Stiletto heel and shoe box cake

I am really pleased with how this cake turned out! This is a model for a class I want to teach.  The gumpaste shoe took a lot of patience to do.  There was a lot of waiting in between, waiting for each part to hurry up and dry before another layer could be applied, but I am really pleased with how it turned out.  The shoe box is a dummy cake, which I covered in fondant.  The letters were cut out of the alphabet set from Patchwork cutters.  All in all, I am really happy with it. :)


Thanks for looking!

Orange cranberry butter cake {Recipe}

As promised, here is the recipe for the orange cranberry butter cake I made for a friend.  I also made extra as cupcakes as they were really yummy.  I decorated a couple to give away to a friend at work. I used a new Patchwork quilt pattern for the background and made some ribbon roses (tutorial here).

Recipe for Orange cranberry butter cake

125g butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups self raising flour, sifted
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup cranberries, cut into smaller pieces if you prefer (add more or less to your taste)
1/4 cup orange juice
zest of 1 orange
2 tsp hot water

Method:

1. Cream butter, vanilla and sugar til light and creamy.
2. Add eggs, slowly, and mix thoroughly.
3. Sprinkle some of the flour over cranberries and toss through to coat.  Keep to one side.  Fold in remaining flour into egg mixture, in thirds, alternating with juice.
4. Add cranberry flour mixture and fold in.  Do not over mix.
5. Add hot water and fold in.
6. Bake in greased pan at 170C for 35-45 min or until a skewer in the centre of your cake comes out clean.

Enjoy!

Kokeshi Japanese doll cake

I wanted to make a cake for a dear friend who has been really wonderful and helpful to me, especially in the last couple of months when I've had to juggle a few things.  I really don't think I could have managed without her and this was a way to say thank you to her for being such a wonderful person. 

She is an excellent baker so making the perfect cake for her was a little stressful (!) and I have to confess this is the second time I had to bake a cake as the first recipe (different one) I tried was unsuccessful.  I honestly thought my oven wasn't working properly until I realised it was the new pan I was using that was giving me issues.  I usually have cake pans that are non-stick and darker in colour and this was silver coloured and I forgot they bake a little differently.  Anyway, I managed to make it a success the second time around by adjusting the temperature in the oven so all is good!

This is an orange cranberry butter cake and is soo sooo good.  I will leave you with the recipe in the next post as I think you will enjoy it.  Luckily I made another batch with cupcakes, so we have been enjoying it all week.  Yum!

Here is the cake all decorated with the Kokeshi dolls.  I made a couple of extra ones, and at first I thought I could fit them all onto the cake but they kept falling off as they were too close to the edge so I went with only three.  They are all made of fondant and were really fun to do.  I just printed out pictures from the net to get an idea of what I wanted to do and then came up with these.

The little cherry blossom flowers are made with a PME flower cutter set and for the rope border at the bottom I used my extruder gun with the three round holes joined together and just twisted the strands.  You can do this without the extruder gun by rolling a couple of fondant logs and then twisting them together.  The letters are cut with a Patchwork alphabet cutter set.

Thank you, Diane.  I hope you enjoyed your little present. :)

Christmas cake and cookies gift

It's been so long since I have blogged I can't believe it's March already!  Our computer decided to have a meltdown at the end of last year and so I haven't been able to put up any pictures of what I've been up to. 
Well I decided to switch it on again today and lo and behold it is up and running again!  Maybe it just needed a holiday too!

Well this post is either very late or very early but I thought I should post some pictures of a Christmas cake and cookie tree stack I did.  The cake is fruit cake and the cookies are lemon based shortbread.

The fondant striped bow was really easy and fun to do and I really must put together a simple tutorial on it soon.  Fingers crossed the computer works next time I start it up!  But just in case, here is a quick run down on how I did the stripes.

Roll a sheet of white fondant as your base.  Then overlap with strips of red at even intervals.  Gently roll over the strips with your rolling pin so the red fondant merges with the white.  Cut out strips for your bow and ribbon and you have your striped ribbon.  I used a new set of cutters from Patchwork for the letters.   A bit fiddly but I am sure I will get the hang of it soon.  I then painted the letters with edible gold paint.

The cookie stack was a lot of fun to do.  I baked lots of star shaped cookies in various sizes using the Wilton star cookie cutter set, decorated them with royal icing and silver dragees and then stacked them together, criss crossing the cookies along the way to get the effect you see in the picture below. 

Very effective don't you think?  It would look really nice in green too of course.  You could even pipe little icicles on the edges of each cookie to make it look like snow.

Thanks for looking!

Monica

Puppy cake - woof!

My friend's daughter just turned 6!  I have been making their cakes now for the last 3 years and I have to say this is probably one of my favourites.  I loved making this cake!  And I am so pleased with how it turned out.  This is a Debbie Brown design and I changed the colours around to suit the little girl's request.  The cake is made with the Wilton sports pan (for the head) and Wilton's soccer pan (for the body).  The checkerboard pattern took ages to do but I was quite happy with how it turned out and brightened the cake as well.  The letters are cut from FMM funky alphabet cutters, which I love using.  I added some bling to his collar using blue cauchous.  All in all, a very easy cake to make.

Isn't he adorable?  Woof!  :)