Gruffalo Cake

Received this Gruffalo cake order from a friend for her daughter's birthday party at least more than a month in advance and was dreading it for the entire time - I had never worked with sugar paste to create recognisable cartoon characters before! The spec of the cake was rather flexible - a Gruffalo themed carrot & banana cake for a small party. My friend left the rest to my imagination - no restrictions as to how the Gruffalo is to be presented/made and I got to use any colour I want. After going through countless of Gruffalo cake pictures others made on the internet, I was still rather unsure how I could actually pull this off. 

I thought about making a carved cake in the shape of the Gruffalo inspired by this video but I am simply not confident enough with my cake carving skills - might end up with no cake to carve at all! I also considered the idea of making a one-tier Gruffalo flat cake in the shape of Gruffalo's head - this sounds simple enough but somehow I didn't think it was enough for the birthday girl. The birthday girl is also in love with the Gruffalo mouse so including the mouse would be a bonus. 

The production of the cake took about three days from start to finish (with very little sleep) and oh how much I fought with the sugar paste - didn't have time to buy (and too expensive to buy) a huge amount of modelling paste so I ended up mixing Tylose powder with normal sugar paste to make the Gruffalo. The Tylose powder grade is that bit too fine and the sugar paste dried up rather quickly and cracked easily. The most difficult part of making the Gruffalo figure was surprisingly mixing colouring gel with sugar paste to get the right colour - sore hands were guaranteed! 

Gruffalo figure front

Gruffalo figure back

Made the mouse, too!

Finishing product

Finishing product

Finishing product

According to my friend, her daughter discovered the cake through the holes of the cake box on their way home from picking up the cake and recognised the Gruffalo and the mouse immediately and started to talk to them - a success I suppose! The party goers liked the cake and how it tasted, too - I could not be more relieved with the outcome. 

Sparkling Piggy

Cupcake order

A birthday girl placed an order herself asking for two dozens of red-velvet cupcakes to treat colleagues at work. I am free to decorate the cupcakes but have to keep in mind that her favourite colour is blue. 

A random red velvet cupcake recipe with good reviews from the internet was used (there are sooo many to choose from). I have used recipes from the Hummingbird Bakery and Lola's cupcakes before and the cupcakes did not turn out well at all - they were either not very red velvet like (and tasted.....weird) or did not have the correct colour. The trick is to not trust recipe books from bakeries thoroughly as they do not want to share their trade secrets with everyone or else they will go out of business! Thank god for internet recipes :) 

Making pipeable cream cheese frosting was the hardest thing of the project - the amount of icing sugar required was ridiculous and the kitchen was a mess afterwards. The final frosting never tasted alright - my journey searching for the perfect pipeable cream cheese frosting continues! 

Back to making girly cake decorations!

As with all my cupcake making projects somehow I ran out of frostings to pipe in the end.....again! Luckily I was able to hide any signs of frosting shortage with sugar paste decorations. Making girly sugar paste decorations was really enjoyable. The birthday girl was quite pleased with the cupcakes = happy me. 

Sparkling Lucille

Second commission-free cake: football themed

Received another cake order for a make colleague at work and this time it is football themed - Tottenham Hotspur. 

The team logo is not overly complicated but it has many narrow and very detailed bits and is therefore very hard to replicate using sugar paste. Was very tempted to get ready-made cake topper to save some time but ran out of time to get it in time for the due date. It took me at least two hours to create the logo - lots of moulding and moving really tiny bits of sugar paste in place and lots of throwing ruined sugar paste away and remaking them. 

This tiny logo is no bigger than the length of my palm - so much effort so little result.

Cake baking (carrot cake with cream cheese icing) was rather easy compared to making the logo. I love making non-pipeable cream cheese icing as they have less amount of icing sugar which means the sourness of the cream cheese is still very much retained and the icing tastes sooooo good!

Final result - must get a better alphabet mould

The birthday boy liked his cake very much and thanked me in person. I was simply glad that the logo was recognisable to everyone and approved by the birthday boy himself. 

Sparkling Piggy

First commission-free cake order

In order to practice what I learnt from the Cake Decorating programme at Le Cordon Bleu, friends and families have been informed to come to me for commission-free cake orders (i.e. only ingredients are charged as I have yet to establish a business properly). 

This first order was made by my colleague for another colleague at work for his birthday. Making a cake for a bloke is actually outside of my comfort zone as I usually go for anything cute and/or pink-coloured. Requirements for the cake is that it has to be chocolate-flavoured and be able to feed around 20 people - everything else is up to me to be creative. After some planning in the head I decided to keep things simple and utilise some ninja cookie cutters given to me as gifts last Christmas to achieved a boy-themed cake. 

I have tried many chocolate cake recipes in the past but none actually turned out ok or simple. A new recipe was chosen for the cake as it looked simple enough and has many good reviews - BBC Easy Chocolate Cake. It was indeed so easy to make apart from the chocolate icing - it was still too gooey and runny to lay fondant icing over it easily. 

 Here it is - a boy-themed birthday cake! 

