Wine Gums cake

Hello cake fans! Sorry it's been a while. I have been making cakes, but not photographing them- I'm awful! Hopefully this will make up for it a little. I don't know if you can get this sweets worldwide, but here in the UK we have these sweeties called Wine Gums. They don't have wine in them, never have, they're just fruity but have names of different wines on each chewy sweet. Look at the photo I posted at the beginning of this post and see the wiki here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_gum

Anyway. We got a request for a Wine Gums 30th birthday cake! So, as ever, my MIL was on baking and cake covering duties, and I had the task of making a bag of Wine Gums out of icing!

Below is step one. The bag. Covered in icing sugar still in places. I pondered how to let it dry in the right shape to put the sweets in, but then realised I should just shove the actual Wine Gums in there for it to dry around! No point in making the sweets out of icing. It would be tricky to get the jelly effect right, and sweets are edible, and go nicely with cake anyway, so why the hell not??

This is step two. I hand painted a logo exactly like the bag of sweets I had next to me. It was quite laborious, but worth it. There's a lot of shine on this photo as it's still wet.
And here is the finished Wine Gums packet, next to the REAL bag. I'm annoyed with myself as I know there's one sweet I forgot to paint on the packet.... I don't think anybody else cared. I even painted the tiny box in the bottom right corner that says "175 calories" Hee! The colours are

relatively true in this photo (my husband took this photo on his phone and it's better than mine)

And finally... the cake itself! I just handed over the bag I made to my mother in law, and she did everything else. The little glasses of red stuff I am told are jelly (or jello to you Americans) I thought they might be some sickly sweet alcoholic shot, but thankfully not! The tiers are a much deeper, brighter colour than the photo shows. Bright orange, lime green and luminous yellow to go with the sweeties!

In my personal opinion, I thought there were too many Wine Gums on the side of the tiers of cake. Obviously more than would fit in the bag, but artistic licence allows a few more. I just think it's a little overkill, but apparently there were bags of Wine Gums EVERYWHERE at the party, so perhaps it's not too many! What do you think?

Cake lull...

Just saying I've not forgotten this blog, I've just actually had no cakes to do lately! I've just had a request for one for early next month, and I'm contemplating one for the end of this month for someone else as a present, but other than that it's a little quiet, unless my mother in law is keeping some quiet that she'll spring on me later!

I can show you something else I'm working on at the moment, it's not a cake but it's inspired by the last cake I did for my mum. Several people said how they loved the birds and would love it on canvas, so I've been working on that. Here's a sneaky peek, but it's not finished yet :)

I should probably enjoy the peace right now before the mad rush of Christmas cakes. There always seem to be birthdays and Christenings muddled in around Christmas too, but the peak wedding season in nearly over...

I'll trawl back through the archives sometime and find some photos of cakes I forgot to post here if it stays quiet on the cake front, or maybe post tutorials if anybody has anything they'd like to have explained to them? I have spare icing for now I can experiment with if I get bored :)

Bird cake

Well I promised I'd post it, and thankfully I'm actually really pleased with the outcome!

I hand painted the design using dust colours and gin and an itty bitty paintbrush, and the leaves, flowers and lettering are all from cutters. I dusted the flowers with some iridescent dust and then added edible glitter to the centres. The letters were from a ready mixed brown icing I bought (cop out, sorry!) and the leaves were made from the same stuff, but I put some dust colour and gin over the top in a darker brown, then wiped off the excess so it left the colour in the veins. Very simple and effective. Once it was all painted on, I also added edible glitter to the centre of the tail feathers and the wings on the birds.

Don't ask me what type of birds they are (like my dad did!) they jut came from my head. The whole design was from my head. They're probably like something else I've seen in the past, but I just did some sketches in preparation and this is what I came up with.

Overall it came out very well. It's not the flattest cake ever, but I don't care. I put a lot of love into that cake for my mum :)

Super husband has made a video again. YAY! I should make him do this for all cakes from now on.

Cake in progress

I'm currently in the process of making a cake for my mum's birthday, and I'm nervous because this is the first cake I'll do 100% start to finish! I've baked them and they're cooling ready to sandwich later, hopefully, then I'll have to ice it with no assistance! I may have to rope in my husband as a second pair of hands to flat-ice it.

I have several plans for how it will be decorated in case of disaster (some cover up more flaws than others!!) so I'm not disclosing any design ideas yet! Luckily it's a gift and my idea, so I'm not working to any brief bar my own, so if it all goes rubbish, I'll throw a load of edible glitter at it and pretend it was meant to be that way!

Watch this space, I promise to post pictures even if it's awful...

Sonic the Hedgehog wedding cake

As promised, here is the Sonic the Hedgehog wedding cake I made for two very close friends of mine.

The bottom tier is chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream and the top is plain sponge with vanilla buttercream.

The block the figures' feet are resting on is solid icing. It was more a structural element, but I think it actually brought the whole thing together. In my initial plan, the figures would be standing together on the top. I hoped that if I leant them in to each other lovingly, they would balance, but it was never going to happen as their legs are too spindly and their heads enormous!

I could lie and say I planned it all along, but I don't lie on here- cakes evolve and more often than not, they don't go according to plan, but the way they turn out is actually even better than the plan was!

