John and Fiona - The Happiest Bride and Groom Ever

You remember a little while ago, I showed you my Wedding Cupcake Preview? Well, this is the cupcake tower that this lovely Bride decided upon. Seven tiers of vanilla cupcakes decorated in shell pink and a soft minty green with hundreds of little pink sugar petunias and the whole tower decorated with fresh flowers. A soft country feel for a beautiful Country Wedding and a lovely opportunity for me to put this together for John and Fiona, friends who live in our village.

Fiona chose a combination of three different cupcakes, one piped with ruffles and covered all over with sugar petunias

This lovely palest pink one, with a soft fondant dome and a butter cream swirl, all to be displayed in these laser cut cupcake wrappers.

And finally topped off with a 5 inch cutting cake. A cutting cake is important to many couples as traditionally cutting the cake is the first thing that the newlyweds do together as man and wife.

And, here it is, the seven tiers of cupcakes in all their glory.

It was an honour and a privilege to create this cupcake tower for such a lovely couple and I wish them many, many more happy decades together. Oh, that's right I haven't mentioned, this lovely couple have already spent three decades together before tying the knot, there were many, many jokes at the reception about the oldest stag in the Forest and the longest engagement in history. Incidentally, the longest engagement in history is usually credited to Octavio Guillen and Adriana Martinez who got engaged at 15 years old in 1902 and eventually married when they were both 82 in 1967.

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Ombre Ruffles and Stylised Orchids

This post is all about how li'l old me's cake came to be featured in the fabulous Cake Central magazine.

Back in February, I received a very exciting email from Cake Central Magazine, asking if I would like to decorate a cake to appear in their magazine. If you use Cake Central too, you can find me here.

I has been an ambition since childhood, to have my work published in paper form, but, I never expected that my first printed work, would be a picture of one of my cakes..

Once I had agreed to the cake decorating task, I was sent the inspiration for my cake. You can see the inspiration picture on page 48 of the magazine. This is a hard part of the process for me, as I am  used to having free reign when making a cake, or just some outlines for what is required. Even harder, was that the inspiration picture I was given was mainly white!  I am not keen on working with white, mainly because I find it really difficult to photograph well and I was going to have to photograph the finished cake to send to the magazine. A little artistic licence and creativity was going to be required here.

The biggest challenge though, being a busy working mum and all that, was finding the time to make this cake. Fortunately, my lovely, kind and considerate husband took our son to his mothers one Saturday afternoon and this was my cake decorating window.

I had a few ideas of what I thought I would make and also flicked through some back issues of Cake Central, to remind myself of the sort of cakes that were usually featured. Flicking through the previous issues made me feel rather anxious and a little unworthy of this challenge. I knew I couldn't make a cake as formal and grand as those featured, even if I might have the skills, I simply didn't have the time.

As well as being inspired by the photo, I was also told, the cake had to feature an ombre or colour graduation effect. I settled on the cake design you see here, piped ruffles in royal icing, graduating in colour in spring time hues of zesty lemon and lime and set off with a little dark violet to make the other colours pop, hoping that this would be reasonably quick to decorate and eye-catching enough for the magazine.

I made up a big batch of royal icing and then played a little colouring roulette as I had to guess how much of each colour icing I was going to need to pipe on to each tier.

One of my aims for this year is to learn how to make sugar flowers and I started this design by crafting a large zesty green cymbidium orchid like those shown in the inspiration photo, intending to perch the orchid, at a jaunty angle, on the top of the cake. Having finished my ruffle piping, I gently set the orchid in place and it just didn't look right. Somehow looking too formal and out of place on this whimsically styled cake. I then set around making a dozen or so of more stylised mini orchids, which I think suit this cake a lot better.

The next day, I took my photos and sent them into the magazine. And then, sometime later, another lovely email arrives, telling me that my cake had been featured in the magazine and including a badge, which you can now see proudly displayed at the side of this page.

So, if you see this magazine, open it up and you'll see my cake! I have only seen it in electronic format, as I have not found the paper version of this magazine here in England, but I still feel rather proud.

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Two for One Zebra Cakes

Zebra Cake Number One

This vanilla and chocolate zebra cake, decorated with basket weave piping using dark chocolate fudge icing is for a very lovely friend to wish her all the best with a new career, sad as I am for myself that I will be seeing less of her, I am so happy that she is moving a step closer to realising the ambitions she has worked and studied, so many years for. She truly is quite an inspiration.

One of the nice things about being someone that bakes, is that when a special gift is required, for a certain special someone, there is usually a special cake I can conjure up. I couldn't decide, what cake would be special enough for this momentous occasion. My lovely friend, mentioned casually one day (aka as dropping a not very subtle hint) how much she liked this Dark Chocolate fudge icing, so I took the hint and tried to decide what cake should go underneath. I think actually she would have been happy with just a tub of the icing, but, I rather felt it should be carried to her mouth on a delicious and stunning cake.

After much searching, I was finally inspired by a zebra cake in the current issue of sweet magazine (this is a newish magazine from the folks that publish Mollie Makes). The recipe featured is by Lily Vanilly, you can find it here. Underneath this chocolate fudge icing is a three layer six inch zebra cake.

I have never made a zebra cake before, so was quite nervous and a little sceptical embarking on this recipe. The zebra effect is made by splitting the cake mix into two and adding different flavours or colours to each part of the mix. For this cake, chocolate and vanilla.

