Christmas is coming

Its inevitable, and the shops will certainly not let us forget it, Christmas is coming. Last year I planned my Christmas a little a-la-last-minute, and this year I have decided that I should plan better. So I am already thinking of presents, and listening closely to conversations to pick up on any hints or possibilities for what my loved ones might like for Christmas. This year we will be in Holland for Christmas for the first time so the present-buying list is a bit longer and I am looking forward to finding some gifts for the extended family. I do love Christmas shopping, although I do loathe the Christmas-shopping-crowds, so I am a firm believer in online shopping. No crowds, no queues, no aching feet. Just me, my little mac laptop, and a nice cup of coffee, and a scrummy flapjack from my hamper :)

I have often bought a Christmas food hamper for my Mum for Christmas when it is a year that I won't be with her for Christmas day. I think its a really nice way to add some lovely treats to the Christmas table that will be great for munching on Christmas day, or, if everyone is already overfed, that will last the rest of Christmas week. There is nothing wrong with having Christmas pudding on Boxing Day as well. And why not New Years too?

If you are going to be doing online shopping like me, then there is a lovely website called Hampergifts, who have a fantastic selection of Christmas hampers for all Christmas budgets. With everything from wines, to fruit and nuts, biscuits, pâté and puddings, the selection looks delicious and its hard to choose just one!

I have had the pleasure of trying out the Christmas Ruby hamper, and my Mum and I enjoyed the lovely bottle of Red while she was visiting over the weekend. I also really enjoyed the unusual vanilla nuts, and the cherry and chocolate liqueurs went beautifully with the red wine, yum :) Chocolate and cherry and red wine is a match made in heaven. I think I should incorporate that into a cake somehow. I think it would make a lovely Christmas flavour. Dark Chocolate and cherry cake. Mmmmmm. Feeling inspired now, time to head to the kitchen :)

(This post is in association with Hampergifts. Click here for a great range of Christmas hampers from Hampergifts)

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Orignal From: Christmas is coming

Loving The Ruffle

I don't often do buttercream cakes. People tend to like the clean lines and smooth finish of sugarpaste, but there are some cakes that are beautiful in buttercream, and unusually I had two last week. One of them was buttercream ruffles. Like any other technique and medium, the more practice you get, the better you get at piping buttercream and getting the effect you want, so I did a practice cake earlier in the week. I have done a buttercream ruffle cake before, waaaaay back when when I was a hobby cake maker novice, and I was going for a slightly more polished effect than that early stumbling-around-in-the-dark effort. So I did a practice cake. I was glad I did, as I got to figure out my technique, how to hold the bag, which direction to pipe in, how to move the bag to get the ruffles ruffley (yes, that's a word), and it was a good warm up for the muscles. Piping uses muscles. You find hand and forearm muscles that you never knew existed once you have ruffle-piped your way a round a 10" cake. But its worth it. And it looked awesome, so I'm smiling :)

Number two was a buttercream swirl cake, in shades of yellow, for a golden wedding anniversary. I was alightly worried that the effect would be a bit garish, having only done the piped graduated swirls in pink before, but the yellow worked really well. It wasn't glaringly, hurting-your-eyes bright and the recipient was all smiles when I dropped it off so it was a good day, despite the 2nd good hand/forearm workout :)

I also did a photo 50th cake this week. I don't normally warm to photos on cakes. I know they make a cake completely personal, but sometimes they can look a bit... simple...cheap... I don't know. I'm not a huge fan. But this one was a bit different. It was a cake for a lady's 50th, and the photo was of her as a baby with who I assume are siblings. I printed off the photo in the original sepia-type colouring, and framed the corners with peach flowers. I don't know why I chose peach, I just thought it would work, and it did, really well :) And peach made a wonderful change from pink. Sometimes I get pinked out. This time I was peachy-keen :) hehehehehe I crack me up :) Its late. Humour me ok?

