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!