Cake for friends birthday

My very beautiful and vibrant friend was celebrating her 25th birthday so I decided to make her an extravagent cake.

My inspiration was purely her personality, I didn't need Pinterest for this one!
She has many different sides of her, all bright and happy, so this cake had to be bright and 'popping'.

Venture into London

My first taste of work in the big smoke. It seems as though London is 'where you gotta be' for everyone else but I don't personally get on with the place. I find it too superficial...2D. Cars seem to get bigger, but minds smaller. Everyone has to like the right thing, do the right thing and say the right thing. It feels so suffocating and as though you too are required to mold yourself to fit others ideal.

Enough misery, back to cakes. So this was a cake I created with the hugely talented and lovely Abigail Bloom. I made the flowers and the plaque. It's all Abi's design, I was basically there to help her with this cake whilst she was busy with other projects and with the running of her business in general (The Abigail Bloom Cake Company).

PME Royal icing and piping and Sugar flowers modules.

So this is where I get a bit more serious about cake. After much to-ing and fro-ing with deciding on what career path to pursue, I came to the conclusion that it was staring me right in the face. Art/ fashion alone wasn't fulfilling me; someone with such a fickle temperament must be fulfilled to be able to get anywhere. But making cakes and creating art with sugar, which it effectively is, feels different. It has a hold on me, keeps my attention and for once I find I can complete projects.

So with that said, I looked online to find a professional, thorough and difficult course to apply myself to, in the hope that I could find the skills I knew I had and use them to create impressive pieces. If I succeeded in doing so, my career path would finally be known.

Royal icing and piping techniques. This is what is called 'brush embroidery'.
The idea is that it adds texture to flowers by creating a soft look of lace. It's a very rewarding technique but quite old fashioned.

The technique shown here uses C and S scrolls. This is very tricky to do and requires lots of practice.  It's all down to your pressure when piping.

This was one of my final pieces on the sugar flower module. I absolutely loved creating these.

Just a little gerbera flower plaque which I did right at the beginning. I feel I have come a long way after I see this!

So this is an example of my lace extension work.  It is an incredibly difficult and time consuming technique.  This would mainly be used on elaborate, intricate and traditional looking cakes. It's not a modern technique but as you can see very effective and could probably be adapted in some way to make it more current perhaps?

Final pieces of the Royal Icing and piping technique's module. I was actually meant to line the board with sugarpaste but I missed that little detail! Technique's include Run-out collar (piped and 'flooded' with runny royal icing) then lace extension work on tips of collar, run-out swan motif, wings piped in layers and colour flow initials. There is intricate piping work running around the body of cake and on base. I follow with some close up's below.

Can you tell I just really love cake?

 So on a gloomy English winter weekend, I decided to bring a smile to a group of friends faces by organising a tea party where they could stuff their faces with sweet delights to their little hearts content. I ended up doing most of the stuffing, but no surprise there.

I cooked up a storm, cheating only with bought favs like party rings, pink wafers and jams tarts. Hey, I aint claiming to be Mary bloody Poppins here.

So aside from the cheats, I made big cupcakes with candy coloured icing, victoria sponge cake, rice crispy squares, variety of mini sandwiches and super tiny butterfly cakes.




   

Here's me pouring tea for a fellow cake comrade.

She better drink it.

Look happy girls. That's it.

Smug?

still going. Troopers

and again...

Home experiments

My first attempt at Macarons! Pretty chuffed and tasted bloomin' delicious.

I made this last minute one weekend to show a woman who was interested in having me help her with  her company in London. I got the job.

Cupcakes I made for my charming and beautiful niece and nephew. Gone in 60 seconds.

A christmas gift for a dear friend of mine. Inside were homemade brownies, macaroons and chocolate covered almonds. I popped this in the post as a little surprise as the poor sod didn't have a Christmas calendar- God forbid! It was so much fun to make but did take quite some time to draw pictures for each window!

First covered cake

So after many bakes, comissions for friends to do their birthday cakes, a cake for a clothing company and various other small projects, I realised that I needed to know more. I needed to start taking it seriously as nothing else was fulfilling me in the same way. Food has always been my speciality; I'm a foodie, I love good grub and I love the feeling of feeding people good grub. I'm also very artistic but along with my poor concentration skills, OCD and fear of failure, the pieces of art I created were just never good enough in my distorted eyes. At least with cake, it's always guaranteed to make someone smile, which ultimately is the main point for me. Also, I find I'm much more creative with sugar so visions and ideas develop more easily.

So here is me with my first covered cake in sugar paste (only ever covered in buttercream) after a class I wish not to disclose as I wouldn't want you to waste your money. But nor do I want to name and shame.
We were told to make either a handbag cake (urgh) or a car. I turned my ski jump nose up at both options, made a fuss and wha-do-ya-know, was allowed to make a character from my favourite film Totoro. (I think mainly to shut me up).

We also made cupcakes. But really, cupcakes shmuck-cakes, I couldn't give a damn. They're just as naff as the handbag idea. I will not post these.

Gotta start somewhere...

First post. Where it all began.

An oppurtunity to provide some of the first ever pictures of my cake creations, starting at the tender age of 14. (It was earlier but I unfortunately have no photographic evidence to back this claim). Not much to say about this. I'm not ashamed. But using buttercream for icing is the trickiest darned thing and if only I had known about the gloriousness of sugar paste, I could have really gone to town. (hah)....because, I really didn't go to town....at all...