Baby Girl Cupcakes

My friends, friend has just had a baby girl and my friend wanted to send a dozen cupcakes to celebrate. The order was for chocolate cupcakes covered in pink, so that's what I did.

I went for a chocolate brownie cupcake and tried to colour the butter cream icing with raspberry jam but it went a very pale nondescript pink so I double checked that I could use some food colouring to turn it pink as food colouring is pretty much made up of E numbers and me being a baby novice was unsure as to whether E no. are good for new mummies. Anyway it turns out that a little bit of colouring is fine.

For the decorations I made bee's, caterpillars, rubber ducks, booties, rainbows, butterflies and flowers. The middle two I covered in pink fondant and piped on Baby Josephine. Another four cupcakes were covered in pink fondant and they had the caterpillar and rainbow designs on.

Both friend and new parents were very pleased with the cupcakes.

Toy Story and Hello Kitty Cake

For this cake I'd been asked to make a joint birthday cake half to be for a girl and the other half for a boy. The first design was to be princess and pirates but children being children changed their minds and wanted Hello Kitty and Toy Story instead which was fine with me as I've done Toy Story before and know what Hello Kitty looks like.

It would have been easier to have made two separate cakes but after finishing the cake this afternoon I think it works quite well. 

The cake is chocolate with chocolate butter cream and covered in teddy bear brown and white fondant. 

For the Toy Story side I made the brown fondant look like wooden flooring by rolling lines over it to make slats and tried to add texture with a leaf veining tool but it didn't work as well as it did on the toadstool cake. Sat on top of the flooring is a cow mat with woody and a green alien, I've made them both before so I knew the best ways to get all the detail in with out any struggles this time round.

The Hello Kitty side is covered in lots of flowers, its taken most of the morning to make them all and for once no breakages. The larger flowers have yellow centres and the small ones have a pearl candy in the middle.

I found Kitty's face to be the most challenging to do, it looks straightforward but took three attempts before I was satisfied it looked like the image. I think it was the size of the head compared to the body which is slightly larger that was making it difficult to replicate.

To finish the cake I piped on Happy Birthday but had the dilemma of what colour to use. I ended up going with yellow as both sides have yellow on and its a gender free colour.

Toadstool Birthday Cake

The Toadstool cake was for a first birthday which I love making because they are usually very cute and this was no exception as soon as I was given the order I couldn't wait to make it.

The first thing I did was cover the board in green fondant and stippled it with a brush to give it a lawn effect, then I left it over night to dry. 

The next step was making the cakes, it took one 8" cake for the top and two 6" cakes for the base. After butter creaming and dirty icing I covered the top of the toadstool first which sat on a thin 8" board for structure. The top was straightforward once I'd placed the red fondant over the cake I went a little crazy covering it in white dots it could be so easy to go over board but I'm hoping I stopped at the right moment. 

The base of the toadstool I covered in white fondant and decorated it with three wood effect windows and a little wooden door which I'd used a leaf veining tool to give them a wooden look then finished with a yellow handle and arrows for hinges. Lastly I rolled small pieces of green fondant in the palm of my hand to make blades of grass that went around the toadstool.

The little snail was made with a piece of black fondant shaped like a worm with its head of the ground and then took a piece of purple fondant rolled it into a thin sausage shape and then rolled it round and stuck it to the body. To finish the board of all I did was placed some white blossom flowers around to brighten up the lawn.

Goal Keeper Football Cake

For the football cake I'd been told that the lad really likes football and that his position is a goal keeper, also colours should be blue and white. Now I'm not a fan of football but I know there are a few teams whose strips are blue and white so I went for the safe option of white shorts with a blue top. 

The figure was originally going to be stood up but it was a bit too tall for the goal post and I thought an action position would look better. For the hair I moulded a piece of brown fondant on top of his head and used a pair of scissors to cut into the fondant to give it a spiky hair look, which unbeknown to me is exactly how the Robbie wears his hair. She shoots, she scores :-)

I had a lot of fun with the goal post, originally I was going to make it out of royal icing so it would have a net and posts but my attempts at trying to remove the royal icing goal broke, several times. So my Grandma gave me a bunch of drinks straws to have a play with and finally I managed to build a goal with three straws, two full straws for the posts and the end of a straw for the cross bar. With the straws being clear I put three cakepop sticks inside to make it stand out more.

The cake flavour was chocolate with chocolate butter cream and covered in Lincoln Green fondant with royal icing field markings and message. To make sure there was enough blue and white on the cake I covered the board in blue and white and finished it of with a blue ribbon around the board. 

Daisy Cupcakes

After putting the Bridal cupcakes over at the bakery I've already had interest in them but for a birthday instead of a wedding. For the order I made six bridal style cupcakes which I've put a photo of at the bottom of the post, they were exactly like the other bridal cupcakes I posted a couple of days ago with the addition of a name so I won't go into detail about them. Along with the bridal cupcakes I made four Daisy cupcakes which I kept in the peach and cream colour scheme. I have made a lot of the Daisy cupcakes but to make them a bit more glitzy I sprinkled on some edible pearls.

Bridal Cupcakes

I'd been asked by the bakery to make some fake cupcakes for the display unit as they have had a number of people asking about them, so I went straight on the Internet to see how much it would cost to buy some fake cupcake bases to decorate. However I came across an extremely handy video on YouTube showing people how to make fake cupcakes, I can't remember the name of the video but if you type in 'fake cupcakes' in a search engine it should come up on the first page. 

Anyways the main body of the cupcake is made with expanding foam that you would usually use to fill a hole in a wall. If you are planning on making some fake cupcakes yourself use an old or buy a cheap muffin tin as its chemical based and I'm not sure how many washes it would need to go through before it could be used safely to make edible cupcakes. Be warned once you have put cases in the muffin tin and popped a 2p piece in the bottom of each make sure you only go half way up the case with the foam as it does expand by a lot, I had to trim my down as there is no way on earth I could make an edible cupcake that big. Leave it to set over night.

Once the foam has dry, trim it down if needs be and decorate with whatever design you want. For a more detailed explanation watch the video I told you about it is really good.

For my cupcakes I went for a bridal theme, I kept the palette in pastel shades with a vintage feel. The decorations vary from pearls, roses and butterflies. The design that I found troublesome was the blue cupcake covered in white flowers, the petals are extremely delicate once dried and when boxing it up a number of petals fell off and I had to quickly make some more. The other design which took a bit of working out was the rose and pearls design, the first attempt at this I made the pearls way to small and it didn't look right so I started again with a larger pearl which totally works and doesn't take as long to make. 

For the large rose cupcake I used two rose petal cutters they were the fourth and fifth larger cutters. To make it I cut out the petals and built it straight onto the cupcake except for the middle section which I made a rose and popped it in to the middle to finish it.

Daisy and Easter Cupcakes

For this order they wanted some of the daisy cupcakes mixed in with an Easter selection so I pretty much knew what I was going to do for the Easter selection. 

I made three different designs the first was the daisy which I made with a gerbera cutter and a small ball of yellow fondant for the middle. The second design was the traditional mini eggs in a nest and the third was a bunny theme which if you haven't guess already I do love the little critters :-) for these cupcakes I used a holly leaf cutter and halved it to get the grass mound and a bunny cutter for the bunny then finished it of with a mini egg and blossom flowers.

The flavours were a mixture of vanilla, chocolate and marble. 

Pink and White Birthday Cake

This birthday cake was an order for the bakery. It was a straight forward cake, vanilla sponge and butter cream and decorated in pink and white fondant with the birthday message on top.

The writing was piped on with royal icing and to make it look a bit more fancy I added beading and a pink fondant ribbon around it.