3 Ways With... Halloween!

Do you know what is terrifying me this Halloween? My own bad time management. Seriously. It’s terrifying. Mostly because Halloween is such a good time to try new things and be really creative but I didn’t manage it very well and have left myself feeling disappointed. Take this giant cupcake for instance; it didn’t turn out like I had it in my head, mostly due to no time for planning.

I don’t like it. That’s that.

But anyway, moving on to some things I did actually a little bit like, here are 3 ways with Halloween:

1. Cake Pops

I always dread a little bit being asked to make cake pops, mostly because my skills with them aren’t terribly reliable – sometimes they work great, other times not so much. I know a worklady shouldn’t blame her tools but I think the candy melts play a big part in whether the pops are going to be a success or not: sometimes they are beautifully smooth and perfect consistency, other times they are thick and lumpy. It varies from make to make and from colour to colour.

So when they actually go right, like with this lot, I make sure I do a little happy dance.

These were for my cousin Oliver who loves the cake pops. He loves them so much that when my auntie asked if I would do him some I already had it in my diary because he’d already placed an order! His brother, Sam, also loves the cake pops but hates Halloween so he got some plain ones and everyone was happy.

These little Frankensteins are the most creative I have ever been with the cake pops and I was pleased with how they turned out. Could this be opening the door to cake pop adventure land? We’ll see…

The cake pops for the ghosties didn’t cover so well but that wasn’t so bad because they were covered with fondant sheets. Wooooooo!

2. Iced Biscuits

Oh I do love an iced biscuit! The only thing I love more than decorating an iced biscuit is eating one. We make so much cake these days that we’ll take it or leave it in our house,but everyone is all over these sugar cookies and the lovely royal icing.

Iced biscuits are something I would love to work with more often – they are just time consuming because there is a lot of drying time required but I think the results are worth it.

Again, I had more ideas in mind for these but time got the better of me. But I think Frankenstein and his bride turned out pretty well.

3. Cake

I got to do a Halloween cake…For my Nanna! Love it! Her country club put on a Halloween party so she wanted to have a cake to take to give to the committee to say thank you. Now that may sound very sweet but I was having nightmares about what she was going to say about this cake. My Nanna has entered that stage of life where she doesn’t care who she offends. (BTW I adore my Nanna she is the loveliest, most generous woman who just makes me giggle with her old lady sass!) So I was worried about the comments. The least terrible being: “yes, Rosie it’s very nice.” The worst being “What on earth is that? It’s rubbish. I can’t give them that.”

Her actual response was: "Oh isn't that lovely! They're going to be over the moon with that!" Yay!

When I Googled Halloween cakes this one instantly caught my eye; I thought it was suitably grown up and just creepy enough. Mine is an amateur take on this one, which I just completely adore, but I think it turned out ok. My favourite bit is the black roses topper – makes me think of an eerie wedding cake.

Funny story – when I was trying to cover this, I accidentally hit myself in the chin with my silicon rolling pin. Those things are heavy. Given the noise that occurred I was lucky to escape a cracked tooth but I do have a bruise (thankfully) under my chin and my left ear just isn’t quite right. Baking is dangerous, kids.

Ok.... 4. Cupcakes

Just because it's Halloween. 

Black velvet cupcakes with meringue ghosts! Spookilicious.

Word to my mother for these Halloween cupcakes!

Halloween: next year I'll be really ready for you!

Vicky xx

Cake Time: Candy Crush

Hands up how many people are addicted to Candy Crush? I have to admit to owning it on my phone and I did get a little bit sucked in trying to get past some of the higher levels. I did draw the line when my app was making me play on Facebook - I spend enough time on there already stalking random strangers...

*Ahem* Moving on...

Bernie obviously loves Candy Crush enough that her family though it fitting to get her a cake in the shape of her favourite game.

I set the cake up as the game screen and made use of all those lovely bright colours. Mum took care of the actual game board because I don't do well with straight lines.

I rather enjoyed crafting those little bits! Cute. This is a cute cake.

And there is the ol' scoreboard:

I realised 40 points isn't very many but that's how old she was and it seemed fitting!

I didn't quite get there with the correct Candy Crush font but I don't think I was too far off that you couldn't get the reference.

How bizarre is it that mobile phones apps are now becoming the norm for cakes? This is the second one I have done now and there are plenty more examples out there. But I guess it's no odder than making a cake for someone's favourite computer game; we all know how popular they are.

 

App cakes. Clockwise from top left: Temple run, Plants vs Zombies, Too Dumb To Die 

So bring on the inspiration! And someone bring me a Hello Kitty Cafe cake.

Vicky xx

Cake Time: Angry Birds

My cousin Oliver wanted an Angry Birds cake for his birthday. On his birthday he got Angry Birds everything. Apparently Angry Birds has sky rocketed from being a simple, free phone app to some kind of phenomenon. I think there’s even a cartoon and the birds have names!

