Hip hop Spotti dotti birthday invites

So all the invites (done by The English Pea)for my eldest 10th birthday party was handed out yesterday, no turning back now, come what may this party WILL happen. Theme will be aqua and red polka dots since Anya is now "too old" for fairy/princess parties, we will be playing games such as twister, musical dots, spot the difference and join the dots. I started prepping and collecting for this party in January since I knew it would take awhile to collect all the fabric and blue and red items required to decorate her party. I am quietly having a panic attack, but probably more so because I am simultaniously doing up her room as a surprise which will be "revealed" the week before the party, on her actual birthday. I need more time, but then again if 6 months isn't enough time to do her room and plan her party then no amount of time will be enough. So watch this space!

Sewing 80th birthday cake

Look at what I delivered to the reception centre this morning, isn't it quirky? The birthday lady used to be a seamstress, specialising in wedding dresses and her daughter and son had this cake made (to feed 70 people) as a surprise. The main elements that had to be present on the cake was the mannequin with wedding dress, scissors, tape measure, pin cusshion, spool of thread and buttons + thimble. Everything on this cake is edible, even the pins you see. The main cake was a orange citrus double tier cake filled with orange and white chocolate ganache, yummmm!

I was stressed the most by having to cover the cakes in fondant but surprisingly I had no hiccups covering the 10' and 8' inch cakes. No creases and no lumps, mainly due to a neat trick "Planet Cake's book by Paris Cutter" has taught me, to ganache the outside of your cakes, let it set and then run a hot knife along the outside to smooth out bumps and creases. The cakes ended up very smooth (yay). Everything on the cake was made from scratch, only the sewing machine and scissors were made using a candy mould.

I loved the sewing machine the best, I used a candy mould to get the shape of the machine (grease the mould with some vegetable fat, pop in some fondant (Pettinice) then wack it out onto your table and let it set before moving or touching it) and used edible pastes to "paint" on the details.

The pin cusshion was made using a medium circle cutter, I cut out the green paste first, pressed the top into my mesh icing sugar shaker (to get the pattern) then used the circle cutter to cut out some grey paste, stuck them toghter and painted the base using edible silver paste. Pins were made from No 3 spaghettini (Angel hair) painted silver (edible) and topped with a coloured fondant "pinhead". All up a very time consuming project, but fun to do. I spent 3 weeks on making all the fondant items (so they could dry properly) and the last week I spent baking, assembling and covering the cakes.

Happy 2nd birthday Liandra

It was my youngest daughter Liandra's 2nd birthday today so to celebrate the special occasion my other girls chose the fruit fairy cake from Debbie Brown's Enchanting magical cakes book. I had a lot of fun making this cake, the body of the cake was cookies and cream madeira filled with chocolate ganach. The easiest items to make was the actual fairies themselves and I had a few hairy moments baking the two halves of cake. My 1st cake (made in a pyrex bowl) didn't cook, even after 4 hrs in the oven it was still raw so I pulled it out and tried again. The 2nd attempt was made using a metal mixing bowl and it turned out perfectly, I did have some trouble applying the fondant. Debbie makes it look super easy in her book but trust me covering a round object in fondant is far from easy! I ended up with a few small creases at the base of the cake which I hid with grass ;-)

Close up of the blackberry fairy, the gloss you can see was achieved by applying edible confectioners glaze, love that stuff!

Close up of the tangerine fairy. All up a fun cake to make which was a challenge but not so difficult that you'd throw in the towel in frustration. Liandra loved it, which is what counts the most in the end.

Sienna's Cheescake for 13th birthday

Holy moly but this project was a doozy. A 10' inch refrigerated cheescake with 24 mini cheescakes. Sounds easy enough, ha! It wasn't, ok the making of the cheescakes was easy but the decorating was a complete pain, I had to do several tests to see what would and what wouldn't work and after numerous swear words and lots of stamping of feet I came up with the following. The birthday girl wanted butterflies in pinks, mauves, lilac's and aqua and the cake had to be cheescake, the rest was up to me. The problem with cheescake is it doesn't like any type of decorations (other than fresh cream and fruit) any type of fondant or pastillage tends to sweat and then go mushy so that leaves you with chocolate. I love to eat chocolate but am not overly confident in using it in decoration, its an unpredictable cranky medium and one I'd like to stay away from. In the end I used white chocolate modelling paste to make the butterflies and coated the underside of each butterfly with white chocolate to stop it absorbing moisture while resting on the cake. I tried to think how to cover the cake to make it look pretty and thought a chocolate collar might work really well, the 1st chocolate collar I made turned out quite well (that was my back up collar) but my 2nd collar (using edible pattern sheets) was a shamozzle. I managed to get half the collar on but the 2nd half had a serious kink in it and I wasn't quick enough to smooth it out, then it broke when I tried to remove the acetate arghhhhh. Back to the drawingboard so I tried making the collar in 4 pannels and with a half circle pattern on the rim so it didn't look unproffesional and shoddy. It worked and the impromptu lattice swirl effect I popped on afterwards made it look even better. It was quite fragile and I had kittens trying to keep it safe for the past three days, esp when I was "gluing" on the butterflies with chocolate.

