Roses Birthday Cake

The Rose cake was a chance for me to try making roses a different way from previous times. They are formed around a Mexican hat shape of fondant and you build the petals up round that. It's quite fiddly compared to wired flowers but still looks effective.
The cake is a Victoria sponge with strawberry jam and butter cream filling with a thin layer of butter cream around the outside to help affix the royal icing to the cake.
I got to try a new gadget out as well that marks out a guideline to pipe pearl garlands around the cake.
The cake was for Bev as a gift for her mother's birthday and I have been told that it didn't last long which is always a good sign.

Sugarpaste Flowers

I made these flower sprays in class. It took four to five weeks to make and assemble, which seems like a long time but the classes were only two hours each week so that doesn't seem as bad.
I really enjoyed making the roses, the lilies and the tiny white flowers (can't remember the name at the moment). I can sit for hours making sugar paste flowers. It's so relaxing and therapeutic, but also fiddly from time to time. This lily spray was a bit of both - relaxing and fiddly.
In class the teacher wanted the sprays to stay white with the green leaves but I didn't know that at the time so brushed mine in yellows, pinks, reds and greens then steamed them so there was no turning back but I wasn't the only one in class who had done the same - oops!

If you like my lily spray I have also done a spray of orchids that can be found on an earlier post titled '60th anniversary cake'.

These are some of the flowers that didn't make the final lily spray so I thought it would be nice to make them into a smaller, less impressive spray of flowers.

The lily took four attempts to make and still ended up being wrong in its colouring and also, when you hold it up, the petals don't sit right. I'm still pleased with the spray but I know its not perfect.

New Brownies and Cupcakes

The pink flower cupcakes were a birthday gift for my mum's friend Anne. The sponge and icing flavour were both vanilla and the fondant flowers cheered them up a treat along with some pink glitter.

This is my third attempt at making brownies and I think I have just about cracked it as I managed to find the recipe I used for the first batch. This batch were a tiny bit too firm so now I know not to put as much flour in as I did this time and I also used white chocolate for the chunks which made them really yummy :-) Next time they should hopefully be perfect - fingers crossed.

I made these dainty cupcakes for one of my mum's friends who was going to a hen do and the theme was pink, hence the pink butter icing. I enjoyed making these because of their simplicity and size, tiny cupcakes are so cute.

The sponge was vanilla with a vanilla and pink butter cream, topped off with a fondant heart and pink glitter.

Scary Were-Rabbit

I'm a huge fan of Easter so I had to make a cake to celebrate such a fun event. What better way than with a rabbit... a Were-Rabbit eek!!!

I recently purchased a Wallace and Gromit celebration cake book with lots of cute cake ideas and this was one of them. I know the icing should have been royal icing but we didn't have enough to cover the whole cake so I improvised with butter cream (my favourite) and used the royal icing for the face, ears and vegetables (which sadly aren't counted as one of my five a day. Shame).

The cake was a mixture of vanilla and chocolate which had been sat in the freezer since March and it tasted surprisingly yummy and moist.
Here are the pics, I hope you like them:

New Cupcake Recipe

Yesterday I felt like trying a new cupcake recipe. It is one of the recipes on my cake decorating board that I've been drooling over for the last couple of months and finally decided to have a go. It's a straightforward recipe, one of those all in ones. The difference was mainly the icing - instead of icing sugar, cocoa powder and margarine it used double cream and melted chocolate which made chocolate ganache. It's yummy, very strong in chocolate flavour, nice with a spoon of cream.

I had help decorating the cupcakes from my friend Jessica (Harry Potter cake). She said she would like to learn how to decorate cakes so I thought it would be a perfect idea for her to help with these and I think she did a great job as they look loads better with the purple and pink flowers, butterflies and bears.

I think I still prefer my original recipe for cupcakes but it's always fun trying out new ideas :-)