But this also means that there is lots of inspiration out there for Angry Birds cakes.

Left to right: Nest, Slingshot, Kaboom!

My Mum, being ahead of the times as she is, made an Angry Birds cake about 18 months ago. What a trendsetter.

I wanted to do a cake with a bit of depth and up and downy-ness and ended up with something quite mammoth, even though I hadn’t actually baked that much cake.

The idea of using Kit Kats as the wooden hiding places was not mine; I saw the idea on another cake that has since disappeared in to thin air. But props to you if it was your idea.

The pigs and birds were almost fun to make; I would have enjoyed them a lot more if it hadn’t been a sweltering day in July and the icing hadn’t melted whenever I went near it.

I know I have been going on a lot about details but they really are my favourite thing at the minute and this cake was no exception! The small details of a snout, some eyes and a crooked smile transforms a green blob into a mutant pig that wants to take over the world! Or steal eggs… I think that’s what they do.

And the birds turned out ok too but they were even more melty because they require a bit more handling to get them in to shape. And getting them to hold their shape in the heat was a nightmare.

But overall it was a fun and effective cake. Best part? Left over KitKats.

Vicky xx

Cake Time: Birthday Cakes

By friend-of-a-friend links and a touch of coincidence I was asked if I would take on a job for a local marketing and branding company, Better Branding Agency.

As many offices do, they celebrate employees’ birthdays with cake but this lot don’t do it by halves. In place of a chocolate cake from Tesco, they make a big deal of it and have proper, full on, decorated birthday cakes. And I think it’s a fantastic idea.

The lady who had been doing the cakes previously had to give it up due to being so busy she was unable to commit to the orders. Good for her and good for me.

This came about through doing a cake for a friend’s family member’s son, who is friends with a boy whose mum works for Better and who approached me to do the cakes. After a bit of discussion and nervousness on my part I was away with my first request.

They’ve been pretty specific with what the want on the cakes which is great but it also meant I was a little bit lost doing the first one. My first order was for Julie who likes tea, credit cards, Seabrooks prawn cocktail crisps, diamonds and stationary. And the end result looked a bit like this:

I have to be honest. I wasn’t really sure how this was going to turn out but I think taking time to get the detail on the various items made it work; it was a random cake with random bits but (hopefully) everything looked like it was meant to.

The next brief was pretty similar: Mark likes tanning oil and the 80s:

How much 80s paraphernalia can you fit on a cake? (Probably loads more!)

PacMan 4 life.

The most recent one I did was for a member of staff who doesn’t like cake. (I didn’t think those people actually existed.) So instead he got a flapjack smothered in melted milk chocolate. I wish I had a picture of this one because it looked so yummy I wanted to put my face in it. I think it was just nice to have a break from cake, and to be honest I’d put my face in anything covered in melted chocolate.

So that’s what I have done so far and am anxious to see what the next cake brings!

Vicky xx

Batman & Wonder Woman Superhero Wedding Cake

When my Mum & I were asked to do a Superhero wedding cake, we were quite excited, and, in all honesty, when we found out the specifications, we were a little concerned: the bride seemed to what so many different and contrasting elements:

 - the cake topper were to be based on this cartoon:

-  Robin from this cartoon to be sat further down the cake:

- the cake was to be red

- the flowers were to be baby blue and based on the small roses in the brides bouquet

At first we couldn’t get our heads round how it was going to look. I think mostly because it was unlike anything we’d been asked to do before.

But then, when we started putting the cake together we quickly found out that the bride and groom knew exactly what they were doing, and had visualized something quirky, personal, and unconventionally elegant.

My mum was put in charge of cakes, covering, and flowers. (She may have drawn the short straw!) The tiers were three different flavours: fruit, chocolate and sponge. And square. That’s not our best shape cake. As we needed red to cover the cake, we went for Renshaw's pre-coloured fondant. At £2 per 250g, it’s more expensive than colouring the icing yourself, but we knew we were going to need a fair amount and wanted to make sure the colour was consistent. Conveniently, Hobbycraft sent out a 25% discount voucher just as we were planning on stocking up!

The flowers were made using a pale blue flower paste. I love working with this flower paste. It can get sticky but stretches to get beautifully thin and dries quickly, maintaining its shape. We made a lot more flowers than we needed because we weren't sure how many we'd need. In the end we went for a couple on each corner: this meant that it didn't take away from the characters.

We probably would have used a mix of flower paste and fondant to make the figures but before we started we came across Squire’s sugar dough and decided to give this a go.

http://www.squires-shop.com/uk/product/sk-sugar-dough-white-200g

It costs £4.35 for 200g and we used 400g. Similar to the flower paste, it get quite sticky if you have warm hands but it was nice to work with. It was easy to mould, set quickly but unlike flower paste, if you decided you needed to re-mould something, and hadn't left it too long, you could do so without it going crumbly and full of bits. I would definitely use this again but probably only for a special occasion; for every day use, fondant is more than good enough.

