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

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.

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!  :)

Giant cupcake

I finally got to try out my new giant cupcake pan from Baker's Secret.  After reading all the recommendations online on whether to bake the top and bottom half of the cake at the same time, I went with the 10-15 minute gap by baking the bottom half first for 10 minutes then adding the batter to the top half after that.  Both halves baked almost to the same time after that.  The only issue I had was trying to get it out of the pan all in one!  I should have greased and floured the pan but decided to go ahead and not do it.  Big mistake!  Always grease and flour your pans before adding the batter and the cakes with pop out with no issues.  Anyway I did finally get most of the cake out in one piece, thank goodness. 

This cake is carrot cake with loads of cream cheese icing on top as well as in between the top and bottom halves.  Bottom half is covered in strips of fondant and the top is sprinkled with giant sprinkles made from fondant circles.  I did try rolling a large strip of fondant around the bottom half but it came out looking like a bowl instead, hence the individual strips.  Will have to try again, maybe with buttercream icing as cream cheese is rather soft and doesn't give a good undercoat.  Tasted yummy though! :)