Pink and Ivory 30th Birthday Cake

As I said in my last post this weekend was my sister-in-laws birthday, so of course she got a cake! I've been so busy lately I've not been able to make many so it's nice to have time to actually do a proper cake.

I love making two tier cakes, they're great to give as presents and you can have lots of fun decorating them. I recently bought a textured rolling pin I've been wanting to try out, you'll see this soon on a Baking Buys post. I managed to get my hands on some ivory fondant, I do have ivory colouring paste that I could have used, but if I see it I usually try to pick some up it looks quite pretty next to pink. Which of course is the other main colour, I've become quite obsessed with this colour combo, if you haven't noticed. As this was going down the girly route I thought I'd make it extra girly by adding some cameos. They can be a bit of a pain as i only have one mould at the moment but my new favourite shop Sew White has informed me they will be stocking them soon so hopefully the process will speed up some!

So for both tiers I rolled out the fondant and used the rolling pin to make the spiral patterns, I've learnt that you need to press fairly firmly or the pattern smooths out a bit when you smooth it on the cake, and don't try to roll backwards afterwards or it'll all be destroyed!!

For the bottom I cut out some pink hearts and using white royal incing piped pearls around the edge and the letter 'L' in the middle for her name, Lindsay. For extra detail I made strips of fondant ribbon in between the hearts and made a pink fondant bow the night before so it could dry and not fall to pieces, think I'm starting to get the hang of these bows now!

For the top tier I again cut pink fondant hearts and made a pink and white cameo inside. Again piping pearls around the cameo to add a bit more definition, I love how sweet and detailed they look! I think the spiral patterned fondant looks really nice and effective against the pink and finishing with the gold ribbon around the bottom of each tier really topped it off I think giving it quite a vintage look.

The cake went down really well after a night of drinking, as you can see it ended up covered in streamers from party poppers and devoured over the next two days, nom indeed! I also have to give credit to my mum for the actual baking of the cake as I was too busy she helped me out one afternoon , we're quite a good team!

Nom! Pin It Now!

Pink and Chocolate 30th Birthday Cake

It has certainly been all about cake in the last two weeks and I have to say I'm knackered! I've had many nights of broken sleep waking up with crazy lazy panic thoughts about the cakes - anyone else? Although I have absolutely loved all of my recent creations so it was all worth it in the end. I started with my pink and white cake pops, Manchester United giant cupcake (blog post coming soon) and this week I had my friend's 30th birthday - a great reason to make a nice fancy cake and try out some new techniques, as if I need an excuse!

It's been ages since I've done a big proper cake so I couldn't wait to get stuck in. The cake itself is a two tiered vanilla and chocolate sponge cake with chocolate buttercream. She loves chocolate so it was the only choice really.

I 'became' Peggy Porschen (or at least I told myself I was!) and decided to keep the chocolate theme but make it a bit more girly (surprise surprise my favourite theme! :D) with using pink fondant icing. The bottom tier is pink with chocolate brown circles, decorated with an italic 'L' for Lisa and polka dot royal icing decoration around the edge.

I have to be honest and say the top tier nearly didn't make it (it nearly went in the bin!), I for some reason just couldn't get the icing to sit on it nicely without any folds - it was driving me mental! I then had the crafty idea of doing the 'suitcase' look to cover up the fold and give it some cute detail. I made up some 'leather' fondant straps and gave them seams with a cocktail stick, luckily they matched up perfectly to cover the bits I didn't like.  I'm quite obsessed with piping detail at the moment so couldn't resist adding some cute royal icing designs in-between the fondant straps.

I wasn't really sure what to do on the top, I didn't really feel like a cake topper would look right but then I had the genius idea of adding her favourite chocolates...Ferrero Rocher! I did initially want to pile them up like in the advert but it looked a bit silly so I thought just to dot a few around symmetrically, and do some more polka dot piping in a circle around the top of the straps to frame the chocolates.

As you all know by now I love adding bows to cakes. I've always used real ones but this time I thought I'd have a go at making a fondant bow which I've never done before. I let them dry for two/three evenings (honestly I can't remember which I think I might be slightly hysterical from all the baking) and it worked brilliantly which I really didn't think it would. I ran some more fondant around the end of the first tier at the bottom and stuck the bow on the front with two extra ribbon pieces running down the front. I'm not so sure I could do this ribbon too much on a giant cupcake, but on bigger cakes I think I'll be doing this a lot now! I would suggest making a few bows, I did, as I've heard horror stories about them collapsing!

