Bowled Over & Blown Up Ovens

It was my lovely Godson's birthday on Monday so in his honour I made a bowling cake as he is mad keen on bowling.

It was a good job I made the cake on the Saturday morning as on Saturday evening my oven blew up!  Thankfully all is now fixed but being without my oven for 2 and a half days was a struggle.  Big thanks to Chief Taster for allowing me to use her oven to cook our tea!

I thought I had been able to claim my dining table back from cake paraphernalia but a late cake order has come in for a birthday cake and 2 dozen festive cupcakes.  The penguin production line is being started up again tonight!!  Then that's it!

Happy Christmas to all!

x

Chocoholic's Delight

My friend is a keen fan of chocolate......she is a chocoholic, there is no point in denying it, so I decided to make her the ultimate chocolate cake for her birthday on Monday.  Lorraine Pascal's 'I Can't Believe You Made That' cake fitted the bill perfectly.

The top is covered in maltesers and edged in chocolate party fingers and sprinkled with a touch of glitter!  A cake this size (8") uses 3 boxes of chocolate fingers (with a few spare for the Chef!) and I used two big bags of maltesers (again, a few spare as the Chef's treat)

Festive Cupcakes

Last night was a bit of a late one, I finally finished all my baking & decorating and managed to sit down at 12.45am!!....as well as finishing off Amy's 21st cake (see previous post), I made some festive cupcakes for OH's office as its their last day in work before Christmas.  Making of the cupcakes itself were no problem, the toppers were a little bit more time consuming!  I went with little penguins (once you got on a roll making them they were ok to do, but black fondant is messy to work with; it stains your hands and is very soft), holly leaves with silver glitter and red berries and green glitter Christmas trees.  I coloured some vanilla buttercream a bright green and swirled on top of the cakes.

I also made them some of my festive streusel mince pies so hopefully their last office meeting with morning will be truly festive!!

Only 2 more cakes to do this weekend and then that's me hanging up my apron for this year!

Happy Christmas x

Green Glitter Christmas Trees

Silver Glitter Holly Leaves & Red Berries

Little Mr Penguin!

21st Extravagance!!

For Amy's 21st cake she wanted all pinks & gold, flowers, feathers and a bit of sparkle!!  Hopefully this ticks all the boxes.....Its a two tiered chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and covered in fondant.  Pink on the bottom tier and ivory on the top which has then been embossed with a paisley type pattern and then dusted with gold lustre dust to give a golden sheen.  Two different types of gold ribbons round the cake bases finished it off.

The flowers were done with varying sizes of a blossom cutter and pink and ivory and then the edges were dusted with lustre dust and glitter sprinkled in the centres.

Hope she likes!

Festive Streusel Mince Pies

Tis the season to be jolly!! Or rather, this the season to eat mince pies!! I love mince pies & would happily eat them all year round. This year I thought I would try to do something a little different with them so I gave them a streusel topping, added a little glitter, & voila....festive mince pies that last for all of two seconds in our house!!

Just use ordinary sweet desert short crust pastry, cut out quite a large disc & press lightly into a muffin tin (gives a deeper pie). Make sure the pastry is pressed up the sides. Get a fork & prick the bottom of the case & put in a heaped teaspoon of your favourite mincemeat (I add some good quality vanilla just to give a bit of depth to the flavour but you could put alcohol in if you wish), top generously with the strudel toppping & bake in the oven for 20 mins or until lovely & golden  at 200 deg.C. Delicious!!!

For the streusel topping mix 100g of plain flour, 50g of ground almonds, 50g of caster sugar & 1 tspn of cinnamon. Add to that 135g of cold unsalted butter that has been cut into cubes. You can either rub the butter in by hand or I use the mixer, either way you want to end up with a breadcrumb type consistency. There will be some larger lumps etc but I think they taste the best!! When all rubbed in add 25g of flaked almonds & 25g of cranberries & give a good mix.

