Spring flowers

With sunny skies and longer days, spring is definitely here despite the cold nights.  The snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils are in full bloom and it won't be long before the cherry trees start to blossom!  After the inevitable green cake for St. Patrick's Day, I had a relatively quiet weekend to look forward to.  I had a cupcake "sampler" order for Monday which inevitably left me with extra cupcakes. 

For a while I have been itching to try making a cupcake bouquet and now that I had both the time and the cupcakes, I got to work making flowers.  I also got to practice my buttercream roses, which I have to admit I haven't done in years.  The cupcakes are an assortment of vanilla, lemon, strawberry and chocolate flavours.  In the end I was pretty pleased with the result and so was my friend who received it.  She is battling cancer and I thought I would cheer her up with this edible bouquet.  Perhaps next time I make one of these I will try using fancier cupcake cases and more ribbon.  I think this is a great gift idea for anyone who loves cupcakes.

I also had time, finally, to practice making sugarpaste peonies.  Here is a picture of my very first attempt.  Not perfect, but I hope that in time they will get better.  They are not so much impossibly difficult as time consuming; each petal must be hand shaped and shaded and there are so many in each bloom!  To make this peony I followed an online tutorial...in German no less! For those interested the link is http://tortentante.blogspot.com/ .  Monika is a very talented lady whose cakes have won prizes and have been featured in wedding magazines. 

Last but not least, here is this year's St. Pat's Day creation.  Every year the Irish staff members throw a buffet lunch for all staff members at the school and it has become habit for me to provide the cake for them.   I will admit that the leprechaun is recycled from last year's cake, but everything else was fresh!  The beer mug was made from rice krispie treats with the "foam" being Bailey's flavoured buttercream, yum!  I am somewhat amused to see how inordinately popular the rice krispie treats are with the staff.  The Brits like it because I suppose it is a familiar treat from "back  home", but the Germans have been hitherto completely ignorant of this treat.

Next on my wishlist is time to make a tiered wedding cake, just to prove to myself that I can do it.  Tempting as it is to use up every free moment cake decorating, I do have to make time for my family and the garden occasionally!  However, before I get too caught up in the wedding cake theme, I have a birthday cake to create for my husband......

Busy times......

Last week was definitely the busiest I've had since December with cake projects to complete every evening after I came home from my day job.  It was challenging, exhausting, but also exhilarating.  I am always eager to learn new methods, try new things and extend my repertoire in general and last week was no exception! 

This champagne bottle cake was a first for me and much harder than I anticipated.  Having read on the internet that using rice krispie treats is the in thing to use in 3-D models, I decided to use this method for the bottle.  But I had a devil of a time getting the surface smooth enough for my liking.  In the end it came out OK; not perfect, but not so bad for my first effort!

The bucket was relatively easy and I was quite pleased with that.  The flowers were another first for me.  The design is loosely based on that of an anemone, but as you can see, there are no black stamens.  This is primarily because I didn't have any black stamens on hand, and in the end I ran out of time to dye them myself.  At one point I considered painting them on, but came to the conclusion that I liked them better this way.

Below is a close up of another fantasy flower I used last week for a different cake.  For this flower I followed the instructions of a tutorial and it involved wires to put the whole thing together. It was time consuming and a bit fiddly, but well worth the effort in the end! I am in the process of trying to get private tuition from a professional in the art of making realistic sugar flowers.  I yearn to make perfect flowers indistinguishable from the real thing.......

Below is a cake I did for a dear friend of mine at the request of her young daughters.  They knew exactly what they wanted their mother to have, and it was real pleasure to help them out.  This cake is not covered in fondant, as the girls were emphatic that they didn't want it for their Mum.  Instead I covered the cake with whipped ganache, but realised too late that it would have been better to use unwhipped ganache.  The latter would definitely have given a smoother finish! 

This is one of the things I find so frustrating about not being able to do this full-time.  My time is so very limited, being restricted to the evenings and weekends, that if I'm not happy with  the way something came out, I rarely have the time to do it over.  I find myself making more compromises than I am  happy with.  I get so envious when I read how a fellow cake decorator had time to experiment with an entire cake for no other reason than to practice a new technique.  Until I take the plunge and garner the courage to quit my day job, that luxury will not be a part of my life.



Speaking of experimentation, the McDonald's meal pictured below was a huge experiment for me, done with no tutorials or instructions of any kind.  I have never done this before, but I found it great fun, and not nearly as challenging as I expected!  This was all well and good as this was the last of 5 cakes I completed last week and I was literally exhausted.  My tiredness showed in that I made several crucial mistakes in the baking phase, and had to bake the cakes twice, with the first lot going in the bin.  The worst part of this was that it had to be a banana cake and I ran out of over ripe bananas.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to find over ripe bananas in the supermarket when you need them?!  I didn't succeed in finding any, so had to make do with plain old ripe bananas.  I hope the flavour came out ok!

The drink was also made out of rice krispie treats and this time I was smarter.  I covered the rice krispie treats with buttercream frosting and stuck the whole thing in the fridge for an hour or so to harden.  Then I smoothed the frosting before covering it with fondant.  Much easier!

