Two Tier White Chocolate Ganache, Swirls and Chocolate Roses

My Auntie's birthday cake.  

I made a big batch of summer berries and cream sponges.  (Two 8 inch circular sanwhiches, and two 6 inch circular sandwhiches).  I used white chocolate ganache to stick the sponges together and coated each tier, using a warm palette knife to get a nice even finish.

The swirls were made with green dyed royal icing.  

I made the milk and dark chocolate roses by hand, but you can buy these ready made. 

Put it all together, and ta da you get a lovely tiered fancy-pants cake!

Little Cupcake Tower

 

 

Oh how I love an excuse to make cupcakes! 
Birthdays are a brilliant one.
It was a friend at work's quite recently, and she specifically requested a selection of cupcakes.
And so that is what she got :)
 Using the rather swanky cupcake tree my Mum bought me for christmas a few years ago to sit them on, I created a nice little display for her, and added a matching card.

I selected Red Velvet, with cream cheese icing and a sprinkling of red sanding sugar...

...Strawberries and cream, with vanilla buttercream.  I topped these with the lovely sugar hearts pictured on the left...

...and coffee with coffee buttercream, topped with some pink sanding sugar, and pink sugar pearls. 








Another good bit of practice on the rosettes on top of my cupcakes went in here, and they went soooo much better this time than my first attempt previously (there wasn't 3 inches of icing per cake where I had gone wrong and gone over the top for starters!)

Ta da, what a lovely looking tower! (It has cake on it, thus the definition of lovely is fulfilled).

Hen Night Naughty Cupcakes

As mentioned in a recent, previous post, my best friend from school is getting married this year.  Her hen do was last week, and, well, as with any other opportunity, this one was made the most of, for cake making possibilities!

I did some research and looked around the internet for some good ideas for hen night decorated cupcakes.  I started by deciding to make these my first attempt at decorating cakes with piped rosettes.  Then putting a number of hen themed toppers onto the cupcakes.

I thought it would be a wise idea to test out making the rosettes before making the final versions.  My boyfriend liked this step, as he got about 8 cupcakes out of it (as a bridesmaid, I have been trying very hard to remain the same for my dress, which means not too many cakes for me in the last few weeks!).  The result in decorative terms however, was not quite so great a move forward.  The word disaster could certainly be applied!  As I watched the icing ooze over the edges of the cakes and refuse to hold the rosette shape, I concluded that in my first attempt the icing was far too runny, and learned that I would definitely have to improve upon that when decorating the real thing.

I chose a red and black theme (with a few additional toppers having a few other colours for specific reasons) and made all of the fondant toppers, decorated with glitter and royal icing, over the course of the weekend before I made the cakes, to give them plenty of drying time.

Charlie is a coeliac, so that was then the next little hurdle to overcome.  Soooo, having made the gluten free toppers, I moved on to making my red velvet cupcake recipe gluten free.  Thank goodness there are now quite a good range of such flours available!  It was nice and simple, and I just had to be very careful to check all the ingredients and nutritional warning bits on the other ingredients. And of course, most importantly, I only used unopened brand new packets, so that I could be 100% certain that I had no contamination from previously using a spoon that might have gone near gluten or such, which would have been a massive oversight.

Once the cakes were made and cooled, I then had a fun time practicing the cream cheese rosette swirled icing on plates.... they did NOT go well for quite some time.  And once I finally thought I had got it ... I hadn't, if you were to look at a side profile of some of the red iced cakes, there is the same height of icing as cake on most of them, where I messed up comepletely the first attempt, and re-iced over the top.  But, who doesn't love icing?!

Having finally sorted out the icing too my satisfaction, I then simply placed the pre-made toppers, decorated with a little bit of coloured royal icing where relevant (e.g. the handcuff links and between the chain part of the ball and), then sprinkled with some red love hearts, which I already had, and happily were made with rice flour, so posed no problems! 

Et voila ....

A beautiful, bountiful box of naughty treats and goodies to be enjoyed with tea/coffee/champagne (delete as you feel appropriate) over the course of an amazing hen mid-week-weekend.

Thanks for reading!

A Little Bit of Fun

I went home to visit my Mum and Dad, and get fitted for my bridesmaids dress (my best friend from school is getting married, and awesome, yet terrifying experience to come this year) a couple of weeks back. My Mum was in need of making some sweet treats of a cakey variety to take on a picnic with some friends.

My Mum is an amazing baker, and makes brilliant cakes herself, however she is also a perpetually busy person, with four boys (ok one is a dog, but he still counts) to be looked after in the house, so .... one daughter to the rescue! (Actually I totally stole this task out from under her nose and ran off to find baking ingredients before she could stop me).

Ta da ....

