Minions Cake and Cupcakes

These are neat to make.  Lovely moist chocolate cupcake recipe with fondant and buttercream.  The larger cakes are chocolate cakes with buttercream and fondant.

Disney with some stars

Rainbow coloured Vanilla flavoured cake - it took three to make this big.  Vanilla buttercream for on the cake then all of the rest is fondant.

Cyclist Cake

Basic choc cake, buttercream icing and lots of fun making the figures and things with fondant.

Lightening McQueen #3 & Scooby Doo

I have used my standard choc cake recipe and piped with both Cremin and Buttercream. I think Scooby came out well. My grandson enjoyed the cake. for his 8th Birthday - yum

Fairy Cake

Well this was fun. Two tiered chocolate cake with buttercream then fondant. The grass is fondant as is everything else.  The leaves, stones, flowers, fairy tree house, pumpkin, toadstools etc.  I am wrapped with the colours and form for the most part.  I have made these small bits a few days earlier to enable time for them to dry, but even allowing for that, when I put the cake together this morning a few of my flowers simply fell apart.  The air is damp and even though I thought they had dried out sufficiently, I was wrong.  I need to prepare the fondant with hardener so that this doesn't happen again.  Unlike the fire truck and designs that require straight lines, you can get away with lack of perfection with flowers and leaves.  Hope you like this as much as I do.

Pink Lamington Cottage

 This simple cake was made from pink lamingtons and pink and white fondant moulded and cut into the shapes as you see them.  The flowers were kept in place with toothpicks. It was tasty and cute.

Fire Engine

This cake is made from two 30cm banana cakes - and it has a lot of fondant so is very heavy.  It was made for a man who is a volunteer fireman. I made the side silver patterned panels a few days ahead so that they could dry out and I also made the ladders, wheels, lights at the same time, but when the panels dried they started to bend a little, hence the sticky outy bits. If I had spent a lot more time with the straight edges it would have been so much better. I have a new job and finish work at 6.00pm in the evening so I am finding it harder to fit the cakes in around my busy days and spend the necessary amount of time to perfect such things as straight edges.  I will not be doing any cakes for a wee while after next weeks fairy cake as I am having a new kitchen fitted and we need to pretty much gut out the old one.  I am so excited, this will be my first ever proper new kitchen. yay.

Minion and Man U cake

This is my standard chocolate cake with vanilla butter cream and fondant.  The twist rope is just fondant as is the hand painted football too. The Man U crest is a sugar sheet and the minions are all made from fondant. They took a few hours to make, nice though in front of the fire listening to Coast FM, my favourite radio station.

Pink Pony/Unicorn

A lovely pink cake for a dear little four year old girl.  Vanilla flavoured cake with buttercream icing.  I am quite pleased with the end result.  Pushing the white fondant through an older style screw type garlic press to get the long even strands for the mane and tail hair. I did brush the whole pony with pearl lustre, you can't quite make it out on the pic.  I laughed out loud when I looked at these pics though as the unicorn horn should be up higher in the top mane hair not down on the nose like a rhino - fortunately the little girl was not too discerning.

Gasoline anyone?

This is a chocolate cake, my most popular recipe and flavour.  The picture on the left of the top cake is similar to the pump that wife Michelle and birthday boy Garry have bought to do up.  I think I might have a minor crush on Andrew at Cartridge World in Upper Hutt as he is so helpful and obliging with my orders.  I am really pleased with these sugar sheet images.  Michelle was thrilled to bits with this cake and I have to say that I was happy with the nice straight lines, good colour and finished product.
I received this really nice feedback;
My wife had the Texaco Pump made for my 50th Birthday by Tina, I just want to say this was one absolutely amazing cake, seriously, it blew me away. Detail was absolutely amazing & correct. The cake it'self was beautiful so not only did it look fantastic it tasted the same. I cannot recommend this seller highly enough. It was brought out to me in a resturant & even people around the resturant came over to admire it & commented on how amazing it was, so do not hesitate to use this lady at all.

JB for Nathan's 40th

This is my second Jim Beam bottle.  I used a sugar sheet for the throat and bottle labels, but I am a bit of a dick because I did not trim the front label properly and as you can see there is a double up of the lettering on the sides.  Other than the shape being a little off, it was ok and the customer was delighted.

Mother Goose

I had to make some Rice Krispie for the neck, first time for everything.  I had just over five cups of rices so modified the recipe to make it fit.

 

I used about 30gms of butter and melted in the saucepan over a low heat then added pink and white cheapy marshmallows - one packet, 100gms and mixed often till I got a smooth texture then added to the ricies.

 I moulded fairly quickly into the shape I wanted for the beak, head and neck.  I pushed down and rolled as firmly as I could to crush the ricies and try and get the smoothest possible finish.

I set the neck in the fridge and it became quite firm.  In order to get as snug and supported neck as possible I cut the cake away underneath the curve and it was reasonably stable.

 

I moulded the orange fondant onto the beak and left it to firm up a bit, but when I next checked the beak had fallen off, so, as the ricie mixture was still a little tacky I pushed the beak back on and added a skewer through the beak into the head to secure it and it was fine.

 

It took me literally hours to roll and cut the feathers with a metal petal cutter, but as I had several sizes, I thought they were ok.  The main criticism is that I rolled the fondant too thickly and consequently used heaps - two and a half packets.  The bird weighed a ton.  End result - pretty good, I think.

Trucking good design

Why oh why do I do this to myself??  I am just not that good at 'boy things'.  I am happy with the Foose design panel, that's because I devoted a lot of time to getting it as good as I could, there is one on the other side too.  The conditions were trying to say the least because the fondant stayed really tacky.  Oh well I suspect the recipient, a 40 year old truckie, was happy with it.  I have to say this chocolate cake recipe is a hit - so yummy.  The buttercream crumb coating was a bit light in colour, but it did the job.

Diamond Anniversary

I love this recipe - given to me by the lady who ordered the cake - Lemon cake with sour cream (and 12 eggs), taste delicious (I had a wee try of the batter before rinsing the bowl).  It was meant to be simple and elegant but I feel the finished cake missed the brief.  I should have enhanced the vine pattern, perhaps adding a couple more patterns so the cake doesn't look quite so 'empty'. I did not receive any feedback as yet and I do not know if the customer was happy or not. It's not terrible but certainly not stunning either - oh well - I pop that in the 'learning curve' box. (P.S Note to self - I must invest in a tilting turntable) it really is a mission to pipe on a virtual vertical angle.