AWOL again!!

I'm so sorry - I have totally been neglecting the blog but Lydia and I went skiing last week, so obviously havent been making too many cakes!!

We had an awesome week - here is a picture of us on the top of the mountain!

Check out Lyd's bunny ears on her helmet!

I promise I will be baking again soon!!

Back in the game!

Ive finally managed to unpack some of my baking stuff after the house move, so thought I would experiment with a new recipe!

Ever since I made the cakepops for my friend's party, I have been wondering about other possible flavours that I could do - white cholocate and raspberry is a classic combination so I thought I would start with that!

I made a vanilla sponge cake with raspberry jam mixed into the mixture at the end, then also flavoured my buttercream icing with raspberry flavouring and dipped them in white chocolate.

I thought they were maybe a bit too sickly sweet but they were well received at work, so it must just be me!

Another successful experiment!!

Its official, cupcakes are good for you!

...well, kind of!

Eve Appeal raises money for a variety of cancers that affect women and March is Ovarian Cancer awareness month. They are encouraging people to hold a tea party in March to raise money for Ovarian Cancer research, which seems like the ideal opportunity to combine cakes and feeling good about yourself!

If you are interested, go to their website, http://www.eveappeal.org.uk/, and register for your Tea Pack!

Sweethings gone AWOL...

Sorry for the lack of posting in the last week but I have been moving house! My cake tins have been packed in boxes for the past week, so havent been able to bake anything!

I will need to test out the oven at my new house, so dont worry, I will be back soon with some photos of our latest sweet treats!

Cake pops - well, our version anyway...

So, the latest craze in America seems to be for Cake Pops, which are basically little balls of mashed up cake and icing dipped in chocolate and presented on a stick - hence the 'pop'! Yum, yum!

Anyway, my friend was having a party so I thought I would give them a try - although I tested them out on everyone at work first, just to make sure they were up to scratch. They are very willing volunteers!

 I didnt really like the idea of putting them on sticks and thought they would be more difficult to transport etc so I made them more like truffles?

Here are some pics of the finished articles - I used mini muffin cases to put them in so people could pic them up at the party - they went down an absolute storm!!

The ones with multicoloured sprinkles on were vanilla sponge and vanilla buttercream dipped in milk chocolate and the ones with chocolate sprinkles on were chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream dipped in milk chocolate.

I'm thinking of making a vanilla sponge and raspberry version and dipping them in white chocolate - watch this space for more pictures!

Past projects

As Rachel (http://www.rayisgoodforyou.blogspot.com/) has only just opened by eyes to the world of blogging, I thought I would put up a couple of photos of some past projects!

Dad's Retirement Party

The picture for this isnt that great, but thought it was worth putting it up to give an idea of what we created. We made lemon cupcakes (vanilla sponge and lemon creamcheese icing), raspberry cupcakes (vanilla sponge with fresh raspberry centre and fresh raspberry cream cheese icing) and chocolate cupcakes.

We also made some plain vanilla sponge with royal icing decorations spelling out Happy Retirement!

We made flags to go in some of the cakes saying 'Happy Retirement' - they were a really effective way to decorate the cakes and make them look a bit more special!

The table looked amazing and everyone thought the cakes were delicious, particularly the raspberry ones!

Rachel's Birthday

Everyone thought they looked and tasted amazing, so they seemed to be a success. Now I'm just going to have to think of what to do for her next birthday to top this!

One of my best friend's has a thing about all things cow print - not really sure how this came about but now we try to find the best cow related birthday and christmas presents that we can find!

Last year, we went on a birthday camping trip and I decided that I would see if I could create Cow Cupcakes - the results were better than I could ever have expected - although it took me forever!

Wedding Cakes!

Our biggest cupcake project so far was actually my wedding last year - I was horrified at the cost of getting a wedding cake (along with a lot of other wedding related stuff) so we decided to experiment with what we could do ourselves! This was our first attempt:

The cakes were plain vanilla flavour, decorated with lemon cream cheese icing and icing sugar flowers. We didnt expect our first attempt to turn out so well, but they looked awesome! The only problem was that we would need to make about 120 cupcakes and 840 flowers!!

My mum and me spent a couple of hours a few days before the wedding making the icing flowers - it took ages, but was worth the effort in the end. As you can see my kitchen table was completely covered!

The day before the wedding, I was pretty busy decorating the hall and generally getting stuff ready and Lydia was left with the task of making the cupcakes and decorating them. It was a pretty mammoth task but she managed and the results were amazing.

We made our own cake stand from silver cake boards and silver card and I bought a small ready iced sponge cake for the top tier so we would have something to cut on the day. We decorated it with a hydrangea which were the flowers on all the tables at the reception.

Our photographer, Rhys Baker from Vivid Impact Photography, was amazing and his photos of the cakes made them look even better. There werent many left over at the end of the night so they must have been tasty!