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...