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.

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!!

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.

Pretty In Pink

I am practising flowers!  I have a wedding coming up next month and I need to do a lot of flowers!!  Currently this petunia cutter is my favourite....

Emigrating Cupcakes

These are for a lady in OH's office whose brother is emigrating to Australia.  They are lemon flavoured and vanilla flavoured cupcakes.

The design for them was inspired from The Cupcake Kitchen who do some very similar to this.  The lady who runs the Cupcake Kitchen also has a blog.....give her a look!...  www.bakingbusymum.woodpress.com

I thought they looked quite effective & I hope they like them!

Freebie Office Cakes!

A few cakes were left over from the engagement cakes, so OH took them into his office....

Engagement Cakes

Hello!  I'm back from taking a well earned holiday with the OH, in fact we've been back a month but I've just been too lazy to blog!  Had a thoroughly fabulous time in Turkey, gained weight (booo!) by eating too much delicious bread, Kunefe & Hosmerim and the most amazing lamb!  Even though I am not too keen in general on lamb, every dish I had on holiday was just great.  Kunefe and Hosmerim were two of the local desert dishes that me & OH took quite a taking to!  Sweet.....but oh so nice!!

Anyway, enough of post-holiday ramblings and back to baking.  I must say I am loving the Great British Bake Off that is currently on BBC2 at the moment....the standard of bakes has improved dramatically since the program first started a few years ago.  Some of the tarts that they created this week were amazing! Plus there is always the advantage of watching Mr Hollywood, the Silver Fox......very easy on the eye!!

I'm now getting back into the swing of baking again after not doing any for a few weeks so when my friend Mrs S & her husband, Mr S welcomed baby Oliver (formerly known as Little S) into the world I made them a few loaf cakes to see them through the plethora of visitors that would be going through their house over the coming week to see Oliver.  I made from the Hummingbird Bakery the very delicious Honey & Walnut Loaf Cake and a couple of Banana Cakes.  I'm not sure that the honey & walnut one made it to their guests as I think they secretly snaffled that one to themselves, but I think the banana ones made it to some guests at least!!  But it was when OH mentioned that Ve's daughter had got engaged recently; the perfect excuse to dust the pinny off & get some cupcakes done was made!

Congratulations to Amy & Tom!

Baby Shower

Mrs S is about ready to pop out Little S! So me and Chief Taster and another friend decided to throw her a Baby Shower a couple of weeks ago.

A few silly games were done, including making Mrs S decide what was the 'content' of several nappies and guessing the 'flavour' of jars of baby food!  We then had a big fat baby-tastic quiz and finally we had Guess Who where we all had to supply baby pictures of ourselves and a present day picture and then we had to match the pictures up.

I have to say, I did think my picture was 'quality' as my OH says.....nothing has really changed much in adult life......still got that glass in my hand and not letting go!

Chief Taster went from that to Chief Butty Maker for the day as she prepared lots of sandwiches for us all to nibble on throughout the afternoon.  Unfortunately it absolutely chucked it down with rain so we couldn't go outside as we had planned, but it worked out quite well at the end of the day.

I made a Red Velvet Cake with a delicious Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting on (my new favourite frosting at the moment) and a Strawberry & Rose Scented Cream filled Sponge by special request of Chief Taster and some vanilla cupcakes with little blue baby feet & hearts on (Little S is a boy!)

We decided as a little treat, everyone received a Hotel Chocolat's Millionaire Shortbread Chocolate complete in a Mini Munchkin box to take home with them....

Mrs S had a great day, got lots of lovely goodies for Little S and everyone seemed to have a good time!  Result!  Now we just have to wait for the little fella's grand appearance!

Father's Day Cupcakes

To celebrate Father's Day these were again the lemon & raspberry filled cupcakes with lemon buttercream topping.  I put a couple in bags as well & tied with a bit of ribbon which looked quite nice

Thank You Cupcakes

A small request from OH for some cakes to say thank you for someone were whipped up over the weekend.  These were a lemon sponge filled with raspberry jam and topped with lemon buttercream.

I used a lime green sugarpaste with a more pastel shade of green to contrast against the creamy yellowness of the buttercream.  Where I had used the embossing mat to create a pattern, I dusted over with gold lustre dust so it would pick the pattern up.  A touch of lime green glitter to finish and we were done!

Autumn Colour Cupcakes

Just a few examples of cupcakes (lemon & chocolate orange) with different types of flowers done in 'autumnal colours'