Cake Round Up

September has been busy, lots and lots of cake...

My brother in law turned 50 in September and my sister requested a Penrith Panthers cake, which is his NRL team. So I piped the top of the cake and painted it, it turned out better than i thought it would, but oh man my hand hurt after doing that!!

My friend Emma turned 25 in September too! and like most 25 year olds she loves Hello Kitty! So once again piping!!! I was going to do a shaped cake but there were so many people going to the party that it would not have fed everyone!!

My friends brother steven turned 16 in September too! and we were going down to celebrate and his sister/mum requested we bring something. i brought cake. and he's such a big Dr Who fan, so i made him a Tardis. Ok Dr Who is about the only sci-fi i don't do, but after doing this cake i now can at least pass with basic Dr knowledge!! The joy of this cake is that i had to transport it 3 hours in the car to get to their house, which was fine except it was so cold and rainy that they had the ducted heating on, and it started sweating, nobody seemed to notice and Steven still loved it!! His face was priceless!!!

Just the way it goes!

Okay, so I've been slack with my blog, shoot me!

Please don't, if you do there won't be anymore cake,

and that's never a good thing!!

Sooooooo, what has been happening? Well I've been busy with doctors and such and getting tests, and i still have more tests, and work is just plain hectic, and that's no excuse for the lack of cake, except there hasn't been a lack of cake (or cake decorating class for that matter),

just a lack of blog!!

So now onto the recap...

For my mum and her sisters birthday they requested a heart shaped cake, and since simple is generally better, here is my Mississipi Mud Cake, with yellow fondant and an orchid i made, with some simple leaves.

The "happy birthday" was a bit shakey

(I don't know why, I'm not usually that shakey)

and if I had had the time to go to the cake shop

I probably would have painted it gold to match the board. But i didn't...

My friend Kristy recently gave birth to a beautiful baby boy Isaac John, and so i made them some baby cupcakes ripped straight from planet cake, but they were surprisingly easy to make and turned out quite cute. A good baby cupcake!

On the spur of the moment the other day i bought a Muffin-top pan, which makes muffin tops and thats it! It is rather cool, and since its only the top of the muffin, technically you can eat more than one! I've also recently made some lava pudding which turned out really well, but i forgot to take a photo of it! And have made a lot of rocky road lately (apparently its got a name for itself) and I've been fiddling with what goes into it, honeycomb seems to be a favourite, peanut butter was not!

Another flower from cake decorating, this one is supposed to be a lilly, but once again I'm not happy with it entirely, The petals dried at the wrong angle, but I like the colour. You can't really tell from the photo but its three different shades of purple and white. I have to say I like making these types of flowers more, where you have to put the individual pieces together. It just amazes me how it all comes together to make something else!


These were also the result of cake decorating class, they are booties for baby cakes, the were quite simple to make, I'm not 100% sure I like them. Let's just say I'm not in love with them! They are flower moulding paste and then covered with white royal icing, and then topped with a little blue bow. I think the thing I'm most impressed with is the bows, they are so cute and tiny and I tied them myself. A feat I may never be able to complete again.

Cars Cars Cars

Nicholas turned two this week!! It's amazing how time flies when you're having fun.

And of course who can have a birthday party without cake!

And what do most little boys love?

CARS!!!!

I think he liked the yellow truck because he picked it up and threw the contents of

the ute across the room (we had filled it with coloured chocolate chips!)

Next time i know not to do that or grab little hands first.

What you cant see is that it is my simple chocolate cake with plain buttercream covered in a green fondant. The green is quite pale so it didnt come out in the photos.

Here are some close ups of the cars I made.

The yellow ute has 'Nico' written on the number plate.

And this F1 has to be my favourite. I loved making it, so much fun!

Well aside from trying to get the spoiler to sit right.

And another view from the top. Next time I would probably put the lines down the middle of the road, but honestly I just didn't think of it at the time.

OMG Shoe!

So what have i been doing the last month - well basically I've been stressing about shoe. Yes Shoe, singular!! I was asked to make a cake for my friend Stephs 21st by her mum. My first paid cake. Kinda scary, exhausting, stressful but also heaps of fun! So the cake was due Saturday, I had made my base of the shoe weeks in advance as directed and then on monday when I went to attach the whole thing to the heel it decided it didn't like that idea and it was wanted to be in 2 halves!! At this point after some hair pulling and general freaking out I eventually managed to calm down and fix it. I ended up propping the base of the shoe with a wedge of fondant. It wasnt perfect but it was as close as it was going to get at that point. The base which is the actual cake is supposed to look like a shoebox. Not bad since i had never covered a cake with fondant before!

Random cuteness!!

So Cake Decorating class is going really well. I'll admit, majorly excited about not doing flowers for the moment!! I'm much better at figures and well lets say DRAGONS!! But i have a feeling i will be back to doing flowers in no time! So there hasn't been much big cake action happening at the moment either, but that is about to change!! So i thought i would post some of the stuff that i have done at cake decorating.

This is a dragon, a very dumpy probably wouldnt fly dragon, but a dragon none the less. What i should have realised is that he would get stuck to my cutting matt, and so major efforts had to be made to remove him onto some wax paper. But it was all very successful in the end!!

