Holiday Over

I have just returned from holiday after spending 2 weeks in Mauritius and after relaxing with OH and doing nothing but eating, reading, drinking & sleeping (in that order), we have come back all refreshed.

I have a christening cake to do in a couple of weeks for a little boy so I will have to pull my finger out and get all the stuff I need ordered and then birthday season kicks off again in September!

In the meantime I will be sleeping off jetlag and eating shop bought cake!  Oh the shame.......!

Be back soon!

Chloe's 8th Birthday Mermaid Spetacular

Today is my beautiful niece, Chloe's birthday.  She is 8 years old and after much deliberation, I decided to make her a mermaid cake as she loves things to do with the sea for her birthday party on Saturday.  She also loves nearly all the cakes in my various cake decorating books and I frequently find post-it notes marking the pages with her favourites on...which is nearly all of them!

This took me about 5 and a half hours in total to do.  The trickiest bit was actually the 'sea', I mixed white and blue icing together with blue lustre dust to try and create a swirl pattern and then because the base of the board is iced as well with sand coloured icing, I had to cover the actual sponge separately and then pick it up and place it in hopefully the middle of the covered board.  Fiddly to say the least!

 I made an octopus and seashells with pearls and glittery starfish!

 The sand was created by mixing a small amount of brown icing (which is chocolate flavoured!) in with some white and then covering the board and kind of scrunching the icing up a bit towards the edges and then sticking bits on here and there.  OH kept trying to tell me that there were creases in it!!

 I got some brilliant little fish cutters which came in 3 different sizes and I used these to cut out fondant shapes and glittered them up to go on top of cupcakes which will be given out to Chloe's party guests to take home.

 I used a mixture green, blue and gold lustre dusts on the mermaids tail.

Hope she likes it!!

Last Minute Retirement Cake!

Saturday was a back to back baking day!  A friend needed a retirement cake fairly quickly (for Monday) for someone who she works with and she only called me at 3.30pm on the Saturday!  But I don't think I did too bad, four hours later, Carol had her cake....

Ruby Anniversary

My parents celebrated their Ruby Wedding at the weekend.  40 years together.....what's that saying...you get less for murder!!  Well we had a family lunch out and gave them their presents & cards and their cake and I think on the whole they had a lovely day.  Even got a text from my Dad to say the cake was lovely!  High praise indeed!!

I embossed the white cake icing with a pattern and then dusted all over with lustre dust to give a nice pearlised finish and then hand made all the roses.  I had made the hearts the week before to give them time to set on the wires and dusted the white ones with a lustre dust.

Patch the Puppy Dog

Little Mr Harry Holden is 4 next week and for his party this weekend I have made Patch the Puppy dog along with his cakepop friends!

Patch was made using a basic sponge mix recipe and dividing between 2 pyrex bowls (one slightly smaller than the other).  You just have to keep checking after 20 minutes as to whether the sponges are cooked all the way through.  The smaller bowl took around 35 minutes and the larger one around 50 minutes.  Leave to cool which takes quite a while before spreading buttercream on and then I used a pre-rolled icing sheet to cover.

The cake pops were tricky to do.  They taste great though but does that outweigh the fussiness in making them?  Its all very fiddly if I'm honest, the candy melt stuff sets very quickly so its a rush to get the stuff on the cake and then if you put too much on its difficult to even the covering out.  It took me 3 and a half hours to make 18 of them!  You can now buy the candy melt chocolate in Hobbycraft but at £3.99 a bag, its not cheap stuff, especially when you want 4 different colours!