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.

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

Photography Workshop - Week One

This week saw the start of my online photography workshop. My lovely friend Leanne recommended Eye Candy Actions to me after she completed their Explore workshop last year. I have had my camera for a couple of months now and only ever shoot in auto mode. This week I have moved that dial to AV mode and the results have been fabulous.

Here are a couple of photo's I have captured this week.

{ A lone rosebud in my garden - my first photo taken in AV mode }

{ 3 cupcakes from a batch I baked early yesterday morning }

 { My big boy and a single cupcake }

The workshop has been wonderful so far and I am eager to learn more about my camera. Hopefully my photo's will improve and I will have many more to share with you.

On another note, my gorgeous custom made camera strap arrived from the US yesterday. Ruthanne from Eclectic Wotnot was lovely to work with. I selected the fabric and she worked her magic. It looks very stylish and coordinates with my camera bag nicely.

My weekend will be all about rabbit's! My niece is turning 7 and she has requested a rabbit cake along with rabbit cookies and cake pops, so I will be busy bringing that to life, please come back tomorrow to see the results.


Have a wonderful weekend :)

Purple and White Wedding.

On Saturday I had the pleasure of creating a gorgeous cupcake tower for Nikki and Brent's wedding. The colour theme was purple, white and silver.

The cupcakes were deep, dark chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream swirls and tiny silver cachous, in purple cupcake cases.

The cupcakes were displayed on a clear tiered cupcake stand. The cutting cake was white chocolate and raspberry mudcake filled with white chocolate ganache and covered in white fondant. It was finished off with a silver monogram initial topper and purple satin ribbon.

 

The weather was perfect for Nikki and Brent's special day. Congratulations to you both and thankyou for allowing me to be a part of your day.

Jungle Themed 1st Birthday Cake.

I have just delivered a 1st birthday cake for little Joseph ( I made the Under the Sea cupcakes for him last week ). His mum chose a jungle theme for his cake, so we went with a number 1 shaped cake. It was decorated with a monkey, a lion, a giraffe and an elephant, some trees and lots of jungle vines.

I hand modeled all of the animals and decorations from modeling paste. They were such fun to create, it is wonderful seeing them take shape and they come to life once there face is complete! The lion was my favourite!

The cake was a moist butter cake with white chocolate ganache and fondant covering. 

Happy 1st birthday Joseph, have a wonderful time celebrating with your family tomorrow.

Enjoy your weekend, I have the pleasure of creating a cupcake tower for a lovely couple's wedding tomorrow and then on Sunday I am meeting up with a couple of gorgeous blogging friends :)

Happy Valentines Day.

Today is Valentine's Day and I made some chocolate cupcakes and the papers peeled away from the cake, what a great reason to mix the cake with some ganache and experiment making some heart shaped cake pops. In the past I have made regular round cake pops, so used a heart shaped cutter to make these. 

 

 I used red candy melts for the coating and some cute little candy hearts as decorations. There was plenty of cake mixture, so I made some regular round pops too.

These cake pops are very easy to make and would look great in any shape. I will try flower and star shapes next time. I am continually inspired by Bakerella and Linda from Bubble and Sweet, their creations always amaze me!

Happy Valentines Day to you all :)