Baby Shower - My Niece Is Nearly Here!

At the end of the month I will (hopefully) become an auntie again. I really hope it's soon as A) I can't wait to meet her! And B) I'm going to Memphis/New Orleans and Mexico in three weeks so I really don't want to miss it.

A baby on the way means of course, a baby shower, and no baby shower would be complete without a cake would it? So I couldn't resist offering to take on the task. Luckily I just happen to know to mother-to-be pretty well...so I had a few ideas up my sleeve. I also did their wedding cake so I couldn't wait to continue the milestone baking.

They're expecting a little girl, and I may have already gotten a little carried away with buying cupcake babygrows and teeny tiny skinny jeans with hearts on.

When they got married, they did it in Lyme and it's really special to them so I wanted to represent it some way in the cake. So I thought the perfect idea would be to use beach huts on the bottom tier, for the top I also saw some quite washing line baby shower cakes with little fondant clothes hung up like bunting which was almost too cute to not do.

The cake was a two tier, Victoria sponge with raspberry jam and vanilla buttercream. I decided to keep the colours pastel with pink, mint and blues. I thought that the beach huts would be nice on the bottom on a blue background with some piped seagulls. I used Ice Blue, Sugarflair colouring for the base. I rolled out one beach hut and kept it as a template for the others. To get the wood panel effect I just used the back of a knife to make the indents. Giving them a white roof and door they were complete, simple and cute.

To give the top tier a bit more colour I added pink fondant strips and dotted holes down the side to give it a stitched fabric look. I thought these would also be good anchor points for the washing lines to hang off. Using some of the beach hut fondant, I let them dry a little and cut out cute little baby clothes positioning them along the line.

To finish each tier I tied a polka dot ribbon and added a bow to the font. Luckily the mother-to-be loved the cake and the personal touches and the whole baby shower was a triumph! There were lots of presents, everyone brought a dish and she didn't suspect a thing right until we shouted 'Surprise!' so all in all a massive success!

 

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Bird Is The Word

A new year starts and so does the giant cupcake making. I haven't made a lot of these recently so I'm glad to get back into it, this particular one was a birthday cake for my best friend, I think they make great gifts and can make them really personal.

I decided to go with a bird theme, as her last name is Bird. I can't believe I haven't covered this before actually. I've done something similar before but for someone else.

The botton of the cake was coloured pink and I kept the buttercream vanilla. The cake itself was chocolate. I decorated the front with two lilac fondant birds with piped detail on them. I also added candy coated chocolate pieces, white chocolate hearts that I dusted with glitter and also some rice paper butterflies.

I initially piped the buttercream on with the standard Wilton 1M nozzle, I probably should experiment with other styles but I love how this one looks so much. Deciding it needed something extra I fount some bird cake toppers I got a little while ago that would be perfect on top of the cake!

To finished it off I gave it a generous dusting of edible glitter and tied it up with a Pandora ribbon, we love a bit of Pandora. As it's my first cake of the year I'm pretty pleased with it, I am my worst critic but she loved it so who cares :) Pin It Now!

Josh's 7th Birthday - Minion Edition

NEWS FLASH! A couple of weeks ago my little brother turned seven...I can't believe it! Which also means I started uni seven years ago, he was born a week before I started uni, ugh. But the big story here is that this is the first cake he didn't insist on having Super Mario on. He didn't have it last year, but he did beg last minute for - but not this year.

We both love Despicable Me, who doesn't? Minions of course rate quite highly so I couldn't have been more excited when he wanted a minion cake, yay! My dad made all of our cakes when we were little so he wanted to join in and help decorate it. My favourite was the Mr. Blobby Cake, I will tell you more about that cake later.

The cake itself it a vanilla sponge sandwiched with jam and smothered in buttercream. For the decoration I covered the cake in sky blue fondant, with white cartoon-like clouds, grey tarmac (from a level in the Minion Rush game he's completely obsessed with) and of course a fondant minion! For the minion, we used a stencil, I say we, but this is the part I my dad did. We're both fans of the stencil technique but as we forgot to print any out we made makeshift ones from tracing an image in my iPad, and it worked pretty well actually.

So my dad cut out and assembled the minion, who is called Carl (true story), and I piped the black royal icing outline.This was actually a lot easier than I expected, thank God for 2D images! By this point I had already iced the cake and we started laying on the fondant minion and getting him (sorry, Carl) in the right place. I thought he looked really cute his dungarees and huge eye. The piping part was quite simple actually the only artistic was I did was to give him hair. I always buy ready made black royal icing to pipe as it's such a hassle to make and takes quite a bit of black colouring.

So after the minion was piped and ready to go I added the white fondant clouds and my little brother wanted to put the candles on himself, he did a pretty good job too may I add. So, the cake was finally ready. He loves the whole deal of singing happy birthday, blowing out the candles and everyone clapping.

The piece he wanted, is the piece all children want - the eye! And I made sure he got it too. BECAUSE - when I was little, 7 infact! I had a Mr. Blobby cake...no one judge me, I loved him and I will always love him. Anyway, all I wanted was the eyes, I don't know why - I just did. And this was of course the only piece sent away to someone, and I have never forgiven him and keep telling my dad he owes me another Mr. Blobby cake so I can eat the eyes. So it was very important that my little brother was not also scarred by a memory like this (I'm trying to guilt trip my dad here, if you can't tell...I want the eyes next year....) so this is exactly what he got...even though the piece as huuuuuuuuge!

Everyone enjoyed the cake and he loved it which is all that matters in the end anyway isn't it. I loved my week down in the south with him doing lots of fun stuff in the last part of his summer holiday. Here's a few pictures from the week too.

I clearly make him pose for too many pictures with me... but we spent some days at the beach with my older brother building epic sandcastles and burying each other, spent his birthday at Legoland which was AMAZING, baked biscuits, went to Fort Nelson, drove around with the roof down like pimps and generally had a lovely time doing lots of silly stuff, same again next year!

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