The cake went down really well she loved it which is all that matters :D I got some really nice comments about it too, I seem to turn up every couple of weeks with a cake for someone's birthday so they're getting quite used to it now, so expect many more in the future!

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Happy Birthday Amanda!

I feel like I haven't blogged in ages, it's been crazy here so I'm glad I have something good to show you. If you remember at Christmas I got a Wilton cupcake cake tin, and I've been itching to use it! It's different from my normal giant cupcakes..it's flat! Well...ish, it's still big :D just lying down.

Today is also my friend Amanda's birthday....happy birthday! She's a proofreader at our work and ridiculously good at her job...she's probably finding loads of mistake in this post as we speak (stop it! :) ) and she needed a special cake of course. It seems to be a bit of a tradition now that the girls in my section all get a cake on their birthday so there'll be many more of these over the year I'm sure.

I thought of course they funniest thing to do was to do a spelling mistake on the cake, with a big red circle around it just like she does. I couldn't help myself I had to. She's got the same humour as me so it went down really well luckily! It's also worth noting that I did have nicer reflective paper to have the cake on...but I left it in the Tesco trolley grrrrr!



I thought I'd still keep the cake really cute though in the pink and white theme that is so popular, and as it is a cupcake it still had to look cute. She loves chocolate so I used a chocolate sponge recipe and covered it all in pink buttercream. The case part of the cupcake I covered in white fondant and the top I did my now trademark rose swirl buttercream piping.

For the writing I rolled out some more white fondant and wrote Happy Birthday on it....incorrectly. My handwriting isn't the best unless I'm concentrating, actually she says it resembles a dead spider...quite accurate really. So I used my iPad to enlarge 'Happy Birthday' in a nice font on for me to copy. I did this with a black pen especially for writing on fondant with and then circled it with another in 'Cherry Red' colour. I then cut it with a quilting tool for the ribbon effect and laid it on the icing in a wavy scroll fashion to give it some depth. I then dotted lots of coloured sugar balls all of the top for the classic cupcake with sprinkles look.

And of course all of my cupcakes have a ribbon. I made one out of pink fondant that I coloured with a bit of Claret Sugarflair colouring paste, again cutting with the quilting took for a bit more texture making the ends of the ribbon really long to drape over the sides of the 'case' part.

I was a bit worried about the actual bake of the cake as the top of the cupcake part of the tin was so deep but luckily it came out really nice and moist. I love giving cakes as presents as you can really make them personal and everyone likes cake on their birthday :) Pin It Now!

Girly Cameo Giant Cupcake

Yesterday was my future sister-in-law's birthday, and of course she had to have a cake! Last year I made her a sushi cake, it was OK but I was till newish to it and wanted to make something better.

The girly theme is everywhere at the moment so I thought why not, I knew she'd like it it's so pretty!

I love using cameos on cakes, the last one I did was the birthday cake to one of my best friends at the start of this year. I loved making this cake and couldn't wait to make something similar. This is a smaller version but just as cute!

The bottom I used the quilting technique, I love this it makes it look like an expensive bag and gives the bottom some really nice detail when sometimes it can look a little plain. I also didn't have any ribbon in the right colour so I thought this would make it a bit more special looking. I do sometimes add silver balls where the quilting overlaps but I though it might look a bit busy on a smaller cake.

Using my Wilton moulds I added a fondant bow in the same colour as the border to the cameos rather than leaving the bottom plain.

The top was iced with pink buttercream and topped with the cameos. To make the cameos I used a silicone mold I got from eBay, pushed fondant into it and put it in the freezer for ten minutes unti I could pop it out. This time I cut around the actual cameo rather than leaving the background of it white. I placed it on a pink fondant circular base and wrapped a thin sausage of brown fondant around it and finished each off with a bow. I got this idea from a Peggy Porschen book called Cake Chic.

I kept it quite simple and it ended up looking like it had little pieces of jewelry on it. I actually love it so much I'd be happy to get a cake like this, that's how I know I'm proud of a cake, if I'd be happy receiving it, and I'm a perfectionist!

I seem to be doing a lot of the pink/white combination at the moment. You just can't go wrong with girly cakes :) Pin It Now!