Happy Monday, have an awesome week, and happy baking xxx

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Orignal From: Loving The Ruffle

The Challenge of Urdu

I have not done hundreds of wedding cakes (yet!) but I do love doing them. Weddings are occasions when everyone is happy and the lovely bride I did a cake for this weekend was no exception. I made this lady's engagement party cake last year, and when she got in touch to talk about her wedding cake I was delighted, especially seeing that she wanted something a bit different, but was happy to give me free reign on the design. Yay! I did have to include an Urdu poem around one of the tiers, which was challenging as I cannot read it and was worried with all the printing out, mirroring, tracing and transferring to the cake, would cause some mix up with the words (which are also read right to left), but I was veeeery careful and all was well.

I was very pleased with how the cake turned out and once it was all set up at the venue, it fit into the setting perfectly (yes, that is a sword on the table, a sword to cut the wedding cake. Of course. Why use a knife when you can use a sword!?!?). The colour scheme was maroon and ivory and I was thankful that in the huuuuge room that is the Dome in Buxton, the cake was not lost. I received a lovely message from the bride today telling me that she loved the cake and so I close the chapter on this cake with a smile. Another happy bride.

As wedding season winds down for those in the wedding industry, I sit at night and plan how to get myself a bigger piece of the pie that is the wedding cake market. And I have a cunning plan, so we will wait and see if it works. It does require some (in my opinion) significant investment, so I have to grit my teeth and take that, but as they say, you have to spend money to make money, so hey ho. Here we go.

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Orignal From: The Challenge of Urdu

Red Velvet Cake & Sunflower Cupcakes

The sun and the warmth have gone from Manchester this week. it is COLD and WINDY and rather unpleasant outdoors. And I like the outdoors. So thats saying something. So It is quite nice to have a little brightness in the world on those days when you feel like the spring will never come, and this weeks sunflower cupcakes brought just that. Bright, cheerful and they make me smile every time I look at them. With these cupcakes in the room, and the smell of fresh Earl Grey and Red Velvet Cupcakes just out of the oven, even on s drab day, there is metaphorical sunshine.

I do like sugarpaste as a medium, but as variety is the spice of life, sometimes its nice to do a non-sugarpaste cake for a change. Last night I delivered this large red velvet cake, which was covered with piped rose swirls and just decorated with some simple flowers. Simple, elegant, and I bet it tasted good! Frosted with fluffy vanilla buttercream, and filled with 3 fillings between the 4 layers. Chocolate ganache, strawberry swiss meringue buttercream, and vanilla fluffy buttercream. Can I stay for the party and have a piece of the cake? No? Darn :( ok.

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Orignal From: Red Velvet Cake & Sunflower Cupcakes

I don't know how its been so long!

 

 

Sorry blog, you have been neglected. I really, really don't know how its been so long since I've posted on here. I am going to blame Christmas ok? Christmas, its all your fault.

Seriously, I did take some time off over Christmas, but now things are back in full swing, and are they swinging! Its busy! Which is great, but leaves blogging time for late on a Saturday afternoon when I'm in between mopping the floor & washing the cloths, and thinking about cooking dinner.

So this isn't going to be a long post, but it will be a promise to post more. I promise. Don't give up on me.

The big news this week is my cupcake photoshoot with the excellent Mark Williamson. He is the camera genius behind my gorgeous wedding photos, and was the only person I thought of when I first considered getting professional pics for my website. It was about time the pics got an upgrade, so this week the cupcakes put their best side forward, and smiled for the camera. The results should be visible on my site in the next day or two, so come back soon! But here's a sneak preview...

 

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Orignal From: I don't know how its been so long!

