Birthday Cake and Eeyore!

Last week I made a birthday cake for my sister in law, Kirsten, who requested a cake that looked the same as one I'd made for a work colleague earlier in the year. I like it when people ask me this, it's so much easier than trying to think of a design myself as that's not really my strong point!!

Anyway I made a 9" victoria sponge cake, filled with buttercream and jam, covered in white icing and decorated with lots of sugarpaste flowers in a variety of colours, with painted vines intertwining everything.



I still need to perfect cutting the cake in half and remembering to put it back together at the exact same point. This cake did have a little slant to it, but I managed to avoid using those photos haha. To be honest, it wasn't that obvious, I didn't even notice it until I looked at the photographs. But it's all a learning curve and I'm sure it's something I'll improve on (fingers crossed!).

Also just wanted to give a quick update on the cake class. We did cartoon modelling the other week and we made an Eeyore figure! I was so excited when I knew we'd be doing Eeyore - he's such a cute character that I feel sorry for, he just needs a hug. We also learned all about copyright and how when copying a character we need to change some small detail on it so that the owners of the character won't sue us! Good to know! Lol. We didn't have to change anything in the class though as it wasn't being sold. but i changed the colour of the inside bit of his ears to lilac from pink just to be sure! lol. He was quite difficult to make but hopefully should I make another one or another character, I've at least got a grounding in it now.

Cake decorating update

 I have been rushed off my feet for the last couple of weeks with barely any time to breathe, let alone update my blogs :-( But on the upside, all this rushing around has been because of cake-y things which I suppose can never be bad.


My last post stated that I had 11 orders for those Easter egg novelties with 10 to do over that weekend. Well between that blog post and Easter itself, the number shot up to 26! How amazing is that? Not sure how, but I managed to get them all done and dusted for when everyone needed them (luckily a couple weren't needed until after Easter).

Once they had been completed, I had a fruit cake to decorate which I'd made in February for Easter. I covered the cake in marzipan and yellow icing (a nice Easterish colour) and then decorated it with marzipan flowers and a chick - oh and some mini eggs! Yum!


I have also been lucky enough to have had more cake requests - the first one I received was for a 21st birthday cake for a work colleague's daughter, which luckily will involve copying a cake rather than designing one! This cake isn't needed until July however. Another work colleague who sits next to me then asked me if I could do her a 2 tier mock up of a wedding cake as she was having a Royal Wedding party at her house. I was shocked that she asked me and it sounded extremely daunting, especially as we hadn't done anything in class yet on tiers - but it just so happened that our class the following day was going to be about assembling tiered cakes!



Once I'd been along and had seen how it was done, I felt a bit better and she found a picture of a cake she wanted me to do, which had a nice simple design of white daisies on it - but she wanted red, white and blue patriotic daisies :) She also wanted the bottom layer to be chocolate cake and the top layer to be a victoria sponge cake.

I spent much time beforehand gathering all the supplies I needed (and even took a jaunt to Windsors cake shop in Warrington, which has everything you could want! Quite dangerous to shop there lol. http://www.windsorcakecraft.co.uk/) and then I spent all of Tuesday baking and decorating (with a viewing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 while the cakes cooled!). I'm pretty happy with how the cakes turned out and even happier that it was my first paid cake job! In honour of my excitement regarding this, I have created a Facebook page called Catherine's Cakes - just do a search on there and you should find me.

My next task is a birthday cake for my sister in law who liked a previous design I have done, and this is needed for next Saturday. Following on from that I've been asked to do 12 cupcakes (6 lemon and 6 vanilla) for my friend's daughter's communion on 14th May, and then I have another one to do which I won't mention on here in case the recipient reads it, followed then by a request for a retirement/60th birthday cake for October. It's all very exciting.