Batman was the easiest to model. He was mostly column-like, with a nice cape to help keep him up right on the cake.

Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was a pain. She was bending from the waist to kiss Batman and this made it very difficult to keep her upright! In the end we had to package her up separately and have her put on the cake at the venue; we couldn't risk her falling off in transit!

And there was also little Robin, who was just minding his own business sat on the edge of the cake. He was fun to do - he had lots of the little details that help figures come to life.

So here is the finished thing! It was a lot of hard work and a bit of stress right at the end trying to put everything together but I enjoyed watching it come together, and, most importantly of all, the bride and groom loved it! :)

Vicky xx

All The Pretty Pins: Cartoon Cakes

Following on from this weekends Catbug cake, all this week's pins are fantastic cartoon themed cakes, So bright, colourful and fun!

Clockwise from top: Garfield, Spongebob Squarepants, Care Bears, Hello Kitty, Pink Panther, Katsuma, Tokidoki, My Little Pony, Lumpy Space Princess, Powerpuff Girls, Adventure Time, Dexter's Labratory

By the way, how awesome are those 3D Hello Kitty cookies?! I need to be finding the cutters for those!

Vicky xx

Go Purple – World Kidney Day – Thursday 14th March 2013

Last month I took part in World Kidney Day’s Go Purple in order to raise some money from Kidney Research UK through baking lots of goodies. I’m not full of my usual excuses as to why it has taken me so long to write about it; I have simply just been putting it off and not quite able to find the words.

At the end of 2005 on a family holiday to visit family in South Africa, my dad was diagnosed with kidney problems. After being fixed up, getting home, then going back to work in Qatar, we received a phone call telling us his kidneys had started to fail, he needed to start dialysis and he was coming home.

After three years of tri-weekly dialysis, numerous hospital visits, endless medical discussions, and talks of transplants, he lost his fight and passed away.

 

I don’t think there is a better word for what he did than ‘fight’; he was a silent warrior who just got on with everything, dealt with things as they came, never complained, and was the one who supported everyone else around him. There were so many occasions when I would be worrying about what was happening and he would comfort me; don’t worry, what will be will be, we have to do these things if I’m going to get better. I don’t think I could have coped if he hadn’t been so strong, and he, in turn, took strength from my mum. I know I will never be prouder of anyone. 

He was a character! Quiet until he really got to know you and then after that you were subjected to his ridiculous jokes! (“I used to be a tap dancer…but I kept falling in the sink”, “I like kids but I couldn’t eat a whole one”!!) He loved music, his PC, and technology in general. His sense of humour was a cross between Monty Python and Naked Gun, he was kind, and he was caring. Family meant the world to him. 

One of my earliest baking memories is baking shortbread with my dad in our kitchen at home. I also remember him trying to make sorbet once, maybe it was lemon, but definitely it was a disaster. I think it was in the freezer for ages! He also thought he was the best cook – everything he cooked was, according to him, perfect! He was pretty good but there was no fun in letting him know that!

Nothing could have prepared us for what happened those 7 years ago. And I imagine it is the same for many others who have been plunged into a similar situation. I hadn’t realised until now that Kidney Research UK took part in national fundraising schemes (it was a tweet from Stephen Fry that alerted me to it) but as soon as I found out I knew I wanted to be a part of helping raise money towards vital research.

The statistics relating to kidney problems are scary, particularly those relating to transplant: 90% of the people on the transplant list are waiting for a kidney, less than 3000 transplants are carried out per year, and 350 people die while waiting.[1] We were unbelievably lucky (and eternally grateful) that one of my dad’s brothers was able to give a kidney to my dad (my brother & I weren’t allowed, and my mum wasn’t a match,) but not everyone gets that opportunity. Knowing that the money I raised is being used to try and find a way to prevent this is rewarding but I know there is still a long way to go.

If you want to donate to Kidney Research UK, you can find all the information here: http://support.kidneyresearchuk.org/page.aspx?pid=609
 
And if you decide you want to join the organ donors list, all the details you need are here: http://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/how_to_become_a_donor/ 

My baking raised a lovely £241, which was both overwhelming and wonderfully generous. I would like to say a mega huge thank you to everyone who bought a cake and helped towards a cause that is so close to my heart. And I will be coming for your pennies again next year!

I will end this on a lighter note with a few pictures of what I created; safe in knowledge that my dad would have much rather had some cheese!! 

Thank you for reading,

Vicky xx

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[1] http://www.kidneyresearchuk.org/about-us/about-us.php 23/04/2013