All about the dinosaurs

Its funny how things happen in clusters sometimes. Like last week, which was the week of dinosaurs. No dinosaur cakes for months, then 3 dinosaur cakes in 1 week. Funny. So, I have now had a lot of practice at making dinosaurs. And I have decided that I like them. They can be made with a certain degree of 'artistic license'. They do not need to be exact replicas of certain breeds or have specially distinguishing features to make them look like a family pet or a famous animal. When you do a dinosaur cake for a child, it just needs to look like a dinosaur. And thats a vague description with a wide spectrum of possibilities. Awesome. Children do not normally mind that there are over 700 different species of dinosaur that have been identified to date, and that the ones I make probably are not anatomically correct to any one of those species, but rather a melee of features of dinosaur generalisation. They look cool, and I like them.

While we are on the subject of children's cakes, I had to wonder last week, while making a cake which had 2 of the characters from 'In the Night Garden', who comes up with these characters. They are odd, and look rather senseless to me. But hey, who am I to judge. I remember one of my favourite childhood tv shows starring a talking donkey that lived in a giant apple. You surely have to be on some kind of hallucinogenic substance to come up with this stuff.

I made an unusual cupcake box last week. I always find it fascinating when asked to bring together in one box of cupcakes, a lot of seemingly unrelated subjects. I have to wonder about the connections and meaning behind each element, which must be relevant to the customer and the receiver of the gift. Relevant to them but seemingly nonsense and mixed up to me. How things can change depending on one's perspective, and the background information which we possess. True in many aspects of life I think.

It is autumn here in the UK. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with autumn. I love it for its beauty. its colours, which awe me every time I get out into the woods. The colours which nature produces just in death and sleep, the human imagination could barely fathom. Such beauty in creation and in its yearly destruction. So as I ran around last week I unusually burdened myself with my phone so that I could take some photos. And I'm glad I did. They turned out rather well and will serve to remind me of the beauty once we are in the full grip of winter and the colour had been stripped from the land. It is amazing how such beauty can be a by product of death and sleep. The winter brings the start of the end for much of nature but in its dying days it sends up a last hurrah in the form of a pallet of colours to numerous to be counted, and too vivid to be appreciated by any lens as much as it is appreciated by the human eye.

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Orignal From: All about the dinosaurs

Pretty Pastels, and Cake International, Wow

 Last week was a relatively quiet week for me. But still I managed to feel really busy. Go figure hey. I did a double height really pretty pastel birthday cake for the daughter of the owners of the coffee shop in Sale which I supply. I also did a boys birthday cake with a figure and a dog. Missing my favourite tools, it wasn't quite the face I normally try to go for, but it turned out cute overall.

 And then the highlight of the week. Cake International at the NEC in Birmingham. Wow. It was the first one I have ever been to, and boy was it an experience. A lot of ladies and a lot of cake stuff. A LOT. I have never seen so many cutters and moulds. Everywhere there were cutters and moulds. I had been warned of this but it was something to see. Don't get me wrong. I do love a good cutter and a good mould. But I was looking something new. Different. Unusual. Hmmmm. However, I did become smitten by the airbrush though. The airbrush is a very cool tool. I am sure that some artistic talent and a lot of practice is required, and I think that I could meet one of those criteria. The effects with an airbrush are super cool and something that could not be replicated by a paintbrush (at least in my ham hand) very easily. And I guess I have to confess, I do like a good gadget. However, I refrained. At shows like that, where so many things are on sale, and appeal to the excited imagination of the cake decorator, one can go overboard and end up buying loads of things that will never be used. So all I bought were a couple of small items that I know I will use regularly. Boring huh? hehe.  

The cakes on display in the competitions were unbelievable. I have never seen so many examples of real talent and skill. Honestly, I don't know how they do it. The details, like in Hagrid's house, the construction like in the teetering Irish cake, and the awesome wow factor in the huge under-the-sea themed cake, were just spectacular. Everywhere I looked there were amazing cakes. It made me feel rather inadequate and like an impostor who should not really be there. Wow.  

After many hours there my poor, patient husband was rather caked-out. As was I, I have to confess. Cake International comes to Manchester next March, and as I will be able to go without having to sit in traffic for 3 hours (for a usually 1 hour journey) to get home, I will certainly be there! 

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Orignal From: Pretty Pastels, and Cake International, Wow