One for the Directioners!

Hello again Dear blog followers!! It has been an age since I last posted, and time certainly flies, especially with 2 small children to contend with! I have many cakes to share with you now, and first up is one that got a lot of attention!...

The One Direction cake!

I am not particularly good at modelling figures, so when I was asked to create a One Direction cake I looked for inspiration at my favourite library - Pinterest!

That the cake should have their logo on was a given, but I wanted to represent the members of the group, and so I decided to make them into silhouettes! I have seen plenty of good examples of this on cakes, and figured it shouldn't be too difficult to do!

My only advice here is to be sure you have a good cutting blade (I use one like this), and some modelling fondant! Trying this sort of thing with normal fondant will just leave you with a brittle  piece of work that will most likely crumble when you want to attach it to your cake!

Next up, find your images! I like to do a Google search for this, and usually end up finding a good image to work from. I then print it to the size I want it, cut it out, and lay it over the fondant, holding it gently while I carefully cut with my scalpel. It is fiddly, and time consuming, and nearly always causes some swearing, but luckily with this cake the images I needed were fairly straightforward, and I was pleased with the results!

The cake itself didn't need to be too big, and I used bold colours to represent the band. Here it is put together and ready to go!

Jack Skellington meets Monster High

This is one of my favourite cakes to date!!

And what's more, was designed with the help of the 9 year old whose birthday it was for! You can't get more personal than that!!
With the help of Pinterest, we picked out a few ideas, and chose a 3 tier cake.
We had great fun choosing the design, which was based mainly on one of her favourite things, Monster High!  Now if you've never heard of Monster High, then I would probably describe it as Barbie and Ken for the supernatural!!
Another love of hers was A Nightmare before Christmas, and so it was decided that Jack Skellington would adorn the top of the cake!

3 tiers of chocolate cake, iced in blue, black and pink and stacked to over a foot tall!

The Monster High skull symbols were cut using a skull and crossbones cutter, and I just removed the crossbone part. This worked really well!

I made the Monster High Logo with some modelling fondant, and dried it on the side of a dummy cake so it would have enough curve to fit on the cake.
I had a few attempts to get Jack's face right, not as difficult as I'd originally thought, but I wanted to get the size and expression right.

Here is the finished cake. The symbols around the bottom are the different character signs, which were hand painted onto modelling fondant.
Getting Jack to sit on top required the use of some wire, and lots of glue!! But he stayed nice and sturdy once set.

Here is his close up...

The smallest wedding cake ever!

 It was always assumed that I would make my lovely friend Erica's wedding cake, But when she came and told me she needed not one, but two, I had to wonder what I had gotten myself in to!! ;)

The wedding itself was to be a small affair, close family only, and the setting was the Cley Windmill in Norfolk.

Erica had her heart set on a tiered cake, in alternating white and blue, with scroll work piped around the sides. So that is what I did.

For such a small gathering, we made the cake in 4, 6 and 8 inch tiers, the middle of which was double depth, and in alternating vanilla and chocolate sponges.



For the scroll work design, I got some inspiration from the designs on this page. I then measured the tiers, and sketched out my designs.

I'm not gonna lie to you, it took me many hours to pipe this cake, but that is mostly my own fault, as I'm still getting used to making up my royal icing correctly! It was also an awfully humid day,so as quick as I was piping, it was drying out!!

And here, was the end result! I was pretty darn happy with it, and I believe the bride and groom were too! ;)

Stay tuned for cake number two!!

A little bit of Wild West

The daughter turned 3 back at the start of the summer holidays, and while she is young enough not to care how girly her party is, I decided to have a Wild West themed one!
The time will no doubt come, when it's going to be all about the pink, fluffy cuteness!! *shudder* So I am making the most of it now!

Once again I got the air brush out on this one for the blue sky, and gave it a bit of a swirly effect.
It was pretty simply made, with lots of little things to depict a ranch and Native Indian teepees!

She loved it, and had a fantastic time running around with her friends. My only failure here was that I lost the birthday candles, and had to put 3 night lights on the cake for her to blow out!! Whoops!!