I also made two other cakes, which are pictured in my photo gallery, but not here.  They were easy and fun to do.  By Saturday night I was more tired than I remember being in a loooonnnng time after surviving on barely 5 hours of sleep a night all week.  Yet I was not stressed or strung out.  The true beauty of this work is that I find it so pleasurable, that no matter how busy, or tired I may be, I actually relax when I sit down to make my fondant creations.  And so I look forward to my future projects with glee!

Happy Valentine's Day

It has been a little while since I last blogged; my apologies for that.  On the bright side I have been very busy with various orders, but on the not-so-bright-side I have been bogged down with the usual winter ailments.  Not enough to keep me in bed, but enough to make me feel tired and drained all the time.

This past weekend I had time to bake some cupcakes in celebration of Valentine's Day.  My original plan was to experiment with making fondant covered cupcakes, but in the end I ran short on time and motivation and stuck to my trademark rose swirls.  I did experiment with making so called ribbon roses and was delighted at how quick and easy they were! Suffice it to say that you'll be seeing a lot more of those from me in the future!
                                 
I find that the more I bake, the more I enjoy it.  With every cake I create I get more imaginative and bold.  There are innumerable new techniques and fads out there just waiting for me to try that until recently I simply had no idea about.  My greatest frustration at the moment is that I have so little time to explore and practice these new methods.  I have several video and pdf tutorials that I have purchased, none of which I have had the time to try.  It is soooo tempting to take the plunge, quit my day job and devote myself full-time to this new passion.  However, the knowledge that next year I will have 2 daughters in university and the UK threatening to raise tuition fees radically brings me back to reality.  The orders are coming in steadily, but not yet in the volumes that I would need to devote myself full-time.  All in good time!!

Fairies and dinosaurs

Here they are as promised; the fairy and butterfly cake and the dinosaur cake.  The fairy definitely would have looked very different had I attempted her before I went to Lorraine's course.  As it was I was very pleased with the way the hands and the feet came out.  The face I was not pleased with and I know I really need practice getting the mouth right!  I wasn't really given any specifics for this cake other than it had to be pink and feature fairies and butterflies.  That it did, but I also went waaaayyyy OTT on the flowers.  When it was all finished, I regretted putting so many on, but it was too late to do anything about it.

My daughter reassured me that since the client is 8 years old, she won't think it OTT at all.  You know what? My daughter was right!  she was ecstatic over the cake; I believe her exact words were, "Oohh, that's the most romantic cake I have EVER seen!"

This dinosaur cake was all in all much simpler and far less time consuming than the fairy cake.  I found these cartoonish dinosaurs relatively easy and a lot of fun to make.  Ok, so the brontosaurus gave me a lot of grief because while I was away in Maastricht, the neck snapped off.  Then when I made a new improved head and neck for him I managed to snap the tail off.  At that point I thought it best to throw the whole thing in the bin and start again.  T-Rex was also a little tricky because I found it hard to support him properly so that he would dry in an upright position.  But little Harry also loved his cake, and in the end that's the  most important thing!

By the way, both cakes were bourbon vanilla with vanilla buttercream covered in marshmallow fondant.  More pictures of these and all my cakes can be found in the photo gallery.

Figure modelling course with Lorraine McKay

After a relatively quiet beginning to the year things have suddenly got insanely busy again.  Once again I am burning the midnight oil trying to keep up with my cake orders while dutifully going to work every day.  I  also spent two wonderful days in Maastricht, Holland last week-end, attending 2 days of courses with Lorraine McKay.  This doubtlessly has contributed massively to the need for late nights this week.

During the weekend I learned how to fashion this bride out of sugar paste, complete with dress details and jewelry, and also a cute mermaid in a bathtub.  On Saturday there were about 16 of us there, of which 10 were bona fide professionals.  Two participants were authors of cake decorating books!  So, yes, I definitely felt out of my league at first.  Yet everyone was super friendly and the atmosphere was relaxed and positive.  Lorraine herself was terrifc, who constantly cracked jokes and bantered with all of us.  For me the pace was punishing on Saturday.  It seemed I was always 2 steps behind everyone else  which meant that I was constantly having to ask Lorraine to show me again, as I had had time to forget in the meantime.  But at the end of the day, when I was checking out everyone else's projects, I realised that I was far from being the worst in the class!  The slowest, definitely, but not the worst.  That in itself was such a confidence booster!

On Sunday I schlepped all my stuff from the hotel to the course venue in order to make the train on time in the evening.  This time there were only 10 of us and the pace was noticeably more relaxed.  Fewer professionals and more hobby bakers so all in all an easier day.  In just one day I noticed a marked improvement in my face-making skills and in my ability to make hands (including the fingernails!).  In the end most of us relaxed too much and ended up not having time to fully complete our projects, me included.  Luckily we were allowed to keep our left over bits of fondant and sugar paste, so I was able to complete both projects at home.

