Cherry Blossom

I've recently been admiring the spring cherry blossoms in Greenwich which inspired me to upload this photo. I'm a big fan of Japanese style and really enjoyed designing this cake for my assessment in cake decorating (NCFE Certificate in Creative Craft, level 1). 

For the assessment I used a cake dummy - a cake shaped block of polystyrene - which gave me time to work on the design over a number of days. The trees were piped from royal icing and whilst it was drying I worked in the realistic bark texture using a small brush.

The flowers were cut using a blossom cutter from pink flower paste and then shaped with a round icing tool on a foam pad. Before attaching to the cake I gave each blossom a light dusting of extra colour. I think this adds a pleasing variation between the individual flowers. The blossoms were painstakingly attached with dots of royal icing with an extra dot in the centre of every flower.

The model of a woman was inspired by a couple of Eastern designs I'd seen in Squires Kitchen cake decorating magazine. The torso and legs are one piece of mexican modelling paste which has been draped in a fabric-thin layer of paste for the kimono. The arms were modelled separately and attached with edible glue. I particularly liked using a sugarpaste extruder to create strands of black hair which were then draped around the head into a bun. 

Since creating this design I've had the pleasure of visiting Japan. It's a really wonderful place that I highly recommend visiting.

Penguin party

 

This is one of my very favourite designs. It's a cake that I iced for a Christmas party a couple of years ago. I can't take credit for the cake itself as my Nanna kindly bakes our family Christmas cakes each year. The cheeky penguins are all mine though!

The fruit cake was matured with the occasional splash of cognac for a number of weeks. A couple of days before the party I added a layer of marzipan and then a layer of regular sugarpaste. As well as being tasty the marzipan is quite stiff and helps to give a really good base for creating perfectly smooth icing on top. I'm a massive fan of the PME icing smoothers to smooth and polish the sugarpaste. On a fairly plain white cake such as this it really helps to have the icing looking pristine. 

As usual when creating models I used Tylo powder to stiffen the paste to give an easy modelling consistency. Additionally edible glue was helpful to stick the different components together.

The penguins themselves were quite straightforward to make - being essentially based on two round balls. The flippers are a couple of smaller balls flatted out between thumb and finger. I used an edible ink pen to create the pupils of the eyes which helped to create their expressive and cheeky characters. To keep the penguins standing upright I inserted dry spaghetti into the model and down into the cake. You can't quite tell from the picture but the fish has been dusted with some edible gold lustre to give it a shimmery fish skin effect.

Hoppy Easter

Happy Easter from the Wee Greenwich Bakery.

Here's a quick and easy 4" cake from a couple of years ago. I really like to make models - I spent a lot of time playing with FIMO modelling clay as a child and I think sugarpaste is a very similar, but more delicious, medium!

Lord of the Isles

This is the cake I baked for my husband Stuart's birthday. I baked this in a rush in just one evening as a surprise for Stuart to take to work.

This is my own design and I'm rather pleased with it. The design is based on Stuart's kilt tartan; the 'Macdonald Lord of the Isles Hunting Ancient'. I had the idea to make a tartan cake after using the pasta machine to roll out sugarpaste ribbons for the delightful present cake.

I bake a lot of square cakes in my fantastic Silverwood  adjustable cake tin. It gives me the flexibility to make any sized rectangular cakes I like - or up to four 6" square cakes at the same time. In our tiny kitchen this multi-functional tin is a great.

To start I iced the sponge cake with regular sugarpaste that I had coloured a dark green. I then added Tylo powder to some extra paste to stiffen it to a gum and added the colouring. The pasta machine was used to roll thick ribbons of the blue icing which was simply sliced using a ruler and sharp knife. Then the tagliatelle attachment was used to make the black and white ribbons and the spaghetti cutter for the red ribbon. I interwove the strands and glued them onto the layer underneath with a dab of clear alcohol.

The cake was very well received in Stuart's office and I'm looking forward to trying other tartan designs in future!