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

Children in Need 2014

Time for another charity cake.
Another try at modelling produced a pretty good Pudsey bear, his face and the dots on his eye patch air brushed on. The building blocks were sponge squares covered with paste and moulded letters added to each face. The faces round the edges were air brushed on and instead of royal icing around the bottom I used dolly mixture sweets to complete the children theme.
It was an 8 inch sponge cake, and selling slices of the cake at work I managed to raise £26 for the cause, which I was more than happy with.

Children in Need 2014

Tour of Britain

Having just been to watch the Tour of Britain - seeing them climbing the hill out of Cheltenham, which any human being would struggle up on a bike, treating it as if it was hardly there - I was inspired to decorate a fruit cake in celebration.
Flower paste jerseys of the race leader, king of the mountains, points and sprint leaders were air brushed, as were the Tour of Britain logos, so it wasn't much of a challenge but I think it was worthy of such a great national event.

Tour of Britain celebration
 

Claires birthday

Claire's partner Graeme gave me just a few days notice when he asked me to make her a birthday cake so a simple floral cake had to be the way to go.
I've got the hang of making roses now so one full bloom on the top and three buds around the edge were straightforward. Rather than just putting the buds just on the top of the paste I made indentations around the edges and recessed them a little, a touch that looked quite effective I think. I don't think there should be anything on a cake that you can't eat and I don't use wires on my flowers, so I make the stems from angelica, which ran down the sides to a couple of leaves. The other flowers around the edges are my version of gerberas, though I don't think you'll see one quite like this in the garden. The little fleur-de-lis around the bottom were just an experiment to see what I could do with royal icing.

Claire's floral cake

A major commission

I like to give myself a challenge with every cake I make and the challenge this time was simply the scale of the thing!
It was my sisters company's 20th anniversary and she asked me to make a cake for about 100 people. After a moment of thought I agreed and spent a while thinking about what was involved. Between us we decided a ten inch square fruit cake and a ten inch square sponge should feed them all and give them a choice. The biggest cakes I'd ever made before were 8 inch square and even though 2 inches doesn't sound much it can make a huge difference. With the fruit cake made a few weeks before all was calm until about a week before I was due to deliver the cakes. I first made a template for the company's logo and made them from flower paste (plus a third just in case) and then produced the banner, also in flower paste. By then it was time to bake the sponge, a bit of a challenge in itself to manage to bake such a big cake without over or under cooking it. I knew it would be too stressful to cover and decorate them in the evenings after work so I took the day off and thoroughly enjoyed the day covering and decorating my monster creations.
I had been invited to the celebration and it was nice to receive many positive reactions both to the appearance and the taste.  It made the time and hard work all worthwhile.

Congratulations ARC Energy