60th Anniversary Cake

Today is my Grandparents' 60th Wedding Anniversary however we celebrated it over the weekend so that family and close friends could join in. I was given the chance to make the main cake and I was really excited about it because I have been dying to make sugarpaste flowers for a cake top since I started the course back in September.
I knew straight away what I was going to do as my grandma loves orchids and her garden in general and my grandad loves chocolate cake so I put the two together and got the following:

The piping work was done with butter cream icing. I know it's usually done with glace icing but I find that difficult to work with. I found the floral designs in a cake magazine and knew they would work with the orchid spray on top of the cake.

Harry Potter Cake

When my friend Jessica said she wanted me to make her 13th birthday cake I was like 'yeah sure can't wait'. Then she told me the theme was Harry Potter and all I could picture was the amazing Potter cakes I had seen Duff make on Ace Of cakes - I was a little worried to say the least!

After a couple of days of trying to think up ideas on what to do I ended up looking through all the photos of other Harry Potter cakes on the Internet. They were all either Hogwarts or the train or Harry's head. Basically there were a lot of similar ideas going on so I left the Internet even more confused on what to do.

After a couple of weeks (really) I finally decided I was going to make Harry, Ron and Hermione figures and have them studying away in a dorm room type scene. It took a while to get the figures made and once I'd finished them I had gone off the dorm room idea all together.

Four days before the cake had to be finished and handed over to Jess I had finally made up my mind: I was going to make the Whomping Willow scene complete with Ron's rat Scabbers. It didn't take long for it to take shape once I'd made the tree out of rice crispy mixture and covered it in fondant. The rock Harry is sat on was also made with crispy treats. The main cake was checker board with chocolate and vanilla sponge and covered in vanilla butter icing and the top layer was covered in green fondant so that the figures didn't end up mushy.

I was really excited when I put the finishing touches to it and Jessica loved it.

Giant Cupcake

I love making cupcakes so when my Grandma bought me a giant silicon cupcake case I was really excited to try it out. I have to admit after decorating it I thought it looked more like a mushroom than a cupcake but that could have something to do with part of the cake sticking to the silicon case. Note for next time: buy some Cake Release. I've heard on the grape vine it's well worth buying.

The cake is vanilla with a strawberry butter cream filling and decorated with little white flowers.

Celebration Cakes

The following cakes are a collection of celebration cakes. The chocolate cake below was for my dad to take into work with him. All of his colleagues were asking when they were going to taste one of these cakes he had been talking about, so he asked me to make a large chocolate sponge cake with loads of chocolate butter cream so here it is:








For my sister's birthday she wanted me to make a Jabba the Hut cake so I said of course I'll make it for you. I think she thought I was joking but here it is:

The section that I thought would be the hardest to do was making the shape of Jabba before covering with fondant but in fact that was the easy bit. I found colouring the icing more difficult and I'm wishing I had used a yellow colour for his face as the orange is a little too orange. But Beck loved it so that's the main thing.

For my mum's birthday she wanted a dragon cake. I had just been taught how to do brush embroidery so I thought it would be good practice to use that skill on a cake. It was more difficult than I thought it would be because the first stage is pinning the picture on the top of the cake and that leaves the basic structure for piping onto but because it was thin and had many curves and colours it looked like a dot to dot puzzle gone wrong. I'm pleased with how it turned out but

next time I'll try to keep the dots to a minimum.

The rose cake was the first cake I'd decorated with flowers before. The roses were made in class and it was the beginning of my love for flower making. I keep hoping for someone to ask for a flower cake so I can sit for hours making bud after bud. It may sound boring but it is so relaxing.

The cake below was the first cake I piped onto. I think it was the second lesson where we made templates out of greaseproof paper and traced around it with dots using a cocktail stick, then it was a case of using the piping techniques we had learnt the previous week. For a first attempt I was very pleased with myself.