Thursday 22 December 2011

Christmas cupcakes

Santa is coming into the office this morning. In my view the only way to mark this very exciting occasion is with some cakes.

I took the opportunity to test a few different designs. I googled some images and then tried to recreate the design.

First up, and my favourite, reindeer cupcakes. I covered chocolate cupcakes in chocolate fondant icing which I rolled out, cup out circles and moulded onto the top of the cake.

The antlers are made out of melted chocolate that I drizzled onto a baking tray covered in greaseproof paper and left to cool.



The noses are made out of modelling icing - make into a ball and squash down - the ones I found online had sweets on but I didn't have any red sweets in the cupboard.

The eyes are small candy chocolates. They are from the toppings you can buy from supermarkets. I sorted all of the colours out and I had the most blue ones so that's why Rudolph has blue eyes. I then finished them off with a bit of black writing icing.  All of the pieces are stuck on with a bit of writing icing or butter icing.



The snowmen are almost as cute but I could have done with a little more time on the icing on the faces and scarves.




Vanilla cupcakes covered in white rolled out icing, stuck on with some melted apricot jam. The Faces are marshmallows covered in black and yellow writing icing. The scarves should have been red laces or red ribbons, whatever the sweets are called, but they kept unravelling and coming off so I used some red writing icing instead. Next time I would get some thinner red lace sweets and try that as I thought the icing looked too messy. Hats are jelly sweets stuck on with writing icing and the buttons are silver balls.



I wanted some adult cakes too that were quite simple so I chose red butter icing finished off with a white rolled out star.



I piped roses with the red icing and covered the stars with some pearl lustre to give them a bit more sparkle. Next time I will use white or green cases.



Finally I had some butter cream and cake mixture left over so I made two tree designs. One are normal sized muffin cases and the others are mini muffins.

 The larger cakes have green icing piped upwards to create the tree, covered in gold sprinkle dust and finished off with a red icing star. The mini muffins have a small green icing swirl covered in iridescent sprinkles and finished off with a silver ball on top.

Sunday 4 December 2011

I have started to upload some of the hundreds of images I have of the cakes I've made. I am hoping that there will be some sort of progress visible, that the recent cakes look much better than the early ones.

My photography skills are about as advanced as my cake decorating skills so there may need to be some jiggery pokery doing on them. Hopefully hubby will be able to show me how to do this.

Images will be posted on blogs as well as in the relevant tabs.




Friday 2 December 2011

Gruffalo themed party

Baby puddle duck is having a third birthday party and we're theming it on Julia Donaldson's Gruffalo story. 

The main attraction will be the Gruffalo himself. I followed the Jane Asher example for Comic Relief but omitted the red nose and made him a traditional Gruffalo. 



I think he looks mighty fine if I do say so myself. This is the most advanced cake I have ever attempted so really I think I did OK. 

Only thing I would have changed would be to use more green icing for the base. I rolled it out too thin and struggled to roll it out big enough to cover the cake board. 

The cupcakes were also Gruffalo themed and I did one for each character in the book; the mouse, the fox, the owl and the snake. 


Saturday 26 November 2011

Cookie gift tags

This Christmas I am going to make my own gift tags, and they're going to be baked.

I did a few this weekend for a friend who I won't be seeing again until Christmas.

I am really pleased with how they look - I just have to remember to tell people not to actually eat them. Not sure they will taste too good by the time we get to Christmas day!



POST UPDATE: I was so pleased with the cookies that I decided to make decorations for the tree too. Baby puddle duck helped me decorate them so it was a lovely pre-Christmas activity to do together. 


Saturday 21 May 2011

For cake's sake

Cakes are powerful things. Turn up to a friend's house with a dozen cup cakes and you'll be welcomed in with open arms. And no party is complete without a cake. From children's parties to silver weddings, from Christmas festivities to afternoon tea, there's a cake for every occasion.

But who needs an excuse for a cake? Get baking!