The only none edible parts of this cake are internal supports- plastic dowels to hold up the cake board inside the cake, and a half a cocktail stick in each figure to hold their heads to their bodies. Yep, the rings are icing. Nothing but icing. They were made a couple of days before hand so they had a long time to dry, then only positioned on the cake on the morning of the wedding. By then they were solid as a rock. I made them by using two different sized circle cutters on some rolled out icing. I thought about dusting them with gold powder, but I thought in game the rings are yellow, so I'd follow suit!

I'm very proud of the figures. I spent a long time researching Sonic as I realised I didn't know as much as I wanted to know to get the detail correct. The pink hedgehog is Amy, who I discovered through my research, essentially stalks Sonic and is obsessed with him!! Oh well! My friends asked for Sonic and Amy, and I think it turned out romantic. I tried to put them in a pose where they looked quite soppy, and gave them wedding rings too. My friends are the sweetest couple ever, and I wanted to encapsulate their romance and how they are besotted with each other in tiny icing computer game characters! I tried to remove them from the cake in one piece when they cut it, but they came apart! They're still going to keep them and the rings in an airtight box as a memento. This is perfectly doable as long as they are kept airtight and out of sunlight, the icing should last. I have some pieces from my own wedding cake still!

I'm happy to answer any questions you have relating to cakes if you want to give these things a go.

Because my husband is awesome, he filmed a video going around the cake, for this blog, so you can appreciate it from all angles. I think it's a great idea of his so you can understand the size of the cake and see it from all sides with out lots of photos!

Random update and a recipe

I know, I know! I've really, REALLY neglected this blog, but I have a good excuse right now as my husband and I have just bought our first house, and most of my time has been taken up with house searching, viewing, packing and moving and now I'm sitting surrounded by boxes! I do have a pretty good wedding cake I did for some friends that has Sonic the Hedgehog and Amy on top. I am so, so proud of it, and my husband even videoed walking around it if I can work out how to post that here, so look out for that!

Well, just so this isn't an entirely pointless 'update' I'd like to share a 'recipe' of sorts, as I made it today, and I thought I'd share!

Well, what do you do if you decorate a lot of cakes and you have all sorts of cake trimmings? You know, all the off cuts from the cakes that get cut to shape. All the burnt edges, and odd shapes you can't quite sandwich up into some sort of cake to present to anyone, ever? What about the extra left over buttercream, or even slightly stale cake bits?! Well... I have the answer!

What I do is something my Mother In Law and me invented once (but is most likely invented by someone else at some point). We call them truffles as they are quite truffley.

Get all the leftover bits of sponge cake (I've not tried it with fruit cake, but it could possibly work, not sure about fruitcake and buttercream though!) and crumbs and buttercream and whatnot. Plop the lot into the bowl of a mixer (I have a Kenwood Chef I love, but you could possibly use a hand mixer) crumble up the biggest bits of cake so it's not too hard on the old thing, and then whizz the hell out of it in the machine. If the mixture looks a bit dry, add some butter, if it looks a bit wet, add some icing sugar and/or cocoa, in fact it's best to add some of all of those things unless you had a lot of left over buttercream. If you want to add extra indulgence, melt some chocolate, and pour it into the mixture. For grown-ups only, a splash of booze is really good.

Once this concoction is whizzed into a big cakey gloop that sort of holds some shape, take gobs of it out, roll it in your palms into a ball, then roll in either icing sugar, cocoa powder or both, and plop on a baking sheet/big flat plate or something with baking parchment on it and chill the lot.

Wahay! A use for left overs! RECYCLING FTW!

Try to remember that what you are eating that can be gone in seconds is essentially a ball of cake with added sugar and fat, so it's not a good idea to eat lots of them on a regular basis, but it's a fabulous way to use up bits that would be scrap otherwise and just get binned.

I just made some of this earlier today, and it was looking too runny, and my husband said "just pass me the bowl and a spoon.." so this is also an option if you are feeling a bit greedy!

Cat cakes

Sorry, I've been a bit dreadful with updates on here. I have been making the cakes- just not always documenting them on here. I mentioned on my profile on Blogspot, but not in this blog itself, but I have fibromyalgia which is a chronic pain condition that makes me very, very tired amongst other things. (for more information check out http://www.fibromyalgia-associationuk.org/ ) This means that sometimes making cakes is impossible, as is updating my blog, and sometimes it's all I can do just to get out of bed. Sounds like an excuse, but yes. I will update as and when!

Right. This cake was made for a very good friend of mine, Becky, who, like me, is a crazy cat lady. We missed her birthday as we were all away celebrating my brother in law's wedding, so this cake was done later for Birthday Version 2 (yes we're nerdy)

I carved this cat out of chocolate cake, sandwiched with chocolate buttercream, and then added all the details in normal icing, apart from the whiskers which are wire, and the feathers, which are, err, feathers. Oh and the candle is real!

Look! Around the back there is a ball of wool and a mouse (my MIL made those and marbled the icing, the whole of the rest of the cake is all my handiwork!)

*Burp!*

While I'm at it, I don't think I posted this cat cake either! This was made as a silly fun cake for one of my Mother In Law's friends who was having a civil partnership. We made her proper wedding cake, and then this silly fun cat cake just for fun. Apparently she put it out at the wedding reception! We would have taken more time over it if we knew it would be on display...

Here's some of the cats drying on my icing mat..

And that, cake fans, is it for today. I have more cakes to show you, but I'm tired now. I hope you enjoy them.