50th Birthday Hawaii Cake

Last week as I said was cake week, so I couldn't go too long without mentioning this one. An order for my best friend's co-worker, the brief was...Hawaii! This was to be a 50th birthday cake so it had to be special. I hadn't done a cake like this before so I was looking forward to the challenge, especially as she'd asked for a hula girl and I don't have a lot of experience in making figures but I had to give it a go, and I'm really happy with how she turned out!

The cake itself is a classic Victoria sponge mix sandwiched with vanilla buttercream. The design she'd asked for was a beach/ocean scene, hula girl, palm tree and flowers etc. The beach was easy, it just had to be crushed biscuits (malted milks to be exact), although the only problem with this is that it is of course difficult to get any kind of decoration to actually stick to biscuit so everything has to be held in place with cocktail sticks.

The ocean was made with blue vanilla buttercream and also plain buttercream for the tips of the waves. Marbleling them together leaving the white bit at the top really helped in making them look realistic.

Now for the hard bit, the hula girl. I've always used fondant before, but it takes ages to dry and if too big, sags under the weight. So this time I used Wilton gumpase, it was brilliant! I was even able to use Sugarflair food colouring paste to create all the colours I needed. I did use fondant for her hair and coconut bra but everything else was made from coloured gum paste. For an extra girly touch I added eyelashes with an icing pen. The palm tree was also gumpase, I had to leave the 'trunk overnight at an angle so that it would set in a palm tree fashion :D. The leaves were made by using a leaf cutter, I then rolled it out a bit more to make it longer and let them dry on colouring paste tubs and fixed them on the trunk with royal icing. As it was a for a 50th birthday I made a pink fondant "50" in a curly font and placed it in the middle of the ocean.

For the last bit of decoration I made what felt like a million gumpaste flowers, as they were meant to be Hawaiian flowers I made them white with pink edged (done with petal dust), blue, pink, purple and orange, all with a yellow royal icing middle. I made these with my cherry blossom mould I used on my brother's wedding cake, this meant I could do them super fast without having to worry bout sculpting each one. I laid these round the bottom of the cake and also some smaller ones on the figures for extra detail.

Stepping back I was really happy with this cake, as I said with the biscuit - it was a bit difficult to make the flowers stick to it, but I can't think of a better way of making realistic sand. Delivering it was pretty scary, she hula'd all the way there! But as she was stuck down with a cocktail stick she wasn't going anywhere! And now summer has finally come, who doesn't love a beach cake?

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Baking Buys

Another pay cheque means another spending spree. I have to say I did go a little overboard this month, but I do have a few cake orders so I can justify it for once. You all know how much I love eBay now...all I can say is they took a lot of my money this week!

They were all good purchases though, no rubbish. All investments as such and nothing too ridiculous..I don't think.

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought the Gum Paste Flower Making Set from Wilton. It comes with 32 pieces; lots of different flower cutters, sponges to work on, a couple of tools and a book showing you how to make different flowers. I got it for only £12.88!  I tried some out in fondant in my last post which I think came out really well. I know you are supposed to use gum paste or sugar floral paste, it's really expensive though, does anyone know of any deals out there? I did get some for £4.50 from eBay which was the cheapest I could find.

So as I just said I also bought some Squires sugar florist paste in poinsettia, I have a 60th wedding anniversary cake coming up so I wanted to try to make some carnations for that, so I bought some red gum paste. I've never worked with it before so I'm hoping it goes OK, I don't know what to expect really but I will of course document it :). I'm not really sure how much you have to use per petal or piece but I'm sure I can track down some tutorials online.

On a lot of my giant cupcakes I am asked to make them really girly with hearts, flowers and stars etc. So I though I'd buy some plungers, similar to the butterfly ones in one of my last Baking Buys post. I got them in a set of three. The heart plungers came from eBay for £2.97 which is a bargain when they cost at least double in shops. The star ones came from T K Maxx which actually have some fantastic bakeware and accessories, I think it cost about £3 too.

Whilst in T K Maxx I also picked up this Wilton Writing Set, I thought it would come in handy some people like more traditional looking cakes, and they all seem to have this kind of writing on them, very italic and a bit scroll like. I thought this would be good to get the writing looking really neat and uniformed while still a bit posh.  There were smaller cheaper sets but this one was just nicer, and cost £7.50 which I thought was pretty good as it's Wilton.

Whenever I'm working with fondant I hate using water to stick pieces together, because as I'm sure a lot of you know - as soon as water touches that fondant, the sheen never goes! So I thought it was time to get some edible glue, so I can stick bits together without the risk of water dripping over the rest of the cake. I really hope this will be a good product and I think it would be really hand for cakes that need a lot of detail. This only set me back £2.29.

I've mentioned a couple of times I have a big wedding cupcake order at the end of the month and I don't think I'll get all 150 on the perspex stand I've got. I have a couple of the 23 cupcake stands you see in shops...normally they are silver but I also have a pink one, so obviously I can't have them different colours. I'm hoping to do more orders like this in the future so I invested in another silver one as then I can display another 46 cupcakes which could make an amazing amount of difference to the final presentation.  I have seen them in local shops but haven't seen one recently so I turned to faithful eBay again and snapped one up for £5.49, not bad really I don't think!

I have actually bought a couple of more things I've just bought, but I'll save them for the next post before I bore you all to death.. I think I may have a slight online shopping obsession I dread to think what the postman thinks!


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