The number 13 is also made from choc fondant and resting on a choc plaque. I used some Christina Re butterfly paper to cover the cupcake supports (seen in the top pic) and made matching cupcake wrappers to go around my mini cheescakes (encased in foil wrappers to stop the moisture and fat "bleeding" through) The most stressful part for me was keeping it all refrigerated till the last minute, then quickly popping on the butterflies and then dropping it off intact. Don't think I'll be doing anymore of these in a hurry!

Emily's Christening

This is what I have been working on the past 2 weeks, its a Christening cake and cupcake set for a friend's little girl being Christened today. The theme was birds and owls with the invite being pink and chocolate brown (a bit hard to see in the scanned pic above).

The main cake was for immediate family only so I baked a 6'inch triple decker white mudcake, filled with vanilla buttercream and covered in white chocolate fondant. I then stippled the whole cake with pink royal icing to give it a rough textured look. The main owl, branches flowers and writing is also made from white choc fondant then the flowers and letters were brushed with pearl lustre dust to give it a shine. The side and back of the cake had various birds in different patterns prancing around. The cupcake stand is custom made using pink and brown fabric from Spotlight while the supports (not visible on the photo) was covered in fabric called "Birdie" by Moda

The 70 cupcakes were 50% chocolate mud with double chocolate buttercream icing and the other 50% white chocolate mud cupcakes covered in pink vanilla buttercream. I then handcut 23 birds and 23 owls (my cutters arrived too late in the post, so had to be handcut) and either gave them a texture (using my texture mats) or handpainted them using edible food colours. I also tried out an edible print sheet on white chocolate for the white birds (experimenting for my next project ;-))

I am extremely happy with how they all turned out, it looked stunning once all assembled and I loved doing this project. Most nerve wracking moment was when I had trouble covering the cake in white choc fondant, I just wasn't fast enough to get the creases out before the paste kept drying, after 5 attempts I managed to get it done. After a strong vodka and a chat to my cake teacher I found out that tall narrow cakes are the most difficult cakes to cover, even for the expert cake decorater (which I am most certainly not!) and that only practice will make me better at it.

What a busy week!

Jumping jelly fish but what a busy week! I've just completed this lovely Baptism cake and matching cupcake tower last night. The theme is circus clown (incase you couldn't tell lol) but in girly colours rather than the bright red, blue and green of the traditional circus. The cake consists of a double decker 10' Cadbury milkchoc mudcake as the base, with the "tent" made from a 6', 5' and 4' mudcakes. The cake was filled with Cadbury choc buttercream icing and covered in fondant (the tent part). I had so much fun making it and a few nervous moments when things did not go to plan. The cake was based on Debbie Brown's Knight in Armour tent from her Enchanting magical cakes book, the only trouble I had was with the tent roof (in the end I made a carboard template and made the roof from modelling paste, after drying I added it to the tent) and the fabric that makes up the walls of the tent. Debbie said to roll out the fondant quite thick and then add it as one piece to the cake, I found this a) added unnecessary extra weight to the cake and b) made the fabric look quite artificial, not nice and flowing. In the end I rolled the paste out nice and thin and added the fabric in sections, seams nicely hidden and added a Garrett frill border to hide the join to the cake.

For the cupcake tower I had to make 80 (yes 80!!!) chocolate sponge cupcakes topped with vanilla buttercream and 4 different toppers. The recipe used was from the Crabapple Cupcake bakery book, yummmmmm.

Here's the clown modelling paste keepsake I made, initially he was meant to go with the cake, but in the end it looked too "busy" so I decided he would look better on his own on the cupcake tower. He certainly was big enough to feature as the main topper on the tower.

Here's a close up view of the 4 different designs I did for the cupcakes. I loved doing the clown heads the best, since I had to do 20 of them they all looked the same but had different expressions which I quite liked.

Liandra's Christening

It was my youngest daughter's Christening day today, we finally bit the bullet and had her Christened just two months shy of her 2nd birthday. I wanted to make something simple for her Christening cake, I didn't have time to make anything fancier so this is the result. I just made a single tier (double cake)coconut cake, covered in orchard icing, the rocking horse was handcut from petinice and I used some stamps and royal icing to make the flowers and sadle. I also tried writing on my cake for the 1st time, so "wrote" a lovely Christening verse using edible textas around the circumfrence of the cake. It probably would have looked more spectacular had I popped the cake on a fully iced and be-ribboned cakeboard, but alas I had no time for that either. It tasted yummy and the girls loved it, which is what counts the most I suppose.