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.