Cymbidium Orchid Cake

This cake was ordered days after I delivered the Hibiscus cake by another colleague for  her Mum's 75th birthday.  The brief was simply,"white Cymbidium orchids, make it look beautiful".  I didn't really have clear idea in my head how I wanted the cake to look, but I started out by making the orchids. I took my time, making lots more than I needed so that I could pick and choose the best ones for the cake.  Once the orchids were complete, everything sort of evolved by itself from there.  I decided that a very, very pale ruby colour should be used to cover the cake.  Then I realised I needed something in a soft, delicate green and the next thing I knew I was making eucalyptus leaves.  My next idea was to add some tiny filler flowers, such as jasmine or stephanotis, but as usual, I ran out of time.

It always amazes me just how much time making something as simple as leaves can take.  Each leaf needs to be individually wire, veined and dusted before they can be wired together to form a stem.  It also took ages for me to figure out how to wire the flowers and leaves together to make an attractive spray for the cake.  Alan Dunn makes it look so simple, but trust me, it isn't!!!

All in all I was extremely pleased with the way this cake came out.  Hard and time consuming as they are to make, I must say that flowers give me the most pleasure to make. There is something so unbelievably beautiful in even the simplest flowers.  For me it is such a thrill to be able to even vaguely reproduce that beauty.

In closing I can't resist adding that the recipient was so delighted with this cake that she refused to let anyone cut it!  She has put it on display for all to see and no amount of pleading can make her eat this one!  Luckily it is a sacher torte which keeps very well for longer periods.  Even so, perhaps I should have made it out of styrofoam........

Thanks for stopping by!

Tropical flowers and elephants

With summer at an end and autumn upon us, the pace has picked  up once again.  I have noticed some evolution in the type of cakes requested of me, which for the most part pleases me greatly.  Having invested a great deal of time and money in learning the art of sugar flowers, I had been a little disappointed that these were the one thing that were not in demand.  This hibiscus cake has changed the pattern.  This is a cake I made as a thank you gift to our fitness trainer on her last day with our group.  It was my first attempt at hibiscus and cape leadwort, so I made twice as many flowers as I needed and picked the best of the bunch.

The cake itself is an organic chocolate zucchini cake filled with organichazelnut chocolate ganache and covered with organic white ganache.  I recently made another organic chocolate cake and tried to make organic fondant.  It was such a headache, so expensive and so utterly impossible to work with that I swore I would never do anything with organic fondant again!  Please note that there is nothing organic about these flowers:))

Approximately the same time I had an order for an elephant cake.  Although no flowers were involved, I thoroughly enjoyed making this one.  The original detail had been for a fully 3-D elephant standing up, but after sleeping on it I realised that I didn't have the experience, let alone the knowledge to do this.  I knew I didn't have enough time to do a trial run, so this is the compromise.  The head is solid fondant with gumpaste ears and tusks.  I think I was a bit timid with the wrinkles and folds, but in the end better safe than sorry!

My original design was to be of an Indian elephant with full parade paraphenalia, but at the last minute I changed my mind and made him an African elephant.  I loved the idea of the massive ears much more....and luckily so did the birthday girl!

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!

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.

Witch's Hat cake

Tonight I am a very happy blogger.  Since my last post I found a better tutorial on making marshmallow fondant; one that made extensive use of a KitchenAid mixer, and this time I hit the jackpot!  My fondant had the perfect consistency and with the addition of bourbon vanilla tasted devine.

About the same time I received an order for a Halloween-themed birthday cake, so naturally I was  keen to try out my new fondant.  The birthday girl had requested a Witch's hat, but could not decide on flavour or colour.  After a moment's thought and a twinkle in my eye I jokingly suggested a rainbow-coloured vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream filling covered with purple and orange fondant.  I figured this would cover all the bases, but she loved the idea!  And truth be told I loved every aspect of making this cake.

It was fun dividing up the batter and colouring each batch a different colour.  It's a pity I can't show you what a slice would look like......Anyway, since I didn't have the appropriate shaped cake pans to make this cake, I improvised with three different ceramic bowls, the smallest of which was a cereal bowl!  Once baked, cooled, torted, filled and stacked I had to trim the cake into shape.  To say I "sculpted" the cake would be a serious exaggeration.

Once the hat was covered in buttercream it was time for the best part, namely rolling out the fondant.  It was smooth, it was pliant.  There was not a crack or a crease to be seen.  This was bliss!  I felt like a professional!  It was also time to try my new imprinting mat, which worked a charm!  Positioning the fondant on the cake was somewhat tricky, as I really could have used an extra pair of hands to hold the fondant aloft while I shaped the very top of the hat.  However, both my kitchen elves are in England right now, and hubby was working late.  Nevertheless, I got the job done and all that remained were the hat band, star and moon decorations and the birthday message.  The letters and shapes I had made ahead of time, so that took no time at all.  On an impulse I decided to add pearl lustre to the whole thing.  Together with the patterned "fabric" of the hat, the lustre just made the whole thing better.

Tomorrow the Hat goes to it's new home and I hope it is well received.  Yet even without compliments this cake was truly a feelgood experience.  I get such a rush when things finally fall into place and work the way they're supposed to.  I've been doing cakes for friends and family for as long as I can remember, but working with fondant is a whole new area for me.  Every cake I make is a learning experience.  These days every free moment I have I am working on new techniques, or practicing the skills I already have.  I get an almost child-like sense of happiness when I'm up to my elbows in icing sugar creating flowers and figures out of fondant and icing.