Cakes, cakes and yet more cakes!

Hello there!

I've been super busy for the last month or so and my little blog has been somewhat neglected. Sorry about that! Anyways things have settled down now so I'm back! I've got a ton of stuff to share with you all. It's waaaaaay to much to put into just one post but even so the posts over the next few days/weeks are still gonna be really long. I'll warn you now that this post in particular is gonna be super photo heavy, which will make it really long!

So.....Shall we get started?

As you can probably tell from the post title, I have been making a LOT of cakes recently. It was my Aunties 30th birthday and I decorated her big birthday cake and also made and decorated 36 cupcakes. Which was one hell of task especially as I've only just started cake decorating recently. But I managed it and everyone seemed really impressed with the cakes, which was nice. And seeing as there was none left at the end they must have tasted good too!

Here's a few pictures of the birthday cake.

The cake was one of those big 'face cake' cakes from Asda. They're just iced in plain white and then you can get an image iced on top if you want. We just bought it and then I decorated it at home. It turned out pretty well for a first attempt at cake decorating :)

I bought the flower, leaf and butterfly cutters from ebay (you can see them in my post here). They worked pretty well once I'd gotten the hang of them and had gotten my icing mix right. The happy birthday was cut out using little letter cutters that I got free with my My Cake Decorating magazine. I then glittered them using a pastel pink Rainbow Dust glitter. The letters are made using Renshaw's Flower and Modelling Paste and then everything else on the cake was made using Renshaw's Regal Ice mixed with a little Gum Tragacanth. This let me still have nice soft icing but it took away some of the stickiness so that it wouldn't stick to the cutters and rolling pin. The sparkly 30 is so pretty! I had to cut the wire a little bit because it was too tall for the cake

Right so that's the big cake done, now onto the cupcakes! I did warn you that this was going to be a long post!

So thats what they all looked like on the stand, which by the way was an absolute bargain! Only 99p from Home Bargains. I made 36 cupcakes in total. 18 were topped with rolled sugarpaste in 6 different designs, and the other 18 were topped with buttercream with 4 different designs.

I'll show you the iced ones first.



These were coloured a pale purple using Sugarflair paste colouring in Grape Violet. The cutters were gently pressed into the icing to create a stamped pattern.

For these cakes I left half the icing white and coloured the other half pink using Sugarflair paste colouring in Pink. I then used a textured plate and a rolling pin to emboss a square pattern onto the icing. I them pushed some small pink and white edible pearls into the icing where the square edges met.

Next up is the rose cakes. The rolled sugarpaste icing was coloured pink using Sugarflair Pink. The roses were made from Platinum Paste flower paste that was coloured pink using Sugarflair Red, and the calyx was coloured green with Sugarflair Holly Green.

The last iced cakes are the bow, daisy and cameo. I made the bow using a 50:50 mix of Platinum Paste flower paste and Renshaw's Regal Ice. I coloured it pale blue using Sugarflair Baby Blue. The Daisy was cut out of white icing using the same plunger cutters that I used on the main cake. The rolled sugarpaste behind it was coloured pastel yellow using Sugarflair Melon colouring. I cut off a small piece and added a little more colouring to make the centres of the daisies more vibrant.

The cameo cakes were difinitely my favourite out of all the iced cakes. The cameo was made using a mould (which was a free gift from My Cake Decorating magazine). You kind of have to push the white icing into the mould so that it only goes into what will become the head silhouette, and then you just push the blue icing into the mould ontop of the white, trim off the excess and then bend the mould a little bit until your little cameo falls out. I made my cameos using flower paste because the sugarpaste was to soft and sticky, but warn people before they try to bite into the cameo that it will be rock hard! After it had dried I stuck it onto the cake and added some edible white pearls around it. I was going to pipe around the cameo but the perals were easier and gave the same effect.

Right so thats all the iced cakes, now onto the buttercream topped cakes. I'll start with the simple ones first.

These are simply piped with an open star nozzle then gently rolled in coloured sprinkles so that it forms a stripe of colour around the edge of the cake.

These are again piped with an open star nozzle but this nozzle was slightly smaller than the previos one used. I made a ruffle/swirl design by piping up and down the cake instead of just round and round.

I mixed up some Mexican Paste using the recipe on the Patchwork Cutters website and coloured it pink, blue and purple using Sugarflair colourings in Pink, Baby Blue and Grape Violet. Then using a small butterfly cookie cutter I cut out the butterflies and laid them onto a piece of card that I'd mountain and vally folded so that they dried with the wings sticking up. When they were dry I dusted half of them with glitter (Pastel Pink and White Hologram Rainbow Dust glitter) and dusted the other half with pearl powders (Irridescent Lilac and Pearl Blush Pink Rainbow Dust and Glacier Blue Sugarflair edible dust). The cupcakes were piped using a large open star nozzle and the butterflies pushed gently into the buttercream.

These are my favourites of the buttercream cakes. I just love them! The whole idea behind them was for them to look like a daisy meadow. I cut the daisies out of white Mexican Paste using the daisy plunger cutter. I mixed a little yellow lustre dust (Sunglow Rainbow dust) with water and painted the centre of the daisies. Then I mixed a tiny bit of Sugarflair Holly Green colouring in with the buttercream and piped it onto the cake using a large open star nozzle. Then I placed the daisies on in a random pattern, between 4 and 6 per cake.

So thats all the cakes Ive made this weekend! Phew that was a long post wasn't it?

Here is a quick list of the products/items I used on this cake. I bought the majority of it from either eBay or Cameo Cakecraft.

Renshaw's Regal Ice in White
Renshaw's Flower and Modelling Paste in White
Homemade Mexican paste (recipe can be found here)
Plunger cutters in Blossom, Daisy, Gerbera, Butterfly & Ivy Leaf
Sugarflair paste colourings in Pink, Red, Baby Blue, Melon, Holly Green & Grape Violet

Rainbow Dust in White Hologram, Pastel Pink, Sunglow, Irridescent Lilac & Pearl Blush Pink
Sugarflair Lustre Dust in Glacier Blue
White cupcake cases from Lakeland
Wilton disposable piping bags
Open star nozzles
Edible pearls from Asda
Pink and Blue sprinkles from Asda

That's all for today. Bye for now!

Checking in

Hi everyone

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've been super busy moving out, getting ready for my graduation next week and starting my new job among other things. I do have some projects to show you all just as soon as everything has settled down! And an update on my quilt too, which is finally starting to get somewhere! Hopefully in the next week or two I'll be back to posting a couple of times a week.

Bye for now!