Thursday 12 July 2012

Paul Weller Cake...

I made a Paul Weller themed cake for a friend's 50th birthday as she is a massive Paul Weller fan! Her family picked a picture of Paul Weller and I had it transferred onto an edible icing sheet which I did through a website. There are a few websites which can do this and they post within a few working days.

For this cake I used the chocolate recipe off the BBC food wesbite as it is easy and delicious! Again I used a fresh cream and raspberry jam filling and it came out perfect.

Sticking with the music theme I cut out some music notes and guitar shapes from icing, free hand! I was quite impressed with myself!! I bought a music note cake ribbon from a local cake shop and set the cake on a cake board covered in red icing to bring a bit of colour into the cake.


Tinkerbell cake...

I made a tinkerbell cake for my cousin for her 3rd birthday. I had looked at a few tinkerbell cakes on the internet so had a rough idea of what I wanted to do. As long as there was plenty of chocolate flavour, glitter and tinkerbell...I knew she would be happy!!

I bought a little tinkerbell figure from Ebay but small tinkerbell dolls can be bought in supermarkets for around £6 as well (i only noticed this after I had bought the figure, but i still saved a pound!)

I bought violet coloured sugarpaste dye to colour a kilo of white icing I had bought, adding very small amounts at a time using a cocktail stick and dragging it across the icing, then kneeding it in to gain a consistent all over lilac colour. The more dye that is added, the stronger the colour will be. I used the lilac icing as the main colour on the cake.

I then repeated this method with leaf green dye paste and dyed some white icing I had set aside.
I used pink icing to create a flower for the centre of my cake to sit tinkerbell on. I applied edible glitter to the icing and cut the icing into petal shapes amd placed them in the centre of the cake, resting tinkerbell on top. I rolled the green icing into sausage shapes, being slightly thicker at one end and added them round the sides of the cake, curling them round at the top to look like stems. Using a petal cutter, I then cut out some leaf shapes to add to the end of the stems. I used a cocktail stick to vein the leaves to give them a more realistic appearance.

To finish off the cake I add some personal details and added some large colourful flowers around the base of the cake and set it on a large cake board.

The cake itself was a chocolate cake with a fresh cream and raspberry jam filling and it was lovely. I got the recipe of the BBC food website, see the link below for the recipe. It is easy to make and the recipe is easy to follow and it turns out lovely!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/easy_chocolate_birthday_90089

Happy baking!! xox

Jubilee Celebration Cupcakes...

For the Jubilee weekend, I made some cupcakes for my friend's house warming party. I used two different decorations, one being the classic crown, a symbol of royalty and a representation of the queen and the other being a cameo icing design of the queens head. I used blue and red buttercream ( in the british spirit!) and used peppermint flavouring to kick up the flavour! I got some festive union jack cupcake cases in a local cake shop to add to the jubilee theme. I got the cameo icing mould with the cake decorating magazine that i collect. Details of the magazine can be found at http://www.mycakedecorating.co.uk/

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Superman cake...

I recently made a superman cake for a little superman fanatic for his birthday party... And he loved it.
I used a simple vanilla sponge recipe with a buttercream and jam filling.

To decorate I bought a cheap superman stencil from Ebay and used that to make the famous superman logo using red and yellow icing. Once the stencil was made the rest was pretty easy!

I iced the cake with a bright blue sugarpaste and set the superman stencil as a centre piece on the cake.

As a finishing touch I added the age and name to personalise it. To break up the amount of blue icing, I used my left over yellow icing to add balls around the top edges of the cake and they held well with some glaze icing.

The logo is the trickiest part but I would definitely recommend buying a cheap stencil or make your own by printing the superman logo onto a sheet of cardboard and work around the cardboard to create the logo. Cheap and cheerful yet just as good as a professional stencil. The stencil I bought was designed for spraying the superman logo onto something ie. a wall but it worked fine and I was happy with the outcome!

Spiderman Cupcakes...

Hi Everyone, its been a while since I have found some spare time to blog so I have a lot of catching up to do!! Been busy baking over the last two months.

I would like to share with you my spiderman cupcakes which I made for a five year old's birthday party.

I used my jam centred cupcake recipe where you gently place just under half a teaspoon of jam on top of the cake mix before it goes in the oven... Once cooked and cut down the centre the jam should have set in the middle (or near the middle) of the cupcakes. If you have put too much jam it will sink to the bottom of the mixture so will be basically the base of the cake which is no fun!!

After trimming the points (domes) of the tops of my cupcakes to make them flatter, I proceeded to make my spiderman design. I did a spiderman face design so started off with 12 red circles of icing to fit the tops of the cupcakes as shown in the photo below.
I then began to paint on the spiderman mask features with black edible paint and a fine paintbrush (icing brush), beginning with a cross, then extending the amount of lines to create a pattern with 8 small diagonal lines meeting in the centre as illustrated in the photo below...
Next was to create the web effect. I started on the outside of the icing and made small arched inward lines between each existing line and worked towards the centre of the icing... The first step can be seen in the picture below...
Repeat this process once more (or twice if you would like), creating an inner webbed pattern. Once completed they should look like this....

The last step is to add the eyes. I did this by cutting out small white triangles of icing and outlining them with the black edible paint then attached them to the cakes and they looked really effective. I used a thin layer of buttercream spread on the top of the cupcake to hold the icing in place. Below is the finished product...
So for an easy recipe perfect for any little boy who is a spiderman fanatic, these cupcakes are perfect!

Happy Baking xox