The birthday boy seemed pleased with the cake and everyone kept on commenting on how tasty and moist the cake was. This easy chocolate recipe will be used over and over again. Very glad that the first order was well received :)

Sparkling Piggy

Le Cordon Blue Cake Decorating Programme 9 & 10 - Wedding cake project - the end of a small journey

The cake decorating programming was finally approaching to its end - thought this day would never come! We pretty much used the last three lessons of the course making more sugar flowers (I also spent a huge amount of my own time doing so at home - sleep was a scarce thing!), icing fruitcakes with marzipan and sugar paste, layering the cakes into three tiers and fully decorate the whole thing. Le Cordon Bleu also managed to squeeze in a cake business session to talk us through what is required to set up our own food business - they brought in an external lecturer who actually owned her own business to share with us her experiences. 

It actually felt like the whole world was against me while putting the cakes together. My knife skills was (and still is) not up to scratch and no matter what I did none of the cakes were perfectly level. The base cake was rather thin to begin with and after slicing the top off it became even thinner. Chef Matthew saw it and offered to gave me a spare one as replacement. Battling with marzipan and sugar paste became part of me and it took me longer than required to have all cakes fully iced. 

Stacking the cake was fun. Chef Julie talked us through why doweling a cake is very important for tiered cakes. Cutting the dowels was hard though - it felt like I was going to chop my fingers off at any moment! Unfortunately my cakes looked rather wobbly after being stacked so I had to keep on adding sugar paste to the bottom of the cakes until each tier is perfectly level.

I really enjoyed the last stage of the cake decoration - putting flowers on the cakes! I had made so many sugar flowers for me to decorate the cake in many ways.

This is supposed to be a magnolia (tutorial from pretty witty cake - https://www.prettywittycakes.co.uk/video-tutorials/fantasy-magnolia) but somehow it ended up looking like......just a random flower no one recognises

Blossoms and hydrangeas

Daisies

I was lucky enough to have the help from a Le Cordon Bleu student who volunteered to be the class assistance for the final lesson - she saved me a lot of time by smoothing my royal icing pearls after piping and gave me suggestions on how I should utilise my flowers. She actually wanted me to put less flowers on the cake but I did not want my flowers to go to waste. What I ended up with is a very girly and extremely flowery cake: 

I even had spare flowers to make into bouquets :) These spare flowers are now part of my living room decoration - result!

After chef Matthew's done taking pictures of everyone's cake, we then proceeded to another classroom for celebration and to get our programme certificate:

This is really one hard to acquire certificate!

I am simply relieved that the programme is fully over. It did indeed give you a nice insight on the cake decorating world but at the same time it was rather rushed. I was always running out of time to do something and felt that each topic could've been taught more thoroughly. To summarise, I felt that I've learnt a lot from the programme but at the same time nothing was learnt well. I would recommend anyone who wishes to take the programme to at least have some cake decorating related skills (e.g. at least have iced a cake with sugar paste to know what it is about and/or know how to use a palate knife well). Was it worth it? I cannot really say right now as I am still evaluating the usefulness of the programme - I am certainly baking and decorating more cakes then before though! Thank you so much to my friends and families for being my cake decorating business guinea pigs and said nothing but praises when tucking in ugly looking cakes - my baking passion is still going strong and I look forward to the day that I set up my own business :)

Sparkling Piggy

Le Cordon Blue Cake Decorating Programme 8 - Sugar Flower

So many ways of many sugar flowers were learnt today. Our chef (Julie) brought in a tray full of incredibly realistic flowers she made as examples:

 Chef Julie's sugar flowers - they are so pretty!

After demonstration we spent the rest of the lesson making flowers we will use for the final cake project of the course (tiered wedding cake). I proceeded to try and make at least 1 of each the demonstrated flowers but the results were horrifying. I could not get the size of my flower stamens correct - my lily had a really fat stamen and almost couldn't wrap the leaf around it; my rose stamens were commented on by chef Matthew for being.....again too big..........

Luckily by the end of the lesson I had an idea about the types of flowers to use for the final project - small daisies, hydrangeas and blossoms all in different colours. They are easier to make (not less time consuming though due to the number and size of them). I went home with some colourful small flower stamens and the very next day I visited a cake decorating shop and bought a bag full of petal paste, food colourings and flower press/moulds. Time to get sugar flower making! 

Time to get sugar flower making! 

Sparkling Piggy

First solo huge cake project - and transported it overseas!

Now that the cake decorating lesson is more than half way finished (4/10 lessons left), I've decided to make a huge cake as a visiting gift to friends in Greece. Fondant icing and I are still getting well acquainted but I am now getting my hands on every opportunity to practice using it.

The cake is Victoria sponge based again (it can never go wrong so I only had the decorating bit to worry about). As there was not enough time to acquire petal paste (or tylose powder to make petal paste using fondant icing), almost every decoration was done using fondant icing for the cake.

Making roses, leaves and the ribbon base using fondant icing was simply a crazy hard thing to do - things kept on breaking and I almost pulled all of my hair out. The end result is still a bit wonky with many flaws but at least it was sturdy enough to survive a plane journey from London to Athens (as carry-on luggage) and my friends in Greece all liked it very much.

Sparkling Piggy