Sunday 4 December 2011

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!