Once the pies have come out of the oven & are fully cooled, give them a genourous dusting of icing sugar & a sprinkle of edible glitter if you have any to hand.

I wrapped them up & gave some out to people when I was giving their Christmas cards out as a little present

Enjoy!!

Homage to Mickey!

For Daniels 1st Birthday a tribute to Mickey Mouse was requested.  This is my homage to Mickey!  My first attempt was a little, shall we say, on the 'portly' side!  OH suggested that Mickey get on the Slimming World diet quick sharp.....so he was slimmed down into the figure that stands before you.  If only dieting in real life were as easy!!

Cupcakes with mouse ears on accompanied (I've not made them yet, so no pictures!!!)

Cupcakes!

Waybaloo Birthday Cake

Imogen whose Christening cake I did earlier on in the year has turned one!  How time flies......As Imogen loves the Waybaloo's (apparently its the music!) then the cake was made based on these characters.  I had never heard of them, let alone seen the Waybaloo's so a bit of internet research had to be done, but this was my interpretation of them!

Mum's Birthday Art Class Treat

As part of her birthday present I made my mum some cupcakes to take to her art class that she goes to each week.  36 various flower design cupcakes were made.  It was a good job that I made too many flowers when I was doing the 80th Birthday Cake as these spare ones came in very hand to just pop in the top of these vanilla cupcakes saving me a lot of time!

80th Birthday Cake

I think this has been my most ambitious cake yet.  A two tiered birthday cake decorated with lots and lots of tiny flowers in a swag effect around both tiers along with butterflies on wires coming out of the middle of the top tier.

It turned out very well and I was very pleased with it.  It was for my friends mum whose birthday it was and they all loved it and apparently it all got eaten which is always a good sign!

I started making the flowers on Sunday evening and had 3 foam sheets worth of them done, far too many for the cake, but just in case any broke as they can be  very delicate when set and easily snap.  Each one was cut out and then a tiny 'pearl' was set into the middle of each flower.  Each butterfly was also painted with edible glitter down the centre of the body.  To say it was time consuming is a slight understatement!!

The bottom tier was baked on and iced separately in order to give the icing time to set.  The top tier again was done separately.  I got some strange looks when I explained that there were actually straws in the middle of the bottom tier but these make great support structures for when you have a heavy second cake layer to put on top.  Just insert them and simply snip to the right height.

All the flowers were glued on by hand and each one had to be pressed gently in place until the edible glue slightly set them.  The swags were done by marking off a cross vertically and horizontally on the cake so you got 4 points.  I put a pin on each marker point and then with a long necklace pinned a link and then draped the chain to meet the next pin and then pinned the link etc.  Once done I traced round the swag with a scriber tool to give me the outline to following with the flowers.

The butterflies on the topper I cut a little thicker out of sugarpaste so I could insert a wire dipped in edible food glue in the body post.  These were then set in a food grade food post that you insert into the cake.

I took quite a few pics!!!

Spiderman!!!

This week has been very full on and busy.  I've made over 200 sugarpaste flowers for a big two tiered birthday cake that I will be finishing tonight.  Fingers crossed (and everything else) that it goes according to plan!!

In the meantime, just about managed to squeeze in a spiderman cake for one of Chief Taster's friends' little boy whose birthday it is at the weekend.  The city-scape looks quite cool around the outside of the cake, even if it was very fiddly to do (lots of little squares).

It was another late night again last night and I'm sure tonight will be the same.  I was saying to a friend the other day; I used to remember when my Sunday evenings were all about the recovery of the night before....now they mainly consist of making sugarpaste flowers (or something else for the top of a cake) and fitting in a quick watch of Strictly Come Dancing!!  How very rock and roll..... lol!!

Anyway, here is the cake.....

Cupcakes

I quickly made some cupcakes to go alongside Issy's birthday cake..

The Princess & The Cat!

A Princess & a Cat was the brief for Issy's 2nd birthday.....oh, and sparkles!!