This is a practice car for my nephews 2nd birthday cake which is coming up at the beginning of July. I was impressed with how the black actually stayed black. I tinted the fondant black (which meant it went grey-ish) and then i painted over the top with food colouring. Everytime I've done this with modelling fondant it has faded, but this seems to have stayed quite well! so i think we will try some more different coloured cars, and making the wheels a bit more round!!

This is the golfer in action!! Made from modelling fondant, I dont know if im into golfers very much, and will probably struggle to find someone who i know who likes golf, but i get the concept!! He needs to have his golf club added when he goees onto a cake. but i like his checked shirt!!

These are bride and groom cookies i made for my friends wedding. They turned out better than i expected, considering it was cookie recipe I've never used before. However, that being said they did lose their heads during the course of the day!! very fragile! They are covered in buttercream icing, and the bride has sifted icing sugar over the top to give her a crisper white colour.

I made these mini cupcakes for Mothers Day High Tea this year (along with some mini profriteroles - of which i have no photos but they were tedious to make so will probably never make them that small again!!) The cupcakes are decorated with coloured chacous and some of my piped flowers from my first term of cake decorating classes (some flowers i made that i actually liked)

Easter Show Appreciation

So when i was a kid my mum used to drag me around the Sydney Easter Show looking at cake. Now i would have been about 10 at the most and being smushed into a cabinet looking at cake that didnt look edible (to me) was not very exciting, its nothing like being smushed into a showbag line at all. So now i must live with my mother gloating at me that NOW I like to look at cake. However our opinions on what we like have and always will be different!! And so i bring you some of the cakes that i liked from the 2010 Sydney Royal Easter Show.... (in reverse order because that's how they uploaded!)

this cake was just so cute and actually quite detailed.

i love the tiny food and drinks. down to the ice in the esky!!

I LOVE this wedding cake. who would have thought black would make great wedding cake!!

on a side note i got pushed into the cabinet by the lady behind me while i was trying to take photos of this cake. The things people will do for cake! even when it is behind glass!

This is just a survey of one of the cabinets, the purple cake in the bottom left hand corner i like but i find interesting, in that it has a hat box shape on the bottom and then a square on top with the circle cut out. it just didnt sit right for me. but i cant quite put my finger on it


this bunny was a crowd favourite. very cutesy looking and was extremely large!!

i love this mini cake not just cos mini-cake is AWESOME!!

but also because it is ancient history themed which is one of my other passions!
It had so much work in it for its size.

"Log in every 3-4 hours to avoid procrastination"

Where does one get a prescription for these?

Okay so its not technically cake but I'm being stalked by cupcakes and theses ones were just too cute to pass up! They're made out of paper tole (all the way down to the tablecloth!!)

I love the detail and technicality of it, the little buttlerflies on the cupcakes and the tea cups and saucers have their own little cupcakes on them!! How cool is that?

30th Wedding Anniversary

So my parents have been married for 30 years this weekend. We had a great lunch out with all of our family and friends. and I made them a cake. I dont know if I have been more nervous about making a cake, since its my MOTHER and she was a cake decorator!! Apparently their wedding cake was oval shaped so thats what she wanted and it was decorated with my first attempt at single roses that i made in cake decorating class a couple of weeks ago. I also tried a new recipe for strawberry cake, it was nice but still needs a bit of tweeking. It didnt taste strawberry enough for me.

and here is a close up of the roses i made with my leaves.

Brobee Cake

Ok so for my friends sons birthday i made a Yo Gabba Gabba cake for him.

He loves this show a lot - personally cannot watch more than 20 seconds of it.

If you dare check it out here is a link.

I can't say the idea came out of my head because well i stole it off the net.

But i did vary mine a bit. He has attached arms and his fur doesn't

go all the way down the edges of the cake.

But i think he looks really close to the real deal!!

The Wicked Wizard of Oz

So we went to see the Australian cast version of the broadway musical Wicked!

which was AWESOME!! If you haven't seen it please do

www.wickedthemusical.com.au

(which is also where i borrowed the photos from)

(lucy durack and amanda harrison)

(Amanda Harrison as Elphaba)

The woman who played Elphaba has an amazing voice

- ok the picture is of Amanda Harrision but we saw Jemma Rix play the role and she is

AMAZING!!

And so there is cake!! I made this Wizard of Oz cake a while ago now for my friend Jo's Birthday.

We all dressed up and gave her a surprise party! She was so excited. She was Dorothy obviously.

Me? I'm definately a horse of many colours!!

I'm sorry but the cake landed on the Wicked Witch of the East!

I just lurve the lil munchkin lego people with flower-pot heads!!


and just so you can see the legs of the Wicked Witch of the East
- she even came complete with red shiny shoes which i painted
-poor Barbie hope she didnt mind having her legs pulled off and painted black and white

Toot Toot... Train Cake

So my gorgeous nephew turned 3 in December. and although he is thoroughly enamoured by Ben 10 now, he is also enraptured by Thomas and anything train related... this has resulted in hours of me watching Thomas the Tank engine!! So here is the finished cake. kinda upset this is the only finished shot i took of it. mostly because it was boiling hot and the icing kept melting and i finished off decorating it in the garage (which is sooo the best place to take cake photos let alone decorate a cake!!) Also my inner perfectionist just was not happy with the colour of Thomas, the blue just didnt seem right for my liking. But he loved it! Which is the main point right?

This is Dan enjoying his cake.

He wanted to eat Thomas' face and the candle just had to go in the funnel!!