Piece of cake

It has been a while since my last post! This is mainly due to the summer holidays arriving... It is hard to sit down and concentrate on writing when your two kids are running around like loons...
Anyway, I have found a little peace and quiet (for a short time at least!), so here goes!

Sometimes my favourite cakes are those where I'm not really given much of a brief! For this cake, I'd been given suggestions, but ultimately was left to decide how to decorate it! This usually means I get to try something new, or make a cake I've been wanting to make for ages!! ;)

In this case, it was to cut a wedge from a cake, and then redecorate it to look like... a cake!! Go figure!



The cake was vanilla sponge, vanilla butter icing and strawberry jam. I made 2 tiers, both 4 inches deep. From the smaller of the two, I cut out a wedge, then gave them all a crumb coating. This is actually pretty difficult to do to the wedge!! Next time, I think I will hold it together with some skewers, to make it easier to coat!!

I used brown (chocolate) fondant to cover all the cakes. This stuff is very odd to work with!! It is flexible, and stretchy, and makes smoothing the tiers down pretty difficult! I got there in the end though, and then I used white fondant to give the cake an iced look!
I made swirls to look like squirty cream from rolled white fondant, cherries from Ruby Red fondant, and then stuck them all together, with slices of angelica for the cherry stems. I made enough of these to go around both cakes.

I gave the sliced areas of the top cake some 'filling' and then finished the whole thing off with a candle and some spiral confetti!
This is most definitely one of my favourite cakes to date!! Now I just need to experiment with different colours, 'fillings' and toppings!

A Summer Invitation

I was recently asked (at rather short notice) if I would be able to make a cake for a 35th wedding anniversary! As it was my lovely friend Katy asking, I had to say yes!

Katy is one of my best customers. In fact, I think that two thirds of the cakes I make, are for her! I don't mind though, as they are always fun, and she always gives me a lot of freedom to do what I want!! :)

This cake was fairly straightforward! It was to be a summer party, and the invitation had bunting on!!



After deciding how many people it was to feed, and that it needed to be dairy free, I just got baking!
Three simple white iced tiers, ribbon to (vaguely) match the bunting on the invite, and a few dozen small triangles to stick on!

I marked out the segments of the cake to make the bunting even, and added fondant strands (hand rolled). Between each strand I stuck a sugar pearl ball to hide the joins - and because, well, they look pretty!

I have lots of random shaped cutters, one of which is diamond shaped. I used this to cut my bunting triangles. I tried to imitate the bunting on the invite, so for some of the bunting, I used my textured rolling pin to give it a stripe, and then when it was all stuck to the cake I added some tiny silver edible stars to some of the triangles!
All that was then left was to hand cut a '35' to go on top, and box it up ready for it's journey across the country! I am assured it got there in one piece! 

The Ironic cake!

For those of you who like me, don't watch Eurovision every year, I will explain about this cake! 

Every year, Eurovision has a different logo! This year, that logo was a butterfly! Also, Wales does not compete, but the entry is for the United Kingdom! 

So, when you get a request for a cake for someone who loves the Eurovision song contest, but is Welsh, it's a bit of a no brainer!! :)
If you were to Google the Eurovision butterfly, you would see that there are a lot of logos with different flags superimposed on them! - This was what I was going to attempt! 

Eurovision logo for 2013

After asking my husband to print out different variations of the butterfly and the welsh flag, I set about cutting them out with my craft knife!
At first I had planned to use one template to airbrush the dragon onto the background of green and white, but this did not work so well! So instead I set about carefully cutting the dragon out with my knife from red modelling fondant. Yes, it did take ages!! I totally expected it to fall to pieces, to have bits missing, or to just look nothing like the dragon on the flag!! Surprisingly though it worked!! I was left with just the butterfly to cut out, which as you can see was a much easier job!!

The cake itself was to be a fairly simple and plain one, and I left plenty of room on the board for the writing!

You will see that at the top I added the Eurovision heart, which although accurate, looks like I am just really bad at drawing hearts!!! Oh well, you can't have it all I suppose!!