I created some little cupcakes, in four flavours (you've got to cater to all tastes after all!) - Lemon and orange, Chocolate, Vanilla and strawberry and Coffee.

I then got busy with play time and rummaged around for some decorating items. I found (ahem my Mum found and gave me) a plastic bag filled to the brim with goodies that she has collected  ... my Mum is a little like a magpie at times, not stealing things, but she does have a habit of buying shiny and pretty things, the majority of which then quite often sit in cupboards and drawers for up to  5 years after their expiry date because she has bought too many to use up in that time (but then I can hardly talk, if anything I am so very much worse for the very same habit).

Getting back to the bag of goodies.  There were all sorts in there, silver hearts, all sorts of dragees, chocolate beans, an exploded container of pink sanding sugar ...

I chose a minimal (ish) approach and selected a few fun items to jazz up each of my cake flavours.

The Lemon and orange sponges are topped with icing sugar mixed with lemon juice, then sprinkled with citrus flavour strands.

The Chocolate sponge, was topped with chocolate buttercream, and each one then with an upside down raspberry.

Vanilla and Strawberry cakes were topped with vanilla buttercream and a little trio of fruit.

Finally the coffee cakes were topped with coffee buttercream and some golden sugar pearls.

Lots of fun to decorate and nice selection to choose from. :)

They went down well I am told, and I had fun making them, so that is all the important boxes ticked!

Thanks for looking :)

Bioblitz 2012

The 7th and 8th of July this year was the 2012 Bioblitz held at Cawsand Bay in Cornwall. 

In my workplace this is a very exciting event for all where we get as many experts and members of the [ublic as we can to come along during the 24 hours, and find as many different species as they can, within the area.

I attended the full 24 hours, and with a nice solid 1 and a half hours worth of sleep, had a brilliant time!

It shows how busy I have been since though, as I made these little treats for all of the hard working, very sleep deprived staff at the event, and have only now managed to pop them up here for all to see!  I made 50 in total, yummy vanilla sponge with lovely vanilla buttercream and a little glace icing to write with.  The sugar kick definitely helped us data monkeys to get through our entry during the day!

Vanilla Sponge with Simple Strawberry and Rose Decorations

This rather posh looking cake, was a request for a birthday cake, for someone who isn't big on many flavours of cake (apparently including chocolate??!!  How can you not like chocolate cake? This baffles me).  So... this cake started out life, as a plain and simple, vanilla victoria sponge cake.

I sandwhiched the two layers together with some posh raspberry jam, and some vanilla buttercream.  Then I iced over the top with more vanilla buttercream.  I used warmed knives (stood in a mug of boiled water and wiped dry on kitchen towel or a clean tea towel) to smooth out the icing, and get the edges lovely and straight.

After leaving for approximately 20 minutes to get the icing firmed up a bit, I then took some ready made chocolate roses, and stuck them on with blobs of vanilla buttercream.  Then did the same to stick some strawberries in between.  I added 5 extra roses around the plate for a little something extra.

Wonderfully simple.

Thanks for reading.

Coffee Cupcakes with White Chocolate Roses

I am sooo pleased with how this very decadent little spread of cupcakes turned out!

This was a really succesful, pretty quick and easy way to decorate my cupcakes beautifully.

I really like the dark brown cupcake cases, they just look so much more glamorous and elegant than plain white ones. 

I made up a batch of coffee flavour cupcakes, topped with swirled coffee buttercream (using a piping bag with a serrated-end nozzle, and decorated with white chocolate roses, white sanding sugar, and white sugar pearls. 

For the cakes with chocolate rose buds on top, I piped on the bootom layer of icing, placed the roses, and sprinkled with sanding sugar (sugar glitter) and pearls then left the icing to dry and harden up a little on the outside (about 30 minutes).  Then I swirled more icing on top and around the rose bud to neatly hide the (slightly messy) bottom of the bud from view, and make the icing nice and neat (I just know that if I had put the roses into the finished icing I would have ended up blobbing it everywhere and making a mighty mess!).  I then sprinkled again with sanding sugar and added more white sugar pearls where I wanted them.

The cakes are sitting on a clear acrylic circular board which comes from a 7 tier acrylic cupcake-stand.  As seen in my treaty towers post.  I placed chocolate roses around the cupcakes then sprinkled over with more sanding sugar and pearls. 

In this instance I only needed a small number of cakes, but I could easily have run with this theme up all 7 tiers of my cupcake tower.

This was a really easy way to decorate a set of cupcakes!  I made my own chocolate roses, which was quite time consuming, but if you don't have the time these can be bought ready made. 

I'm quite looking forward to making a variation of something like this with a bit of red and green for christmas, and maybe poinsettia flowers instead of roses  (6 months early I know, but it's impossible to be TOO excited about Christmas! ... Though some parents may share a difference of opinion on this one).