Celia & Istvan's wedding cake & cupcakes

This past Easter long weekend I had the pleasure to finally put together and complete this lovely wedding cupcake tower for Celia and Istvan. I am very happy with how it turned out. Not only did I make the cake and cupcakes, I also created a custom cupcake tower for everything to be displayed on and hand cut all the cupcake wrappers (to match the paper I used around the pillars of the tower).

The top tier was gluten free coconut cake covered in coconut buttercream and then iced in white fondant. The orchid and lily cake topper is all made from flower modelling paste, only the ribbon was not edible.

The cupcakes were milk choc sponge topped with choc fudge buttercream and embossed white choc fondant and orange & almond cupcakes topped with orange buttercream swirl and then all topped with fondant orchids.

Happy Easter everyone

Happy Easter everyone!! Hope you all had a fantastic long weekend with family and friends. We had a quiet day today with our 4 girls with lots of Easter crafts and an egg hunt in the afternoon.
This Easter I was inspired to create an Easter table for our family based on Mandy Sutcliffe's characters "Belle & Boo". I purchased Mandy's book "Bubbles Before Bed to do book" especially for Easter and was so in love with all the gorgeous drawings and activities that I knew a Belle & Boo Easter table would be a hit with my daughters. The Easter table is actually quite simple with lots of crafty items that any crafter can replicate, all you need to do is go through what you already have in your cupboards and perhaps look at your old furniture in a brand new light. I re-used our old drawer unit (I used it for my nieces bird party last December and it now sits in my eldest daughter's bedroom) and gave it a green coat (Dulux celery) of acrylic paint followed by crackle medium to make it look more vintagy.

I had an old wine box lying around which I covered in celery green Kona fabric and then wrapped in left over celery wool. This was used to give my flowers more hight on my table.

The cake was very easy, bottom tier is choc mud covered in milk choc fondant, top tier raspberry buttercake covered in embossed raspberry fondant. The topper is a wooden Boo brooch I bought from the Belle & Boo online shop, while the cuff of the bottom tier cake is just fluffy wool wound around the cake several times (I first popped a cardboard (or you can use acetate) "collar" around the bottom to avoid fluff sticking to my cake) and then finished of with a crochet flower brooch I already had (look familiar Selina? lol).

Gorgeous blue hydrangeas mixed with pale pink carnations in one of my vintage tea pots, I used this as my table centre piece. I was lucky enough to get the very last hydrangea for the season as they now don't flower anymore.

Cute hand knitted hunting egg bags with Belle & Boo badge attached to each bag, yep hand knitted by me! Those who know me know I do NOT knit, so it was quite a challenge to knit these simple squares and then fashion them into bags :-) But I did it!!

Wool covered MDF letter E, I saw this clever idea on Bump Smitten, so hop on over for a free tutorial. Ceramic bunny from Bed, Bath & Table.

Boo cupcakes, pistachio cupcakes topped with Rose flavoured Persian fairyfloss. Boo topper created using Dress Up Belle & Boo range.

Boo cookies on sticks, all hand cut since I couldn't find a cutter that looked like boo. Milk bottle from Shoppe with Lily, make sure to visit Lilian, she has AMAZING items for dessert tables and if you can't find what you are looking for just ask her! Belle & Boo dress up dolls from the Belle & Boo online shop.

One of the Easter crafts we did was colour eggs in gorgeous pastels. Now as some of you may know I struggled to find white chicken eggs since it seems they don't sell many here in Melbourne, in the end I used white duck eggs from the Asian grocer which are the size of a 800gr chicken egg and colour beautifully. Very happy with our results!

Rose flavoured macarons, not my best results but they would have to do ;-) Tag from Belle & Boo (came with my Boo wooden brooch)

What the Easter bunny left for the 4 girls this morning, all in a lovely canvas Boo repeat bag.

My gorgeous flowers with a Lindt bunny yummmmmmm Will have to hide these away from the girls ;-)

Lemon baked cheesecake & cupcake set

I made this lovely cake set last Sunday for a father/daughter combined birthday for one of the mums in my mother's group. The cake is baked lemon New York cheesecake with lemon white choc panels while the cupcakes were mini lemon baked cheesecakes topped with butterflies, roses and blossoms.

Close up of the cheesecake cupcakes, aren't they cute?

Anyone want a glass of coke?

This is one of two cakes I had to make for 2 people leaving a company. The coke cake was a choc sponge cake frosted in choc fudge icing with black choc fondant, the coke label is made from edible paper. It's actually not that difficult to make, I baked 6 individual 4" cakes since its the same size as the coke bottle and the coke bottle top was shaped and then held in place with a wooden skewer and choc fudge ganache. This is to feed 15 people since the cake was the actual size of a 1.5ltr coke zero bottle.

Next up is this dairy and gluten free Moose cake, probably a bit more challenging to make due to the fact that almost everything on the planet contains gluten! In the end I rang around and even double checked with companies who made the colouring paste I was using to check if it was gluten free.

Orange cake gluten & dairy free

250g of Tablelands dairy & gluten free canola

1 3/4 cups brown sugar

4 eggs

2 cups of Orgran selft raising flower (gluten & dairy free)

1 cup of Pauls Zymil dairy & gluten free milk

zest of 1 large orange

1/4 tsp of whole vanilla bean

Cream canola & sugar till well combined, then add your eggs one by one, beating after each addition.

Now sift in the 2 cups of flower and add the zest, vanilla and milk. Gently mix till combined.

Pour into a greased and lined 8' inch round tin and pop it in a pre-heated 180 degree oven. My oven is gas so it took 65 minutes to bake, make sure to check it after 50 min to see if its done.

Let cool and then frost with orange frosting

Orange frosting

2 cups of pure icing sugar

2 Tblsp orange zest

3 Tblsp Tablelands canola

enough Zymil milk to blend the frosting into the consistency of thick whipped cream

Beat 1 cup of icing sugar with all the canola and a small amount of Zymil milk for 5 min till whote and fluffy, gradually add the remaining icing sugar and enough Zymil milk to make a thick spreadable frosting.

My husband thought the bottle was real, he almost picked it up!! lol