Happy Birthday Anna!

It's been a busy year and I haven't had the chance to bake many cakes. I'm very rusty!

Happily it was my friend Anna's birthday this week so I was able to dig out all my cake decorating equipment and bake a cake. It was to be a big birthday barbecue so I needed to bake a large cake but unfortunately only had 6" cake boards available. Not a problem though - since we couldn't go wider - we went taller! 

This was my first two tier cake and I must confess I didn't do it properly with dowel rods but it was sufficiently sturdy for a barbecue.

I made four petal flowers from royal icing using the directions in Peggy's book. It's been a couple of years since I last made flowers so I found it quite tricky. For some reason I find four larger petals a lot harder than five smaller ones.

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.