Back to cakes

It was pay day this week, and for a few days beforehand I've been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to spend some of my hard earned cash in Hobbycraft. I've spent far too much time on Youtube recently watching video tutorials on piping methods and how to make fondant roses (yes, the kind of icing you mould shapes with seems to be better known as fondant in the cake world. I guess that makes sense, since there do seem to be many types; fondant, buttercream, royal icing - which I have yet to experiment with - glace icing... the list goes on, so you need to tell the difference) and decided that I needed to try out these methods immediately. Don't you just love inspiration?

I happened to have some fondant icing already, so out that came straight away and I had a go at creating roses:

This was the first one I did. I was incredibly pleased with it at the time although looking at it now I'm not so impressed :-)

Second attempt: this was slightly better I thought, but more of a miscellaneous flower that a rose.

Unfortunately I had to wait several days before I could try the piping techniques, but finally pay day rolled around and I made my way to Hobbycraft and spent too much... as you do.

My shopping list included:

As many paste food colourings as I could find (it being December they had sold out of red and green, bloody typical. I've found out paste colours are better than the liquid sort you get in supermarkets - they don't make the icing soggy and you get a better colour quality from them.)

Two sets of piping bags/nozzles.

Three shades of ready-made fondant icing (which I wouldn't have had to buy if they had had all the paste colours in stock).

A set of leaf shaped fondant cutters (I wanted holly but I couldn't find any holly shapes! Shocking, I know. I've since bought some off eBay.)

An edible food pen (black).

As soon as I was home, I put my online lessons into practice:

The buttercream is meant to be pink and lilac, not peach and grey as it seemed to come out on camera!



And the following day:

My best rose yet! Even though the edges of the petals are torn. The funny thing is I was just doing this one as a demonstration to my mum, who was curious as to how they are made. It ended up being my favourite.

Chocolate Christmas pudding style cakes! I wanted to do a layer of chocolate brown icing under the white, but I couldn't get the right shade of brown. (Sorry I can't seem to rotate this picture!) It would have proper holly leaves if Hobbycraft had the cutter I wanted!

Well... you've got to do a snowman haven't you! Gave me a chance to try out my new food pen too.

I still have to get the hang of piping buttercream; I got the consistency totally wrong this time which didn't help, plus I used Stork instead of a butter block which I don't think was the best idea.

But all in all, I was quite pleased with my attempts, and they all got eaten!

More biscuity madness

So I decided to have another go at the gingerbread again this week, since the last attempt was so much fun (and tasty).

I discovered something I didn't know about food colouring. It doesn't obey the same rules as paint. What I mean is: if you mix red paint and blue paint you get purple paint, right? So if you mix red food colouring and blue food colouring you get purple food colouring, right? Wrong. It goes brown. Not sure how that works, but hey ho, at least it looked like chocolate and not something a lot less appealing. A similar thing occurred with my fireworks cake before - I tried to make navy blue with blue and black colourings, but ended up with a dirty shade of green and had to start again.

I don't have any pictures of my 'chocolate' icing, as they have been scoffed now :) but here are my efforts from today:

I told my boyfriend I'd do one of his face...

Those are mine... they've got my name on 'em.

I had a go at using some of the different nozzles that came with the syringe I bought recently, they are mostly different star shapes.

The first attempt went a bit wrong...

But I sort of got the hang of it.

Then I just enjoyed playing around with patterns. I did discover that the fondant icing needs to be quite firm for the star shaped nozzle to work, else it just collapses. (As in the ^ shaped one in the middle of the pic).

I did a hand (badly)...

...then I got bored. :-D



Cookie creations

I got a set of cookie cutters and a recipe book called 'Christmas Cookies' for my birthday last week, so I thought I'd give them a test run today (as if my house isn't already full to the brim with uneaten baked goods!)

I went for a gingerbread recipe and was amazed to find the amounts made for nearly 50 biscuits! So I've had a busy afternoon decorating each and every one. I used the ready made writing icing I had left over but instead of using it straight from the tube, I squeezed it into my decorating syringe (currently my favourite decorating tool as it is less painful for the hands). I also made use of the sugar stars and silver balls left from my shopping spree in Tesco's home baking section last week (for the bonfire/fireworks cake) and some white chocolate drops.

 Syringe.

Work in progress.

Most of the biscuits. My son had eaten several by this point! On the right is the half eaten fireworks cake, covered up.

A selection of the finished products. 

I was particularly pleased with this one.

...and this one. 

Especially for my little boy.

All in all I'm quite pleased with what I managed this time around. While it's not a cake, it's a chance to have another go at decorating with icing, and I'm sure I can find plenty of willing volunteers to eat them.

:-)

To begin

Hi all,

I thought I'd start this blog to share with everyone my progress in learning a hobby I became interested in a few months ago - cake decorating.

It started with my son's birthday in July, when I made two cakes:

This was a chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate drops for the border. The writing was done in white writing icing (from a tube, I suppose that's cheating but I'd never decorated a cake before).

This was a plain sponge. I used ready-to-roll icing (cheating again, I know, but at least I coloured it myself with blue food colouring; I was very pleased with the shade of blue I achieved) and writing icing from a tube for this one too.

The tubes of icing were actually quite difficult to write with, as you have to squeeze particularly hard and consistently too, to get an even line. It makes your hand ache after a while.

A couple of weeks later my sister gave birth to a girl, so I decided to use the excuse :-) to have another go, and created this:

The main icing was meant to be baby pink, but it seems this is very difficult to achieve with red food colouring and I ended up with more of a reddish orange! :)

I haven't had any excuse to make another cake until yesterday, which was my birthday. But I didn't want to make a birthday themed cake for myself (what do you write on it, Happy Birthday to me?) so I thought I'd go with the theme of the upcoming Guy Fawkes night. However, the image I had in my head didn't really come out on the cake...

But it gave me a chance to experiment with fondant icing (which I made too runny this time), sugar fruits, silver balls and sugar stars. The blue icing here was also my second attempt... I had originally intended to go for dark blue icing (for the night sky) but my attempts to do so ended up with a dirty grey icing that would have been very suitable for a Frankenstein cake on Halloween ;-) so I decided to go for light blue instead.

Maybe next time...