

Popular1

One of our major milestones this year happened in July when we opened our new cake shop!! Read all about it in the recent blog post link.

D81_5007

We received the following awards:

Chosen by Bride’s Magazine as one of Top 100 Cake Designers in the United States!! OMG!

2013 The Knot Best of Weddings (2nd year in a row!)

2013 Wedding Wire Bride’s Choice Awards (3rd year in a row!)

In February, I was extremely honored to be selected as the Small Business Administrations (SBA)- Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the City & County of Honolulu!

SBA Award

At the Award Ceremony and with Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell

ACakeLife_Top100-Blog

We participated in the following special events:

Pumpkin Carving Festival with Matthew Delaney, CEO of The Hawaii Group.  We won awards for The People’s Choice Award and Best Team Spirit.

The Wedding Cafe Cake & Catering Workshops

The Wedding Cafe 12th Anniversary Party- We created their Anniversary Cake for the third year in a row! And this year, we decided to do something new and made 200 Mason Jar cakes!

TWC-12Anniversary2

TWC-12Anniversary1

It’s always important for us to give back and support our local community and the men and women serving in our Armed Forces.  This year we worked with the following charities through participating in their events and donating cakes & cupcakes =)

American Cancer Society Relay for Life Events

Pumpkin Carving Festival benefitting Keiki O Ka Aina and the USO Hawaii

Operation Shower, a national organization that puts on baby showers for expecting military mothers whose spouses are deployed

Operation Shower

We added to our team at A Cake Life and now in additional to myself and Grant (aka the best unofficial employee), now have 5 employees who we absolutely adore!

And we enjoyed working with Chris from Moanalua High School for his student job shadow program to complete his Senior Project.

In November, one of the biggest highlights was meeting Michelle Phan and Chriselle Lim, two women I follow regularly on their YouTube Channels and look up to as inspirational figures.  One of their best friends decided to get married on Oahu and A Cake Life was selected to create her wedding cake!  This is the Garden Rose Petal Cascade design we created for her, and they selected our Guava cake with Fresh Strawberry Cream filling.

Garden Rose Cascade cake Photo Nov 23, 2 13 43 PM Photo Nov 23, 4 07 11 PM (1)

We partnered with Emi Ink and Les Saisons and created a gorgeous window display over at The Wedding Cafe with  – A Painter’s Dream: Painting-Inspired Vignettes

And we were featured in several publications, a few can be found here:

Style Me Pretty – Great Gatsby Inspired Shoot

Style Unveiled – Ocean Inspired Elegance

JuneBug Weddings – Lindsey+Brett

We reached over 9,000 followers on InstaGram!  Here’s a little slideshow of our “Most Liked Photos”.

Most Liked Photos

And our “Best Moments on Instagram”.  Are you following us @acakelife?

THANK YOU to our awesome clients, friends and family and our fellow wedding professionals for all your support in 2013!! We are soooo excited for 2014 and all the excited new adventures we have coming up.

Please follow A Cake Life on our Blog and Social Media Sites for our latest news and lots of cake pictures!!  And, of course, call us for your specialty cakes! =)

Many blessings and good wishes to you in 2014!

With Warmest Aloha & Mahalo,

Kristin

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This entry was posted in A Cake Life, Awards, Best of Weddings 2013, Birthday Cake, Brides Choice Award 2013, Cupcake Tree, Cupcake Wedding Cake, Cupcakes, Featured, Hawaii Birthday Cakes, Hawaii Wedding Cakes, In the Media, Modern Wedding Cake, Small Business Award, The Knot, The Wedding Cafe. Bookmark the permalink.