A girl can never have too many shoes

A girl can never have too many shoes - and here's a few more pairs for my niece on her birthday.

I started off with a red and black theme and the shoes and added some pinwheels after seeing them on Pinterest. 

 

Finally, to make enough cakes for the party I did some simple red buttercream icing flowers. Both of these were made with my rose nozzle which I now believe is a wilton 2D tip. I really like the ruffle and it means I can do two different designs without having to change the nozzle or use several icing bags. I think these would look even sweeter in a pastel colour with glitter or sparkles on.

Can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man

Thank you to my colleague Kirsty for sharing this gingerbreadman's adventures.....

Can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man

So glad I took a picture of these before I dropped the tin on the floor! Three survived. Many heads and limbs were severed!

How do you remove icing sugar dust from an iPad?

Last Christmas my mom was given a copy of the Primrose Bakery recipe book. I guiltily copied out a few, well OK a lot, of my favourite treats to attempt at home. (The marshmallow icing is lush, if a little bit of a faff).

This weekend however, my guilt was eased when I discovered the Primrose Bakery app. It's got a good variety of recipes including some of the ones I took a shine to from the book.

 
The first recipe I tried was the bourbon biscuits for our kiddie play date and mummies meeting today.

The steps were very easy to follow and when the screen timed out and went into standby, the orientation changed to landscape and offered a page for each step of the recipe including the measurements and ingredients needed for that step. This was a good format to follow and made it very simple to carry out each step. However I couldn't work out how to get from that screen back to the main menu without fully closing down the app. A bit too long winded when you're covered in icing sugar and cocoa and have sticky chocolate fingers from rolling the dough.

The recipe itself was simple but I'd question the quantities for the water and cocoa mixture for the filling. Mine seemed far too dry.

The verdict from the mummies was that they were yummy! They're perfect with a cup of afternoon tea as they're ridiculously rich and you do need something to wash them down with.

All in all, a successful bake, even if I do have icing sugar in my iPad now!

Up the gooners - Arsenal cupcakes

With the impending start of the football season combining nicely with my friend's boyfriend's birthday, these Arsenal football cupcakes were a delight to make.

There were three main designs, a shirt which I tried to match as closely as I could to the new season strip, a scarf on grass and a happy birthday rosette. I also planned to do some guns from the Arsenal logo but after I'd done one, I decided to go for a simpler design! I enjoyed trying out my new gold paint though. 

The striped scarves took a few attempts as I tried to line up red and white sausage shapes and roll them out but they fell apart do in the end I looked it up and instead rolled out some white then some red. I cut strips of the red and placed them on top of the white before rolling it a bit more. The red then embedded itself into the white and it worked much better.

 Hope it's a lovely birthday weekend for James.

Pinterest - my new favourite social network

I could spend hours trawling Pinterest for inspiration. The gorgeous cakes and cookies I find just make me want to get baking.

http://thedecoratedcookie.com/2009/05/watermelon-cookies/

I've started following a few inspirational boards and have created a few boards myself. I've put all my own cakes on one board and created others to keep track of ideas I'd like to try.

https://pinterest.com/marecip/cookies/

https://pinterest.com/followcharlotte/cakes-and-parties/

http://pinterest.com/jessicamotz/cake-ideas/

I am trying to 'suggest' to puddle duck that she should have a 'Hungry Caterpillar' themed party so that I can do a cupcake caterpillar and cookies made out of all of the different things the caterpillar ate through.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cococake/3380402658/

She's not having any of it though and wants a fairy with a castle! Oh well, I'll just have to search Pinterest for fairy cakes.

Feeling Peachy

A busy week has meant a late upload of last weekend's cakes.

I was feeling peachy with two different but complementary themes, one for my sister in law's birthday and one for babypuddleduck's ballet friend.

I used Gum Tragacanth in the peach icing again as this makes it much more stable. I used the sugarflair flesh / paprika colouring.

The ballet shoes were fairly easy to make but the tricky part was attaching the ribbons. I cut thin strips of icing, rolled them round a paintbrush and then left them to dry so that they kept the swirl shape.

I used my new Windsor Clickstix Groovy number stencils from www.partyanimalonline.co.uk to make the number 4s.

http://www.partyanimalonline.com/windsor-clikstix---groovy-number-cutter-10804-p.asp

I bought white icing from the Co-Op which seemed to be stable enough without adding Gum Tragacanth and held the emboss pattern really well.

The second project was for a birthday so I thought I'd try one of the tutorials from www.mrsbakerscakes.com. A few weeks ago, I won a competition on Twitter with @Cakeory (http://www.cakeory.net/join-cakeory/). I commented on a post to say how useful an online cake school would be as it is very difficult to get out for evening or weekend classes with two little ones. I was so excited to win but am still struggling to find the time to do many of the tutorials.

Shelly from Mrs Bakers Cakes is really good and her tutorials are very easy to follow. Some are pictures and descriptions and some are video demonstrations. I had a go at a variation of the embossed fondant daisy tutorial http://www.mrsbakerscakes.co.uk/tutorials.html.

Initially I imprinted and cut the toppers and left them to dry, then when I tried to fold them over the cupcake, they cracked so I had to re-cut them. Note for next time!!!

I'm still trying to find some good photo software that makes my cake pictures look decent but in the meantime, I hope these show the results OK.