Nanna's Birthday Cake

This is a cake I iced a few years ago for my Nanna's birthday. I was studying cake decorating at an evening class at the time and was keen to practice my skills with royal icing and this was certainly a big test! The design is from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes book.

I made the flowers well in advance as they keep indefinitely. The pink flowers were the simplest to make. I used a petal nozzle to pipe a single petal onto the flower nail using a stiff peak royal icing, I then rotated the nail by 1/5th and piped another petal and so on. After the flower dried the yellow centres were then piped on top. The other flowers are all variations on the same theme. I particularly liked the violets which had two different colours of icing and used a black edible pen to accent the petals. After the cake was decorated the flowers were stuck down with more royal icing and pretty green leaves piped on randomly for added effect.

A cake decorators toolkit

I'm often asked how I manage to achieve particular features of my cakes and my answer is invariably that there is a tool for the job! Here's my top items in my cake decorators toolkit:

1) Icing smoothers

I absolutely couldn't get by without these! They help hide a multitude of sins. After applying marzipan to the cake I use these to push the sponge into as regular shape as possible and you can actually be quite brutal at this stage to force the cake into a more even cube/cylinder. Then after applying the icing these are used to remove any lumps and bumps and literally polish to a really smooth finish.

2) Tylo (CMC) or Gum Tragacanth and icing glue

Not strictly a tool but an invaluable part of my arsenal nonetheless. The addition of a small amount of either of these powdered gums will transform regular icing sugarpaste into something that will hold its shape when modelled, not get too sticky, and allow you to roll it extremely thinly. You can also buy ready mixed modelling paste but I really don't see the value when you can so easily make it yourself. 

Icing glue is simply a hydrated version of CMC and I use a fine brush to stick items together in most of my designs.

Bunting cake

Nothing says "summer party!" quite like bunting. Well except maybe Pimms. And a barbecue. But that still makes it the first, second, third most important part of a summer party so I thought it would be a fabulous theme for a cake I was baking for a family summer party this weekend.

Our young cousins from New Zealand were visiting the family and everyone would be getting together so I wanted to make something quite fun. It was also really important that I could easily transport the cake on the train from London up to Yorkshire - a squashed cake is soooo not a good look - so it had to be single tier without too many fragile components.

I'd already pinned this FABULOUS bunting cake on Pinterest so borrowed heavily from it for this design. I was a bit reluctant to make yet another pink cake but I already had this sensational spotty ribbon that really complemented the patterns and made pink the obvious choice.

There was actually a reasonable amount of maths involved in the design. I made sure the bunting tessellated so I could make it efficiently. It then follows a visually appealing sequence of colours (blue, purple, green, blue...) and designs (spots, stripes, spots...) 

The bunting itself is, as always for me, make with regular supermarket sugarpaste with added Tylo powder that allows you to manipulate it really easily - in this case giving the ability to roll is extremely thinly. It was then simply stuck to the cake with edible glue.

After I got to the party I added the hanging string of bunting. To make this I had stuck triangles together with some paper coated sugar floristry wire between. It was then hung between a couple of cake pop sticks.