Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A Sneak Peek - Oliver's 5th Birthday Party!

It is all about the emergency services in this house at the moment, I am in the midst of putting all the finishing touches together for Oliver's 5th Birthday Party on Saturday.

His birthday t-shirt arrived in the post today, it was custom made by Naomi (Taylored4baby), and is fabulous. I am keeping it as a surprise for him, he will be very excited to see it on Saturday!


I have just finished wrapping the chocolate bars and labeling them with a fire engine motif. (I apologise for the terrible photo's, it is late and I took them on my iphone!)


I have quite a long to do list, but tomorrow will see police hat's being made, cookies baked, ribbon being attached to lolly jars. Along with this I will be decorating a couple of other fun cakes. Never a dull moment in our house :)

Enjoy the rest of the week.



Monday, March 28, 2011

Mia & Riley's Christening Cake

Again my poor little blog has been neglected. I have had a small break from making cakes so not a lot to post about. The past weekend I made a gorgeous combined christening cake for a brother and sister. It was a challenge to put together something that suited both a boy and a girl, a 2 year old and a baby. The cake was white chocolate mudcake with white chocolate ganache and fondant covering. I made the doll and the train from modelling paste. The swag around the cake was also made of icing and provided a lovely finishing touch to the cake.






This week I am in party planning mode, Oliver is turning 5 this weekend. His party is an "Emergency Services" theme, as he is fascinated by fire engines, police cars and ambulances. He did have a fire engine themed party last year, but insisted on a similar theme this year. I had to take a step back and realise that is all about him!!! I also have another 9 cakes to do between Thursday and Tuesday, so I will be a busy little bee in the kitchen. I will have a very long post next week, showing you all of the photo's of my creations. 

Enjoy your week.



Tuesday, March 15, 2011

What a week!

Wow, what a week I have had. 6 cake orders, photography work, running a household and life in general. Today is my first chance to sit and catch up on reading my favourite blogs and post some photo's of my cakes.

As there are lots of photo's I will keep the words to a minimum today!

The first cake was Linda and Craig's wedding cake. The top and bottom tiers were dark chocolate mudcake and the middle tier was a styrofoam dummy cake. The butterflies were acetate.




Next was a 70th birthday cake. The cake was pumpkin fruitcake and was made by the birthday girl's daughter, I decorated it to look like a giant slice of cake.

 

Dark chocolate mudcakes were the most popular choice this week. Mallory was turning 23 and had a simple cake to celebrate.


The local family history society were celebrating their 25th anniversary, so a special silver and white exploding present cake it was.


A chocolate overload cake was requested for Luke who was turning 30. Dark chocolate mudcake with ferrero rocher ganache filling, dark chocolate ganache coating, kit kat border and malteser and rocher topping!









The last cake was an unusual request. A skull cake! It relates to a text that Aimee is studying at school and was for an after school study session. It was cherry ripe mudcake. 







So I am all caked out now! About 6kg of chocolate and 5kg of fondant later. This week I have no cakes to do, which will see the ironing finally get done and the housework completed :)


Lastly, I will share a couple of photo's from my week 3 task for my photography workshop. The shoot had to revolve around 4 words that were given to me by the course coordinator. My words were sentimental, retro, giving and string. I used my baby girl, Claire as my model, and being 17 months old, proved challenging. The end results were very pleasing.


Sentimental - Claire is wearing the pearls I wore on our wedding day.
Retro - the dress she has on is a little retro.




Giving - the gift.
String - the twine tied around the gift.


I hope you are still reading after that very long post, thankyou.


Enjoy your week.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Photography Workshop - Week Two - Milk & Cookies!

It is hard to believe that week two of my photography workshop (read about week one here ) has finished and we are part way through week three! Life is super busy at the moment so getting time with my camera has been limited.

Yesterday I decided to take time out and practice using my camera indoors. This is proving to be the most difficult place to take photo's. They all seem to come out dark or blurry. My children are getting a little tired of posing for me, so the next best thing was some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. I took about 50 photo's!! I don't have Photoshop yet, so used Picnik to play around with the best image. This is the end result.

 
I am rather pleased with this image, which I am sure could be improved with better editing, maybe a darker background. Week four will provide more information on this.

This week is a busy one with five cakes to do over three days, so be sure to come back in a few days to see what I create.

Enjoy your week.