All About The Roses...

My gorgeous sister-in-law Mel and her lovely bloke Nev are getting married next August and they have asked me to do their wedding cake!  I've got a pretty free reign, which is quite exciting, but Mel has said that she likes the idea of cupcakes or minature cakes.  I've been starting to experiment...

The minature cakes are chocolate with a buttercream frosting and then covered in fondant icing coloured with pink colouring (the colour is slightly different than in the photo).  I made the rose from white fondant icing and added some glitter!

Here are some lemon drizzle cupcakes decorated with pink cream cheese frosting piped like a rose and then sprinkled with some glitter (it's all about the glitter!).  I just used plain cupcake cases as they were lying around but I think they would look better if they had a solid colour so will have a hunt for some prettier ones. 

I showed my little experiments to Mel and Nev and they seemed to really like them but I'm not convinced that we are there yet.  I'll get to it drawing a few more designs and making some more examples to make sure they have an amazing wedding cake!

Ice Cream Cupakes

As I am writing this it is tipping it down outside and it feels like summer is suddenly long gone!  I made these just over a month ago for my lovely husband's birthday, using a chocolate cupcake recipe.  I was very impressed at how they came out and thought it was a little bit special - but then I looked at a 'how to' videos on youtube and they said these were super easy and they'd been making them since they were brownies! Ah well, Andy liked them!

Sunflower Cake

I didn't technically make this cake but wanted to include it in my blog as I thought the design was just so unusual and fabulous!  My friend James asked me to supervise him in making a cake for a couple who had just had their first baby, Dharma.  Dharma's mum's favourite flowers are sunflowers so James wanted to incorporate these into the cake.  This was the result!

We cut up a pineapple into really thin slices and gently baked it in the oven, then covered a cake with the pineapple 'sunflowers'.  James also made letters by flooding some royal icing - he was very proud! I hear the cake went down very well with the new parents too!

Christmas 2010

This is slightly out of season, although I'm beginning to think about this year's christmas cake designs, but here are three christmas cakes I made for family and work last year (I was at Waterstone's in Bath).

Red and gold were the theme for the starry cake and the one for Waterstone's.  For the other cake I cut out different sized triangles from white, dark green and light green fondant icing and drizzled white royal icing to create some snow covered trees.  I loved the idea of the trees going all the way round the cake and leaving the top without any further decoration.  It also meant, as we munched our way through the cake, that it still looked pretty half-eaten!

Birthday Cupcakes

The second party for my mother-in-law's birthday was more of a lavish affair! She had invited around 80 people so I set to making cupcakes!  

I made chocolate and orange, vanilla, orange and lemon cupcakes, all iced with a cream cheese frosting.  I used a recipe my mum had found in a magazine.  It's a basic cupcake recipe but you add a syrup to the just-cooked cupcakes to give them added moisture! Yum!

The sugarpaste butterflies were deceptively simple to make - I coloured some florist sugarpaste in a variety of bright colours then stamped out the butterflies with a cutter and left them on a folded piece of paper to dry in a V-shape.  Then, with some white royal icing, I gave each butterfly a body and some decorative dots on the wings.

The party had a beach theme so I decided on bright and happy colours and a big flower for the topper cake.  This was a bit more tricky but, helped along by the amazing Alan Dunn and Sugar Flowers for Cake Decorating, I got there in the end!

Here is the end result, in situ.  We managed to get a few photographs before the cupcakes started disappearing!

A Very Chocolate Cake

I have this brilliant recipe magazine I picked up on a whim in a supermarket, The BBC Good Food Cake Collection.  It has all sorts of cake recipes from bake sale loafs to wedding cakes and every recipe I've made so far has turned out really well.  This is the ultimate chocolate cake I made for some friends coming over for tea and, if I say so myself, was very scrummy!

Maggie's 50th birthday cake

This is one of the cakes I made for my mother-in-law's 50th birthday.  She had organised one party for family and then a big party for everyone!  I made a square rich fruit cake (I have a secret recipe that a master baker gave my mum) for the party for all the family...

...see how messy I was getting it decorated!

I coloured some fondant icing and cut out different size flowers to go on top and around the sides of the cake.

I left a circle in the middle of the cake for the big 50...

...and, instead of stems for the flowers, the green royal icing spelled out "Happy Birthday Maggie!"

My first blog

I've been baking cakes since I was little but last year my mother-in-law challenged me to make her 50th birthday cake - this set me on a journey of discovery into the world of cake decorating and I haven't looked back!  This blog will be a record of the cakes I make and decorate, decorating techniques that I come across and the odd recipe and baking method!  I hope you enjoy having a peek... love Kate xx