Wednesday, 16 January 2013

Birthday Butterflies

A lovely butterfly cake for my friends mum who likes butterflies!  The butterflies were actually a lot paler in 'real-life' so the whole effect was quite delicate.

Pearl lustre spray is my new favourite thing at the moment (the stuff smells like the drink american cream soda!) so everything is getting sprayed with it!!



Tuesday, 15 January 2013

40th Twin Birthday

Two good friends of mine turned 40...both are big Liverpool supporters.  I had trouble in my household doing this cake as my OH is an avid Everton supporter!  Sabotage could have happened very easily!!



Gorgeous Godson

My godson is 16! Eek! where did all that time fly by?!!


He was most impressed that I used 'real' popcorn!! Lol!

Christmas Cupcakes

A friend who is a teaching assistant wanted Christmas cupcakes to give out to her class when they broke up for the holidays.  These proved quite popular with their little individual cases!





Christening Cake

Arrrrgh!  Its been soooooooo long since I last 'blogged'!!!  Happy New Year to my few readers!!  Its been a busy few weeks and I'm now going to bombard my page with updated pics of cakes that were done over the Christmas period!!

Lets kick off with a lovely & simple christening cake.  It turned out so nice, I was really pleased with it.  Accompanying cupcakes went with it and according to the family it all went down a treat!

The cake itself was vanilla with vanilla buttercream filling.






Friday, 2 November 2012

Gruff the Gruffalo

Well you met Gruff a few weeks ago and he was finished last week in time for Tom's birthday.  I feel I have to point out, Tom is 25!!! (he loves the Gruffalo.....ahhh!)




Clandestine Cake Club

I finally got my email last Friday telling me the venue of the Clandestine Cake Club (its all very secret!), so I started baking for that cake on Saturday.  The theme was Trick O' Treat so I decided to do a spiced pumpkin & walnut  (or butternut squash in this case) cake with an orange cream cheese frosting.

I've made this cake before and its gone down well (the recipe is on the Good Food website) so I felt quite confident about making it.  I added extra spices to the original recipe and I decided to add walnuts to it to give a bit of variation.  If you like carrot cake, you will love this one it has a very similar texture and taste to it.

I spooked it up a bit with the addition of a glitter bat and some fondant pumpkins and scatted some bats and ghosts around the cake.

The CCC was great.  It was lovely to meet so many other bakers who are so enthusiastic about cake.  There was no air of competition with anyone's cake and everyone took a genuine interest in what other people had baked.  I took along Mrs S as a guest and we had a fabulous afternoon drinking tea & coffee and eating LOTS of cake.....best thing was, everything was divided up at the end and you took home what was left, how fab is that?!!  Mrs S was very impressed, so much so that she might even dust off a pinny and bake next time as well when we meet up again in December

 Spiced Pumpkin & Walnut Cake with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

 Graveyard cake complete with lit up pumpkins!

 Soggy Moggy ginger cake



 Selection of the cakes made - there were 10 or 11 all in all

Complimentary Jasmine and Very Berry teas courtesy of the venue

All in all it was a great way to spend a couple of hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  Can't wait for the next one!!

Weddings.....

Phew, last week was a whirlwind of activities, mainly all happening at the weekend.  Some serious baking took place in my house last week and my trusty Kenwood K-Mix was worth every (expensive) penny!  Without it I doubt I would have managed all that I did / baked.

Baking preparations for me started earlier on in the week where I hand made over 190 petunia fondant sugarpaste flowers, individually dusted each one with lustre dust and placed a little edible pearls in the centre of each flower.....time consuming to say the least!  Each flower then had to set up  ready for them to be placed on top of the cupcake.

The theme was autumnal colours so I chose 3 colours for the flowers....brown (chocolate flavoured sugarpaste), peach and cream (white chocolate flavoured sugarpaste) all dusted with golds and bronzes


A few days beforehand I had iced the top tier cake and decorated with the same flowers so that was setting nicely.  The bride's mum had made a delicious smelling fruit cake (well doused with alcohol she assured me!) but I was just asked to decorate it to tie in with the cupcakes.  I have to say, I don't like working with marzipan.....terrible stuff to handle; very sticky so I was glad when that job was done!




Next up was making the cupcakes; lemon with a lemon buttercream and chocolate orange with chocolate orange buttercream.  The wedding was on the Saturday so I booked the Friday off work, collected the cake stand first thing in the morning, had a cup of tea and was baking by 10am!................Nine and a half hours later, I finally finished!!  I have a stone floor in my kitchen and standing on it for literally 9 1/2 hours did my feet no good at all!  To say I was shattered was a little bit of an understatement!!

With all the cupcakes baked, it was then on to icing and decorating them..........

 This was all the ingredients for the cakes!

 Lemon cupcakes all lined up

chocolate orange cupcakes cooling

I made extra in case of any mishaps with the cases etc so then it was on with the icing.

All the cakes were sprayed with a pearl lustre spay which gave a really nice sheen to the cakes.  At £8 a can it was expensive stuff (I went through 2 cans) but I thought it made the cakes look really nice.


Then next morning it was off to the venue to set up.  It took a fair few boxes to transport everything..


Apart from the manager of the venue being a bit difficult with where I could set the cakes up, everything went smoothly (I would have liked to have taken some better pictures of the cakes when all set up but that wasn't possible so what follows are a bit blurry I'm afraid).

Most important of all though was the Bride & Groom liked them and they both had an amazing day and night (watching the mother of the bride showing her dancing moves gangnam style will stay with me forever!!!!)






We had a brilliant time at the evening reception and the buffet was great.....mini Fish & Chips with Mushy Peas!! (the fish wasn't that 'mini' either!) great idea!!


Friday, 19 October 2012

Place Your Bets....

It was my OH's Grandad's birthday yesterday so we are visiting at the weekend to drop his birthday cake off.  He likes to place a bet does Grandad, so this is my homage to him!  I got the idea from a cake that www.jennyhuntcakes.co.uk had done and I thought it looked really good so decided to give it a go!

 Everything on the cake is edible including the coins....good old chocolate coins!!



Monday, 15 October 2012

I can hear a Gruffalo........

I've been asked to do a Gruffalo cake and this is a sneak preview of my Gruffalo!  I got the idea for the cake from www.cutelittlecupcakes.co.uk who have done a brilliant Gruffalo cake.  Hopefully my finished one will look just as good as theirs!

I have to say, they do some fab looking cupcakes on their website but jeez, they charge alot for them!  £2 per cake with a minimum order of 12.....thats £24 a box!!!  Hmmmm, maybe I should put my prices up?!?!?!

Anyway, introducing Gruff the Gruffalo!!




Millie's 1st Birthday

Another 1st Birthday cake this weekend was dropped off on Saturday   A beautifully simple cake which looked lovely when finished with a cute bear peeping round a number one with daisies and a heart with Millie's name on it.  Millie's mum said the cake didn't last longer than half an hour......a good sign?!! Lol!!



Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Peppa Pig

A little girl whose 1st birthday cake I did last year (a number one shape) has just turned 2 - how time flies by so quick!  Her mum said she was mad on Peppa Pig and so she wanted of course a Peppa Pig cake!  We decided on a flat cake as opposed to a 3-d model and I did cupcakes in the same theme to match.





Neon Icing Toy Story Cupcakes

Just a few vanilla cupcakes for a little boy who is mad on Toy Story.  I decided to do neon coloured buttercream and the colours came out very well.  Using gel paste's are far better than liquid food colouring as they are a more concentrated colour.  Even though they are more expensive, you use less of it which makes them more cost effective!  The toppers are little rice paper discs with Toy Story characters on them.