Ruby Wedding Cupcakes!

These were made as a gift for my Auntie and Uncle's Ruby Wedding Anniversary so I had fun searching various cake-y websites for some fancy decoration pieces. I used a red food colouring paste for the buttercream, as gels and liquids don't produce anywhere near as vibrant a colour. For a lot of the toppers I used a crimped cookie cutter pressed into ready made icing and then went in with a toothpick to create a sort of make-shift impressed design. On the white ones I painted a light coat of silver lustre dust over the top. Most of the glitter fell into the grooves so the rest of the toppers just had a slight pearly shade which was lovely. Lustre dust comes as a powder and needs a drop of any clear spirit (don't worry you can't taste the alcohol!) added to it to make a liquid that you can then embellish your icing with. I also used this to paint over the little J & B's that were very fiddly to make! I really need to experiment with a stronger icing than ready made for molding smaller objects. I ordered these adorable edible rubies from a website called craftcompany.co.uk. Yes they make such a thing as edible rubies! They advise you use tweezers to position them so you don't leave finger prints on them. It was a little tricky to ply them out of the packaging without damaging them but definitely worth it :) The tons of  little red roses were made from ready made icing as usual. The technique is actually really easy and quick once you get the hang of it. Although I cheated a little bit with the love hearts and used a cutter. I think that's about it! The pretty edgings were from the same website that I've mentioned and simply wrap around your normal cupcake case to make them look all fancy. 

Breaking Bad Cake!

OH LORD. This cake was a bit of a project to say the least. There were a lot of components involved but the end result made it so worth it! The cake consisted of three stacked Madeira sponges so it ended up being huge as you can see! I thought this would be the safest recipe to use as the higher quantity of flour results in a dense texture that holds all of the decoration well! My housemate had the task of making the 'blue meth' that makes the whole cake I think! For this she used a simple glass candy recipe, combining sugar, water, syrup and blue food colouring, and left it to set in a baking tray so that it formed a slab. Then she smashed it to pieces just like they do on the show! We bought these suspicious looking bags to display it in as well as sprinkling some on the top of the cake. All of the extra decoration was made using ready made icing. I'm really happy with the way Walt and Jessie turned out as I haven't made many human characters from icing before, so that's given me confidence to experiment further! For the rocks and the blue substance in the cylinders I used two different shades of icing and kneeded them together so that they were just under combined. This gave them a marbled effect that makes them look the part I think :) I used a black edible food pen (my secret weapon) to draw tiny dollar signs on to the totally accurate (ahem) notes flying about the scene, and for the sand around the bottom I just used granulated brown sugar. Oh and finally I roped in my housemate again to pipe the 'Happy Birthday' sign on top with pre-bought writing icing as I'm rubbish with trying to write neatly with this! As I say this was a marathon of a baking process. I think we were awake until 6am the night before the guys birthday. As this is still my favourite cake though it was very worth it :)

Burger Cake!

This was a joint effort with my housemate for a friends birthday! I used a standard cake tin for the base and a half sphere tin for the top of the bun. Both were a simple vanilla sponge, iced with buttercream icing and covered with coloured ready made icing. The beef patty was actually an incredible cake sized brownie made by my housemate. The lettuce, tomato and cheese that you can see poking out were also made from ready made icing and were super simple to do despite looking the part. Then again McDonalds cheese looks so plastic-y I suppose it's easy to replicate! My housemate made the 'chips' from simple ready made icing. These looked so realistic! So much so that we couldn't tell the icing chips from the real chips that littered the table in the morning thanks to someone's drunken trip to McDonald's after the night out. It made for a fun game though! We also had the genius idea of swapping the BBQ sauce for chocolate sauce at the last minute. When we told the birthday girl to try the sauce with the icing chips she looked at us like we were crazy before being pleasantly surprised. In the future I would love to try and make my own chocolate sauce and strawberry sauce in place of the ketchup. It's a nice little extra touch that really adds to the re-creation :) Finally, we added a shot of mango sourz to the cup in place of the Fanta. This cake also gives you a great excuse to take a trip to Maccies before hand and gather empty packaging to present your creation. Entirely for the equipment purposes of course.

50th Birthday Cake!

                                 

My first ever full-sized cake! I think there's a lot of technique to laying the fondant over the cake without imperfections etc, so hopefully that will come with practice as this is nowhere near perfect! The sausage dog was tricky too, (requested from the person buying) I'm not too sure what happened to my icing but it seems to have cracked a little on his back :( Might have left him in the fridge too long. Other than that I didn't have much instruction so my mum suggested spring colours which I think work really well :) For the border I learnt how to make roses with fondant and gum trag and placed them around the bottom of the cake with royal icing. Think it looks really pretty, so I'm super pleased with that! Will try it again. I also really like the '50' made out of fondant and silver lustre dust painted on. The stuff dries really quickly and looks really professional! I ordered a few other colours too so no doubt i'll experiment more soon. Overall I'm happy. Gonna try some more full sized cakes v. soon!

Baby Elephant Cupcakes!

I was going to do the elephants smaller/simpler and vary the colours/backgrounds and stuff but then I found some on google similar to these and they were SO CUTE so I just decided to try it. Although the icings not as smooth as some other designs I've made and so doesn't look as nice, I'm actually dead pleased with them. I just really like their little happy faces and the way they're all sat differently :) I'm definitely going to start making bigger figures like these cause I need to practice getting the icing perfect. (These have quite a lot of scratches and mistakes if you look more closely!) 

Made as a super late birthday present for a friend, oops. She was chuffed though :)

Harry Potter Cakes.

As usual, made for a friends birthday who likes HP. Either that or I just assumed she did so I could make some Harry Potter themed, I'm not actually sure. Anyway. Really couldn't decide which cupcakes to make and which to leave out as I'd seen so many good designs on the interwebz. As it happens I really dislike the way the Hogwarts Castle turned out so ignore that one, there's a much better version somewhere on google :) I also wanted to make the Marauders Map but I stupidly broke my food pen half way through making them and made the Deathly Hallows sign instead and ended up being really pleased with it, so that worked out okay! Probably shouldn't have been as lazy and tried to draw the different house animals on the crest but I thought it'd look shitty so Hm, i'll improve that one if I make them again :) Nothing else was used than what's mentioned in the Alice in Wonderland post. Think that's pretty much it. My favourites are the Cauldron cupcake and the Hogwarts Express Cupcake. :)
xx

Alice in Wonderland Cupcakes.

Kinda designed these by taking my favourite parts of other versions that I'd seen on google so i can't take credit for the Tweedledee/dum or caterpillar designs for example! All the rest I pretty much went off the film (cartoon version) as closely as I could :) I tried to make a cupcake to represent each key part of the story which is why they're all packed! Maybe some of them are too much? I dunno. Only things used to decorate were butter cream icing, milk chocolate icing, piping bag with swirl nozzle, ready made icing and food colouring, and edible food pen (black). I used fabric roses for the Rose Bush Cupcake cause I'm not v. good at the super delicate stuff yet and the Drink Me glass bottle is also obviously not edible but apart from that everything is :) 

These were just made for a friend as a favour, she loves Alice in wonderland! :)x