Then the cake mix is added to the tins, in alternating scoops of each mix, into the centre of the cake pan each time. I used quarter cup measures to scoop the cake mix with. You don't need to be particularly accurate and the zebra effect appears as if my magic during cooking. To see if the zebra effect worked for my cake, you'll have to scroll down to the bottom. (I probably wouldn't be showing you if it hadn't!)

Decoration

By special request, this cake features dark chocolate fudge icing, it is the same icing used for my Dark Chocolate and Banana Rose cake and you can find it here.

The icing is really easy to make, as long as you make sure that all of the chocolate has melted, if not, you can get lumps that get stuck in your icing tip / nozzle when you pipe it. The only difficult thing, with this icing, is trying to work out the exact moment when it has thickened enough, but not too much to be able to pipe. I think, I went a little too soon with this one, hence, my piping became a session of tilt roulette as I had to tilt my turntable to get the icing onto the cake,  without the cake sliding off.

This basket weave effect is piped with a Wilton 1D and the swirl border with a Wilton 2D. To find out how to pipe basket weave, take a look at my Lavender and Coconut Cake.

Zebra Cake Number Two

So, after filling my three six inch pans for the above cake about two thirds full, I still had quite a lot of cake batter left, so I quickly grabbed a seven inch cake pan and carried on scooping. Below is the seven inch cake, as baked. Just look at all those lovely stripes.

This cake had quite a dome on it and trimming it would have made it considerably smaller, I did just trim it a little, little bit and then decided to pipe chocolate roses on the top as this compliments the domed shape beautifully.

After the success of the zebra cake, I was in the mood for experimenting, so decided to try a whipped ganache to top this second cake. I had read about this often, but, have never tried it. I have to tell you that this whipped chocolate ganache tastes like the most luxurious premium chocolate ice cream (except that it is not frozen, obviously!)

I started piping the roses in the centre, working outwards and then over-piping another rose on top of the one in the middle. This cake is piped with an Ateco 887 nozzle and I ran out of whipped ganache before finishing the sides, which is why I have smoothed them off.

And here it is, the cut slice of the zebra cake with all its zebra stripes revealed. I am really rather happy with this cake and busily planning what other combinations of zebra cake I can maybe make

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Springtime Springerle Birthday Biscuits

It was one of my very best friends Birthday's recently so I decided to make her some biscuits for her Birthday and I made the biscuits that you see below. She loved these, in fact she didn't want to eat them because she said they were too pretty

I like these well enough, mainly because I am totally in love with these amazing Springerle moulds from House on the Hill, but, something about them didn't feel quite right. Somehow they just weren't "springtime" enough.

I mixed up some fondant in springtime colours to try that.

The weather here in England has been most un-spring-like just of late, so we really needed something to break through the cold grey days and all the rain we have been having. Then, I had a flash of inspiration, I didn't have to use the cookie cutter that was the closest shape to the cookies. Much activity followed as I tried as many different shapes as I could find, until I settled on this, much used one, which just seemed to frame the design really nicely.

I quickly baked a batch of sugar cookies cutting them out with this cutter so, things were coming together very nicely. These are made just the same way as my Old Rose Cookies, except you use the mould shown here and this cookie cutter which is the smallest one from Wilton's from the Heart set.

This is how they came out.

Look a bit different don't they?

I've just had an idea how to make these even better, so watch this space!

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Even more dress biscuits

You may remember these dress cookies that I showed you recently, that I decorated using a stencil. I think they need a little something extra but I am not quite sure what yet?

For these dress cookies, I have been using a cookie cutter by Autumn Carpenter that comes as part of a set. As well as the cutter, the set comes with three thin sheets of plastic for embossing the cookies. The ideas is you roll some fondant, use the texture mat to emboss the pattern and then cut the fondant and stick it on the cookie. So simple to do and looks really impressive



Roll out the fondant to about 5mm. Rub a small about of vegetable fat on to the fondant to stop in from sticking. Emboss the pattern onto the fondant using the end of a rolling pin and a circular motion.Alternately use the method from the Autumn Carpenter site.

Try them both and see what works for you














Cut out  the fondant using the cutter, then gently life and stick to the cookie, use some ping gel or edible glue if you have it, if not a bit of water normally does the job well enough.









If you use the three texture mats that come with the kit, these are the embossed dresses that you will have. Other than the one on the left, which is always my favourite, they don't look much at this stage and need a little extra embellishment.

For the dress on the right, I used an edible paint pen to paint over the flowers and the swirls. This was an absolute disaster, the pen just flattened and tore at the fondant and the silver colour I was using did not show up, this went straight into my families "eat me" biscuit tin.




The the dress on the left, I added a bow that I had dusted with a white lustre powder.

As I had just picked up some new lustre from one of my favourite, beautiful and well stocked shops, salt and pepper, I thought I would try it. I brushed another of these dresses with a Bridal Satin made by Squires Kitchen. The colour I used here is Verona (Green). It gives a sort of two tone effect and this lustre is satiny rather than sparkly. (This is my very favourite)

I added a bow in the same colour fondant that the dress is made from











Then finally I added some lustre brushed daisies to another dress and here they all are together. Maybe the daisies are my favourite?

Which one do you like best?

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