The Bird on a Tree Stump

I was a bit stumped (har har) for ideas for a theme for my friend's birthday cake. The tree stump cake was on my list of 'cake themes to do' so I thought it fitting for a nature lover! The cake is vanilla sponge with French buttercream and covered in chocolate ganache. 

The top of the stump is handpainted, The rest is made with sugarpaste. The bark of the tree was created by hand with my modelling tools. I added the holes to give a lot more texture, interest and realism. 

The bird is modelled out of sugarpaste, and attached to wooden skewers. All in all, a cute cake and my friend loved it :)

50th and Baby Blue

There's a lovely story behind this cake :)

A lovely girl rang me up asking if I had time to make her mum's birthday cake, which was a week away and I said yes I did. I set about making the flowers first so they had time to dry.

A few days later a friend of mine visited to say she was going out at the weekend for her friend's 50th. I have met my friend's friend before, and had a rough idea where she lived (somewhere across from my friend). Can you see where this story is going? Now I didn't make the connection because up to this point, I hadn't been told where to deliver the cake. Even when I did get the address, my only thought was, hey that's near my friend's house! DUH.

It was only shortly after I delivered that I remembered about my friend telling me about the weekend birthday bash, and with the location of the house, I finally put two and two together. I rang my friend just to be sure and she confirmed it all.

So it turns out, I've made a cake for someone I know, and I didn't know it! What a lovely small world!

A Pink and Ivory Wedding Cake

Pink and ivory - cannot go wrong with these colours! They are just perfect together. Combine with pearls and flowers and you have a very vintage feel to the design, just the way this lovely wedding cake turned out.

I practiced a bit with the pearls before decorating the cake with it. I'd had problems with my pearl mold before. With a liberal dusting of cornflour, and freezing the molds (with the sugarpaste in it) for at least 15 minutes each time, the pearls came out perfectly and were a doddle to place on the cake. Only thing was, I had to do this rather a lot as I only had one pearl mold :)

The flowers turned out better than I thought too, and came out beautifully once placed on the top tier. I was wondering whether to place a posy pick into the cake or make a little dome and insert the flowers and leaves into that. In the end, I decided I didn't want to place a posy pick into the top tier (which was a little 4" fruit cake), and opted for the little dome instead.

The middle and bottom tiers are chocolate orange cake with chocolate orange ganache- quite rich but really suitable for a wedding where the cake slices are on the small side. I grated A LOT of fresh orange for this cake!

My bride (well I don't own her but you know what I mean!!) was really happy with it, exactly how she wanted it to look! Now that's made my day :)

Happy caking, folks x