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.

Ruby's 7th Birthday Party.

My niece Ruby turned 7 today and had a party to celebrate with her friends from school. She spent a couple of weeks going through all of my cake books looking for the perfect cake. A rabbit was her cake choice! I love getting to create cake's that I haven't done before and this was one of them. It is from the Lindy Smith "Quick and Clever Party Cakes" book which a friend was kind enough to lend to me. This particular rabbit cake is very life like. Ruby requested caramel mudcake, which was filled with white chocolate ganache and fondant fur.

Ruby also requested her favourite vanilla sugar cookies, rabbit shaped of course and also rabbit cake pops. The cake pops were caramel mudcake too.

The party colour theme was pink, pink and more pink! So the party table reflected this perfectly.

Tulle pom-poms, pink table covering, loads of pink lollies (including musk sticks, marshmallows, milk bottles, teeth, mentos, sherbet lollies, starburst sunfruits and pink foil money chocolates), the rabbit cake, cookies, cake pops and cake balls.

Pretty pink boxes were filled with lots of goodies for each guest to take home.

Happy Birthday Ruby Claire xxx

Baking with Emily.

Over the weekend my eldest niece, Emily, who is 8 came to stay with me to do some baking. We had a wonderful time, baking gingerbread cookies, cupcakes and chocolate cake.


The gingerbread was the first item we made. Emily chose the cookie shapes, the colour of the icing and also decorated them all herself.

 

The finished cookies looked and tasted sensational!

Next was the chocolate cake. The recipe we used was Deep Dark Chocolate Cake. An easy cake, that is moist and tastes great. We filled it with dark chocolate ganache and covered it with vanilla buttercream. Emily helped make all of the decorations for the top of the cake.

 

 

The presents and christmas tree looked very festive and the finished cake took pride of place on the table at our family gathering yesterday.


Next on the list was cupcakes. Again Emily chose the colours and made the decorations. 

 

Emily became an expert with the piping bag almost immediately, she can be my assistant in the kitchen any day!!


I really enjoyed having Emily bake with me, and we will be doing it again soon.


What do you think of all of her creations?


Enjoy the lead up week to Christmas.


Mrs KT :)

Disco, Star Wars and Mickey Mouse!

This week's cakes were all very different in their theme. It started off with an R2D2 cake for Brianna who was turning 11.

I have made this cake before and it is a lot of fun to create. It is a milk chocolate and caramel layered mudcake with milk chocolate ganache and fondant covering. If there are any Star Wars fans reading this, I hope I have managed to re-create R2D2 closely.

Natalie who is turning 14 today requested a Mickey Mouse Face cake. This involved A LOT of black buttercream, I would love to see the mouths of the birthday guests after they have eaten this birthday cake!!

 

Mickey Mouse is moist butter cake with buttercream icing.

The next cake is the first 3 tier cake that I have made. Robyn is turning 40 and is celebrating with a 70's / disco themed party. Her sister ordered this cake for her.

Three flavours make up this huge cake. The bottom tier is dark chocolate mudcake, the middle tier is caramel mudcake and the top tier is milk chocolate mudcake. It is a really heavy cake and I just hope I can deliver it in one piece later on!!

The last order for the weekend is for a lovely lady who is celebrating her Hen's Day today. I am making her wedding cake and cupcakes in a few weeks time. The theme for the Hen's Day is everything pink. I think these cupcakes fit that theme quite well!

Earlier this week the school fete was on and I made some disney cookies for the cake stall. I have only used these cookie cutters a couple of times, but they are my favourite. 

I am going to relax for the rest of the day and then it is back to baking again tomorrow. 

Enjoy your weekend.

Mrs KT :)

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies!

I love a good chocolate chip cookie, always home made, not the supermarket variety. I have previously posted my favourite recipe. This morning whilst browsing my blog list I came across this post on How Does She? The perfect chocolate chip cookie!

Of course they looked very tempting, even at 6am! I had all the ingredients in the pantry, so off I went making a batch. The only modification I made was that I replaced the choc chips with milk couverture buttons.

The cookies are delicious. The recipe made 45 cookies, plenty to share around!

Bobbi-Jo provides a wonderful step-by-step recipe over on the How Does She? blog, so if you would like to try this recipe for yourself please head over there!

Enjoy your weekend.

Mrs KT :)