Happy New Year

I'd been invited to a New Years Eve party so I said I'd bring along a cake.

A simple sponge cake, filled with buttercream and strawberry jam, it was a pretty obvious theme. With a nod towards Dali's 'Persistence of Time' the watches on the clock face of the cake are distorted but still record the midnight hour. The guys around the edge of the clock are Father Time, although I know they look like the grim reaper.

Tempus Fugit

Happy birthday Bridget

My brother asked me to make a fruit cake for his wife's birthday and as her birthday is on Boxing day I made it alongside the Christmas cakes. I'd been asked to make this one without any citrus so instead of mixed peel I used dried apricot instead, which worked out really well.

I had a free hand as the only brief I had was 'flowers' and not to make the number too large. Having been on a course on making bluebells and snowdrops I thought I'd give them a go. Not exactly a likely combination in reality they make quite a pretty little posy. Being small they're really fiddly to make and using angelica for the stems instead of wire (I don't think there should be anything on the cake you can't eat) I had to make them thin enough to be able to bend them but not too thin so they didn't break, which was also a challenge.

Flowers for Bridget

Merry Christmas

It's the highlight of the cake decorating year again. Last year was a really hectic so this year, with a birthday cake to make as well, it was just two cakes.  They were both traditional fruit Christmas cakes (a 1970s Good Housekeeping recipe) baked in November.

The first one was for my Mum's annual 'at home' the weekend before Christmas. They had angels last year so this time it was a simple snowman and tree theme. The snowman was as simple to make as the real thing, two balls of flower paste, paste nose & hat and royal icing buttons. I'm really pleased with the tree. With a core of a cone of marzipan my new fancy piping nozzle has made a pretty good royal icing tree I think. Air brushed stencils and snowflakes around the edges finished off this fun cake.

Snowman & tree

The second one was the family cake. It's my version of the nativity. With the Virgin Mary, baby Jesus and three wise men (they were going to be kings but the crowns looked a bit silly when I put them on so I had to demote them) it's a pretty simple version. My favourite bit is the stencils around the edge. There was a different one on each side - the three kings on their camels, the shepherds in the field, Mary & Joseph travelling to Bethlehem and an angel announcing the birth. It's simpler than I would have liked but I didn't want to overload it with shepherds, donkeys and sheep.

Nativity