Ship shape and ready to go!

Yo Ho! Lets Go! At this time of year we have the most special birthday cake to make, this year hes moved on from Power Rangers to Jake and the Neverland Pirates, the perfect character for a cake. As always Rob made a brilliant job carving the cake:

It needed a bit of propping up to begin with until the buttercream hardened in the fridge and could be 'dirty iced' (someones been watching too much Cake Boss....). This provided the perfect base for the sugarpaste covering and I must say Sattina Sugarpaste is by far the best sugarpaste we've used so far. It was soft and pliable straight from the tub but didn't stick to the worksurface. It also smelt absolutely fantastic!

Anyway onto the cake, instead of using a single piece of sugarpaste we made each wooden plank of the ship individually included hand indenting the wood grain effect. It took hours but this is one cake where no effort is too much.

To bring out the woodgrain effect we used the airbrush sprayed at an angle. Once suuficently covered and dried we added the finer details and displayed it ready for the Birthday Boy.

Another cake done and more orders in the pipeline :)

Testing the new toy :)

It was a cold morning on 25th December when I opened quite possibly the best Christmas present ever. After attaching the gun to the hose and air compressor my new airbrush was ready to go! This post will be all about my first attempt at using the airbrush.

To start with I watched this brilliant video tutorial by Krazy Kool Cakes. The next step was to protect the table! 

A couple of drops of Teal food colouring (which apparently has 'adverse effects on children....') and the airbrush was ready to go. To spray the food colouring you simply have to pull back on the trigger. Covering a cake in a solid colour was a lot easier than anticipated. As long as the board was continuously moving on the turntable the colour applied fairly evenly.

 

Next up was attempting to create a wood effect. I started with some small white 'planks' of sugarpaste and indented a wood effect onto them. The colour was sprayed on at an angle to ensure the grain stood out. After colouring I attempted to transfer the 'planks' to the cake... bad idea. The food colouring makes the sugarpaste a lot softer and its really hard to handle.

My final test was to colour some small sugarpaste butterflies and apply them to the cake. However I had the same issue with the sugarpaste going soggy after applying the colour.

Overall the cake went well but next time I try a wood effect I'm going to stick the planks onto the cake first and then spray them!

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.....

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole and that means comfort.

It also means we've tried to re-create one in cake! It is a fairly simple looking hobbit house but the hours of work that went into it were immense!

After Rob once again cooked a lovely cake filled with Italian Meringue buttercream and chocolate ganache he carved it into a hobbit house shape. To start with we made a "perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle". Well coloured with food colouring anyway...

On top of this we added the front of the building and cut a hole out for the door. Of course the hole I cut out in the 'middle' of the building wasn't in the middle in the slightest! Nevermind, time for brick work! We carefully tweezered 41 tiny bricks around the door and window. Each brick was about as big as my little fingernail.... it took a while!

We then worked on the grounds of the house. Firstly we covered the whole house and most of the board in green sugarpaste. This turned out to be the easy bit!

I then decided to texture the sugarpaste to give it the appearance of grass. To do this I stuck and star piping nozzle on my finger and repeatedly poked the icing....

This isn't so bad....

Approx 45 minutes into the process....

Almost 2 hours later.....

Roughly 2 hours 15 minutes later and I finally finished. I still dont think my back has forgiven me!




















But the cake wasn't done yet! We added in the 'timber' supports holding the roof up and a crazy paving pathway leading to the door. Plus a few bushes in the grounds of the house to make the landscape a bit more interesting!

I may have been going slightly insane by this point....

A small chimney and the cake is complete :)

Somebodys Turning 3!

Last week it was the birthday of one of our favourite 3 years olds and what better cake than a catroon dinosaur :) This blog is a bit more in-depth as we managed to take quite a few photos so feel free to just look at the pictures!

The body and head of the dinosaur were created using our spherical tins (these are becoming a bit of a favourite despite the long cooking times involved) which Rob then ingeniously carved into a dinosaur.

A few small holes later and we had room for the fillings:

We added a tail to the rear of the body and covered the whole thing in buttercream ready for the sugarpaste covering. The sugarpaste covering the body was seamlessly smoothed into the tail to make it seem like one continuous piece and then we added the smaller details like legs and nostrils.

A few final touches such as spines, spots and skulls rounded the dinosaur off and he was ready for the party!

Unfortunately it seems the reason for the dinosaurs extinction is their in-ability to run away when the birthday boy threatens them with a knife!

Now just to plan his 4th birthday :)