I had grand plans of spending the week leading up to the day making the cake. Unfortunately, work got in the way. I made the cakes Thursday, then covered and decorated them Friday night. I went to bed at 8am. I didn't want my only niece to have just any birthday cake.
I did this just for a bit of fun. Don't get your hopes up. I didn't film the making of the figurine. It was too late and there was not enough time. Plus ignore the messy crumb coating.
irthdays should be renamed Birthweeks for kids. This is the first of 3 cakes that I am making my daughter. Maybe I am going overboard but its for my little girl ;-). This is the Kindy one.
(From one of Debbie Brown's books)
One of the carers at my daughter's kindy was leaving. My job was to make the cake. For those wondering about the writing. It's supposed to look like the little girl in the red and white dress painted it...... oh, as a few people have pointed out to me the paint on the girls hand doesn't match the print. If it wasn't 3am in the morning when I realised this then I would have fixed. The hand print is actually the logo used by the childcare centre. The cake is chocolate mud cake.
I forgot to post the valentine's day cake from last year.
I can't take credit for the design. It's from one of Debbie Brown's books. I probably could have picked a better cake stand too :-)
My daughter wanted to decorate a cake for Mummy. So I covered a small cake and let her at it with a paint brush and food colouring. I think she did an excellent job.
White chocolate mud cake with white chocolate fondant. I wanted to try out a stripy design. The tricky part is keeping them all straight. The white heart is inlaid into the top of the fondant. Mr Heart was sharing the love :-)
My first attempt at piping chocolate. This is from the Whimsical bakery book. As you can probably tell the blue colouring didn't quite mix properly. Also I should use wax paper and not freezer plastic. The freezer plastic created ripples in the surface.
No fancy pants multi-petal cutter used for this one. Each petal is individually hand made petals. I could have done a better job at chalking it but that wasn't really the point of making it.
I wish, or more to the point, my wife wishes. It's large sugar crystal that I grew over the last few weeks. I thought htey would come in handy for decorating a cake with jewels.
I don't make cakes for a living so I look for any excuse to make one. This was for our 8th wedding anniversary. It is a mud cake covered in white chocolate fondant. The piping is royal icing.
I am planning on making quite a few of these for a permanent display. I will conceal the wires with brown florist tape
You can see the old red ones(real) in the background.
Guess who these cupcakes are for:-)
Take those cupcakse and add some of these
I was given the task of making cakes for my niece's christening. This was a trial cake.
This is the first floral arrangement that I have made. I think I did ok, even if I do say so myself :-) The piping was just for practice.
I went for the big time. I saw a cake online that I really liked and had to try it myself. At times I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew but it came through in the end.
I didn't want to make tonnes of cake so I opted for polystyrene balls for the leaves. It also has the added advantage of being light. Covering them was easier said than done. Polystyrene doesn't taste very good, a bit chewy for some peoples liking :-). So, I made sure I covered them away from the main preparation area. The branches are also polystyrene. I normally would like to make everything edible, especially for a kids cake, but time was short and this was less hassle.
Each birthday for my daughter has been more like a birth week. These cakes were made for her to take to kindy. I had to make something plain with little to no icing. So the cupcakes are vanilla cake with a dab apricot jam and sprinkles. The mud cake is for the teachers.
It was a hit, but then anything with sugar in it usually is with 3-4 yo's.
Finally, after a few hard years of work, I finished my PhD. Sure, I could have got someone else to make a cake but this would also be the first cake where I didn't have a voice in my head telling me that I should be studying :-)
The toughest part to this cake was the pattern on the side of the top 2 tiers. Trying to press hard enough for the pattern but not so much that the fondant would stick.
The biggest compliment I got was unintentional. Before I stacked the tiers I had the bottom one sitting on the bench. My mum came along and placed another real book on top of it thinking that she'd put them away later.
The top and bottom books are mud cake. The middle cake is a sponge soaked in vanilla sugar syrup.
Being an engineer, and according to my wife, a nerd, I made a scale model of it before I started construction of the real cake. This is about 3-4cm high (1.5").
Another big day deserves another cake. My Nans 80th birthday meant something traditional. Maybe not for all Nan's but for mine it does :-)
This was my first attempt at roses. I'm not too disappointed with the overall result. I have to say, covering the cake in fondant has to be the most stressful part of cake making. For the detail to stand out the large flat areas need to be flawless, or as close as possible. I notice my wife leaves the room when I start rolling out fondant... coincidence maybe?
You might notice that I positioned the writing on the cake board. I did this tor two reasons. One, I didn't want to risk ruining my good fondant work, and two, I think it looks better.
This fondant covered mud cake was quite simple. I'd have to say the most difficult part of it's construction was the writing on the side. Not just because those cutters are a pain in the backside, but the difficulty in trying to get those letters to stick to the side in the right place without sugar glue smearing everywhere.
Anyway, I was happy with the finished result, and more importantly so was the recipient :-)
Well it took a year for me to make another cake but I decided to go for fondant figurines this time, In hindsight I should have made the cake tiers a little more interesting by carving and shading but hey, practice makes perfect.
Both cakes were mud cake and the figurines were made with fondant + gum trag.
This is the cake that started me off. The cake it's self was nothing too ambitious but the butterflies, well they were quite challenging. Particularly as I had never done piping before. I should thank Peggy Porschen for the butterfly templates in her book.
