A birthday present

I baked and iced this cake for my friend Robyn's birthday party at Kettner's in Soho. It's based on a design from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes which is one of my favourite cake decorating books. The original design uses a green bow and pink spots but I much prefer these more grown up shades of purple.

The bow is made from regular supermarket sugarpaste with some added Tylo powder to make it stiffer. In fact it was so stiff I struggled to roll out the paste and resorted to using the pasta machine - which was actually really effective at creating a ribbon of consistent thickness. The ribbon is dusted with some edible lustre dust to create the shimmery effect.

Cakes on a plane

Last week I made a Patchwork cake based on the design in Sugarcraft 3 as a surprise for my Mother-in-law's birthday.

I've been wanting to bake this for a while. The design uses the Patchwork Squares cutters to cut and emboss the patchwork design out of stencil paste. I really like the texture and femininity of the cake.

I was running short of time to finish this before our flight to Scotland, but next time I'd like to try dusting parts of the design to add a bit of colour variety. We were very pleased that the cake made it from Greenwich to Glasgow unscathed!

Looking forward to trying some more needlework and fabric designs :)