Monday 6 October 2014

A light hearted look at a cake decorators life!

I am posting this here as it always seems to cheer us up to know we are not the only ones living this crazy cakey life!

Friday 3 October 2014

Busy Busy

Wow its been such a busy few weeks I have again not had much chance to get near the computer!
I had this lovely Golden Anniversary Cake to finish and many secret plans afoot!
I absolutely loved making this one although I did look a little like midas by the time I had finished with the gold lustre dust!
The lower tier was an 8" toffee and I had my first ever experience of pre mixed gold lace on this one....took a few goes, a bit trial and error with the oven temperature and timing but 11 minutes seemed to be my magic number!
The middle tier was a double barrelled 6" Lemon cake. I wanted a shiny gold for this one so used a metallic lustre dust which worked very well although as I said I did manage to get it everywhere!

I used my FMM Press-Ice tool (polka 5) to get evenly spaced dots and gently placed small pearl dragees in each (secured with a little royal). I finished the bottom with a row of larger gold pearls.

The top tier was a double barrelled 4" Irish cream cake, simply finished with a gold ribbon and brooch (Karen Davies) that I painted using the same dust with a splash of vodka.

A trail of Lily Of The Valley and Freesia finished it off with a lovely sparkly 50 topper!
I was very happy with it.

Thursday 4 September 2014

Tiddys first blog!

Well ive finally gone and done it!

I have been intending to do this since forever but something always comes up (usually cake!).

My very own blog where i will be sharing my caking adventures, recipes and links to all things cake and sugar. I hope you will find it mostly fun and informative and I hope you will share any comments with me.

So.......what have I been up to?
Now the kids are back at school I decided it was time to try a few things I have been itching to do, first on the list was painting on cake!
Now whilst ive always been creative, and love trying new things, I can distinctly remember not being very good at painting! Sketching and drawing I loved but something happened to my brain when faced with a brush and colour so i knew this was not going to be easy.
I was determined to overcome this simply because i had seen so many beautiful painted cakes and just had to have a go.

Like so many of the things I've learnt I decided to go straight to Youtube and found some great tutorials for painting roses. These were not all on cake but the principal was the same, a technique called one stroke which involves loading two colours on the brush to get some great light and shade effects.

So the very same day I went out and purchased some decent brushes (my old fuzzy ones were just not going to do haha). I already had some paste colours and some dusts and vodka so all i really needed to get was some white.

I was all set...and my inspiration for this masterpiece i was about to create?...my scarf! Yep! Its one of those many items that i look at and think 'mmm that would look good on a cake'. Here it is! My fave scarf!


I decided that I would make a three tier with a base colour of blue and the pretty peach and pink roses all over.
Now I would love to tell you that i just picked up the brush and away I went but no. As with all things cake the key is practice so I rolled out some leftover sugarpaste and cut three circles and these became my practice discs.


As you can see the results were pretty good and I then felt confident to jump straight in.
This is the result, a very pretty cake! What do you think? Will you have a go?