All in all I learned more than I ever thought I would in one weekend.  Best of all the skills I have learned are easily applicable to other kinds of projects.  I now felt confident making a 3-D fairy for a birthday cake ordered for this weekend.  My fairy has bare feet, and I realised I could apply the techniques used for making hands to make realistic feet with toes and toenails.    See my next post for pictures of that cake and a dinosaur birthday cake I was also working on!

Teddy Bear Cake

 Happy New Year to all you dear readers!  After a relaxing Christmas holiday 2011 has begun in a whirlwind of activity.  The dishwasher and the oven are repaired and the cake orders are rolling in.  This teddy bear cake was so much fun to make, even more so when I know the little birthday girl.  Not surprisingly the teddy bear itself proved to be the biggest (and only) challenge.  This one is my second attempt in fact.  The first one was not really the right colour and I made the mistake of trying to model him out of marshmallow fondant with cmc powder mixed in.  Not a good idea!  After a couple of hours, instead of setting and hardening, teddy had sagged and collapsed into an amorphous lump.  All my attempts of reviving him just made things worse.

So, having slept on it I started again the following day by mixing a 50-50 mixture of mmf and gum paste.    This time the teddy kept his shape!  OK, so I made his belly a bit too big, but no matter, he still definitely looked like a teddy.  Once teddy had dried completely, I covered him with royal icing to make him look fuzzy.

I did the blanket by laying a waffle-weave dishtowel over the rolled out fondant and gently rolling over the towel to imprint the weave.  Then I took a pairing knife and hand-cut all the tassles.  I was surprised it worked so well and was very pleased with the end result.

I just had to include this photo because the way the colours arranged themselves is so cool!  My kitchen elves made two cakes for the teddy cake; one in blue, green and purple and the other in red, orange and yellow.  Then I torted both cakes and layered them alternately.  the edge looks burnt, but it is in fact the way the dark purple baked.

Next in line are a dinosaur cake and a fairy and butterfly cake.  I do so enjoy making children's cakes; probably because in most cases I can let my imagination run wild! :D  The fairy will be a challenge, but as serendipity would have it, I managed to enroll in a Lorraine McKay figure modelling course to be held in Maastricht, Holland next weekend.  To see the amazing work she has become famous for, see her website at http://www.extraicing.co.uk.  This is a great opportunity for me and a rare one at that.  Most of the cake decorating courses on offer are held during the week and my full-time job effectively prevents me from being able to attend.  Working in a high school my vacations are restricted to the school holidays, which make things even trickier.  Anyway, I look forward to learning all I can from Lorraine next weekend.

Sacher Torte and kitchen disasters

 Christmas 2010 has come and gone with all the stress and sleepless nights that preceded it.  Yet all of that was worth it when I reflect on how lovely and happy Christmas actually was.  Many have bemoaned the chaos that all this snow has brought upon our lives, but come on, admit it; there's nothing like a white christmas!!!!  Granted when one has a 4 wheel drive Volvo tank, it's easy to dismiss icy conditions and unexpected snow drifts.  Those with  compact, 2 wheel drive cars really were in trouble and we did our fair share pushing our neighbours' cars when they got stuck.

Despite being extremely pressed for time, I did find time to bake cupcakes for the neighbours and a sacher torte for a friend of mine.  This was my first attempt at a Sacher torte and I probably spent more time researching the best recipe than was spent actually baking!  What surprised me was the range and variety of chocolate glazes that were used to cover the cake.  In the end I chose two different recipes; one for the actual cake and apricot glaze and the other for the chocolate glaze.  The cake recipe was Austrian, and I used a ganache-like glaze that had a higher proportion of chocolate to cream and incorporated butter as well.

All in all the cake came out very well, although I suspect the ganache had cooled a little too much by the time I got it on the cake.  At any rate I would have wished for a smoother finish on the cake!  Being a little tired of snowflakes I opted for christmas roses and holly for the decorations.  I discovered that by mixing burgundy and Christmas red, I was able to achieve that rich, deep red that holly berries really are.  A bit of gloss spray made leaves and berries look more authentic too.  At the last minute I added a red fondant band around the base to hide the slight irregularities.

Now I am on a forced baking hiatus for a week or so as our kitchen suffered several disasters over the holidays.  Namely on the evening of the 23rd, right after business hours, our dishwasher broke down.  That in itself is not an unsurmountable problem, merely annoying as heck!  On Christmas morning I managed to wreak havoc in the kitchen by omitting to remove the ceramic stove covers before heating up some mulled wine to take with us to the stables.  Sure enough the covers exploded, leaving the kitchen filled with acrid smoke, and the stove covered in shattered glass and melted plastic.  Again, once the glass had been cleaned up, the kitchen aired out and the plastic scraped off the stove, no apparent damage to the stove itself. Phew!

The crowning glory of all disasters occurred during Christmas dinner in the evening.  The oven had been left on low to keep the desserts warm.  No sooner had my daughter removed the  desserts and closed the oven door when the door, which was glass (of course!) literally shattered for no apparent reason.  My daughter got a fright but no one was hurt.  It will be well in to the first week of January before we can get that repaired.  In the meantime there will be no turkey pie, sausage rolls or cakes prepared in this house.  An awful prospect indeed!