
I chose a lily for this birthday cake as I am trying to get better at sugar flowers, or trying to learn how to make sugar flowers other than roses and little ones from cutters. And thanks to the excellent tutorials on Paul Bradford Sugarcraft, I have now got the hang of the lily, and I love it. Its such a big bold flower and one you don’t see very often on cakes. And I do like to be different!
I LOVED making the bunny girl cake last week. It takes some thinking when someone gives you a whole list of a person’s likes/history and asks you to bring them together in a cake. Sometimes there is just no way to make them not look messy, and like a bunch of random objects that have just been flung onto a cake at random. But that may just be my eyes which do not see the personal relevance for the birthday girl/boy. This one however, came together, and did not look like randomly flung together pieces on a cake, and the black and white theme allow it to still be elegant. I hope the birthday girl loved it as much as I did ๐
On the To Do list this week, chocolate truffles for Christmas presents. Watch this space! ๐
Its inevitable, and the shops will certainly not let us forget it, Christmas is coming. Last year I planned my Christmas a little a-la-last-minute, and this year I have decided that I should plan better. So I am already thinking of presents, and listening closely to conversations to pick up on any hints or possibilities for what my loved ones might like for Christmas. This year we will be in Holland for Christmas for the first time so the present-buying list is a bit longer and I am looking forward to finding some gifts for the extended family. I do love Christmas shopping, although I do loathe the Christmas-shopping-crowds, so I am a firm believer in online shopping. No crowds, no queues, no aching feet. Just me, my little mac laptop, and a nice cup of coffee, and a scrummy flapjack from my hamper ๐
If you are going to be doing online shopping like me, then there is a lovely website called Hampergifts, who have a fantastic selection of Christmas hampers for all Christmas budgets. With everything from wines, to fruit and nuts, biscuits, pรขtรฉ and puddings, the selection looks delicious and its hard to choose just one!
I don’t often do buttercream cakes. People tend to like the clean lines and smooth finish of sugarpaste, but there are some cakes that are beautiful in buttercream, and unusually I had two last week. One of them was buttercream ruffles. Like any other technique and medium, the more practice you get, the better you get at piping buttercream and getting the effect you want, so I did a practice cake earlier in the week. I have done a buttercream ruffle cake before, waaaaay back when when I was a hobby cake maker novice, and I was going for a slightly more polished effect than that early stumbling-around-in-the-dark effort. So I did a practice cake. I was glad I did, as I got to figure out my technique, how to hold the bag, which direction to pipe in, how to move the bag to get the ruffles ruffley (yes, that’s a word), and it was a good warm up for the muscles. Piping uses muscles. You find hand and forearm muscles that you never knew existed once you have ruffle-piped your way around a 10″ cake. But its worth it. And it looked awesome, so I’m smiling ๐
I was very pleased with how the cake turned out and once it was all set up at the venue, it fit into the setting perfectly (yes, that is a sword on the table, a sword to cut the wedding cake. Of course. Why use a knife when you can use a sword!?!?). The colour scheme was maroon and ivory and I was thankful that in the huuuuge room that is the Dome in Buxton, the cake was not lost. I received a lovely message from the bride today telling me that she loved the cake and so I close the chapter on this cake with a smile. Another happy bride.
As wedding season winds down for those in the wedding industry, I sit at night and plan how to get myself a bigger piece of the pie that is the wedding cake market. And I have a cunning plan, so we will wait and see if it works. It does require some (in my opinion) significant investment, so I have to grit my teeth and take that, but as they say, you have to spend money to make money, so hey ho. Here we go.