Birthday Daisy Cupcakes

My new cutters got a testing on Ve's cupcakes for her friends birthday.  Daisy plunge cutters...expensive but worth it as I think they look very effective.

The cakes were in purple, hot pink & pale pink cases and I matched the fondant daisy colour to the cake cases with a bit of glitter (of course!) in the centre.  I got a lovely new lilac glitter yesterday, the colour is just fab, so of course a little bit of that went on the purple fondant daisies!

September Birthdays Part 2

For Louise's birthday I made her a Hummingbird Cake as I think they are great for birthdays.  Very simple recipe and you can make them look great for a special occasion.

The fondant is actually a lovely duck egg blue shade and I did the centres in brown.  The colours worked well together and looked very pretty!

September Birthdays Part 1

September is quite a busy month for birthdays in my house.  (October & November are proving to be just as busy....even more so!!)  I had  2 children's cakes (monster & the wiggly worm) plus cupcakes / fairy cakes.  Then it was my Dad's birthday and in honour of his birthday present (a remote control helicopter, complete with lights for night travel!!) which he is no doubt driving my Mum mad with, I made him a helicopter cake!

Wiggly Worm Cake

Charlie. S had his 6th birthday party at the weekend and for it I made a wiggly worm cake.  I'm not sure who was more impressed the adults or the kids!!

To be honest it wasn't as difficult as I had anticipated and I got it finished in 2 hours.  It did help that the sponges had been made the night before and then wrapped up & stored until needed.  This not only made them a lot easier to carve but also saved me a lot of time. The bottom layer was just one sponge and the top was 3 x 6" sponges stacked and then carved into smaller discs.

The chocolate icing (not a good thing to work with when you are meant to be eating healthy as it smells and tastes like chocolate!!!!) was rolled into a strip and then I rolled it up from one end and then un-rolled around the outside of the cake.  The green 'grass' was created by twisting my star piping nozzle into the green icing.  The icing has to be rolled out quite thick in order to take the indentations of the nozzle otherwise it will tear.

The worms were made by using flesh tone / peach icing rolled into balls and slightly flattened and then stuck together.

I was secretly very pleased with how my apple turned out though!!

 What else but worm cupcakes to accompany!

Monster Biscuits

'Favourite Ne ice in the World' needed some biscuits that had been decorated to enter into a competition last weekend.  So I quickly bought some cookies from Sainsbury's and decided to do so monster biscuits with the icing that was left over from the monster cupcakes.

As I had only done 3 instead of the 4 biscuits needed (it was a long baking night!) when Grandma brought her round in the morning to collect them, she quickly decorated one herself to make up the 4.

She (or I?!) won the competition and received a bag of minstrels for her prize, of which I have not seen any of them!!  Hmmmm, will be having words I think!!

Octonauts Mission Completed

More late nights!  I finished Ve's godson's octonauts cake late last night.  Apparently she is very pleased with the results and the cake is being taken to Jamie Oliver's restaurant in Liverpool on Saturday for the party celebrations!  (Not jealous at all about Ve going to Jamie Oliver's restaurant!!).

I've had quite a few nice comments about the finished cake which are always nice to hear!  Thank you everyone!  Lets hope Charlie is equally pleased with it.....

Last Minute Cupcakes

Last minute cupcakes for Caroline's birthday.

Just plain vanilla swirled with a little pink food colouring along the edge, topped with a touch of glitter!

Dinosaur Cuteness

When I was at an anniversary party for some friends I got myself a commission!  One baby dinosaur was ordered and will be delivered tomorrow!  I tried out my new 'grass' piping nozzle and its fab!!

Monster Madness

A very late night last night finishing off Chief Taster's little boy's birthday cake.  Who knew that a dome shaped cake would take so long to cool down?!  Over an hour and a half for it to cool!!  It took over an hour to cook as well, seriously putting me behind on time.  But it did gave me time to do a last minute order for my OH who casually mentioned he'd like a dozen cupcakes for his work colleague's birthday the next day when he came home that evening!! (Hope you enjoy them Caroline!!).

Well, here we have a very handsome chap......

I got the great purple coloured icing from www.cakecraftworld.co.uk  It was slightly more expensive than normal at £3.15 for a 500g pack but I thought it was worth it for the overall effect of the cake.

The cake itself consists of 3 layers of cake using 7" cake tins sandwiched together and then on top I used a small dome shaped bowl to cook a cake in (took about an hour, plus an hour and a half cooling!!)  I used the same quantities of  mixture as if I was making a victoria sponge cake.  Then I crumb coated everything and placed two cupcakes (also crumb coated) for his feet and then a slightly smaller cupcake (cut in half) for his tummy bulge.  I used two packs of icing to cover him and to make his extremities!!

The book I was working from suggested using a sponge scourer to scuff up the icing to create 'fur'.  I didn't have any new ones so had to use my imagination so I used my star piping nozzle instead and sort of twisted the nozzle all over the cake to create the effect.  Took a bit longer but I think it looks good!  You have to be careful though not to tear the icing.  Doing this also covered a multitude of sins in the icing which would normally not be so forgiving, so all those creases just vanished!!

Anyway, now just the monster cupcakes to create tonight to go with the cake all ready for the party on Saturday!

Update......The cupcakes were a huge success!  All the children at the party loved them and quite a few of the adults were eyeing them up as well.  I have to say I was extremely pleased with how they turned out!

 purple buttercream with a touch of purple glitter!