Mum's 60th Birthday Cake

I made this cake for my mum's 60th Birthday. I wasn't sure of a complete design when I started it but I decided on yellow butterflies and roses. It was a fruit cake (10 inch) covered in marizpan and then roll out icing. I made the roses out of sugarpaste and the butterflies out of flower paste.

I'm not sure how I managed to carry this cake all the way from London to Preston on the underground, train and then car but somehow I managed to get it their in one piece with all the butterflies attached.


My mum loved it and i'm so pleased she did! She really deserved a special birthday and we had a lovely 'country living' style outdoor garden party! Happy Birthday mum!

Sugar flowers

I made these sugarcraft flowers to decorate my cupcakes and practice my piping bag skills. They are so easy to make but you will need a piping bag with a star nozzle (sizes 12, 8 and 5 should all work well). When creating any patterns with an icing bag you need to make sure that your icing is thick enough so that it will hold its shape when piped. Bear in mind though that if it's too thick it won't squeeze through the tube properly.

To make royal icing you need:

2 egg whites

1ml (1/4 teaspoon) lemon juice

500g icing sugar, sieved

5ml (1 teaspoon) glycerine

First measure out the lemon juice and add it into a bowl with the egg whites. Sift some of the icing sugar into the bowl and mix using a wooden spoon. Stir in more icing sugar until it is of a thick consistency and then beat well. Keep adding more icing sugar until the mixture is thick and will create a sharp peak when you lift the wooden spoon out of the bowl. Then simply add any colouring you wish and spoon it into your piping bag and away you go!

More cupcakes

I thought I would post up the rest of my cupcakes for you to look at. I made these when I made the flower ones below. These i decorated with silver balls and home-made icing flowers. I've been practising with my piping bag lots recently and I made them by simply using a flower nozzle tube and leaving them to dry over night. They are so easy to make! The difficulty is removing them from the grease-proof paper without breaking them as you can imagine they are extremely delicate!

I just can't express my joy at finally getting the intenet, i've been wanting it for so long now and it's makes life so much simpler and easy. I can log-in whenever I like now! It does mean that i'm slowly getting addicted to facebook but oh well!

I also sprinkled some coloured sugar on them too to add extra effect. Yum yum! I just can't resist a nice cupcake! Pure childish bliss!

Cupcakes for a princess

I'm so happy because as of this morning I now have the internet! Which means I can keep up to date with my blog more and read everyone's blogs that I so love on a daily basis! Woo-hoo! Since I moved here I've beeen going to the library to use the internet (we live next door to one!) but this is so much better! We've even got a brand new spanking desk to work from too so I'm very happy today! Ages ago I bought this beautiful cupcake book called 'The Crabapple bakery cupcake book' but once I had got it home I realized that all the measurements were indeed in Austrailian cups. So I thougt I couldn't use it but now I have a cup I finally got around to trying it out. The recipes are not very simple but I have got the hang of it now! And I've learnt two really great tips for cake baking! One is that is your butter is too hard (i.e. you forgot to take it out of the fridge!) then put it in the microwave for 5 seconds at a time to warm it up. Secondly, if the recipe requires milk (which it did) warm that up in the microwave too as cold milk will cause the mixture to shrink and may result in a tough cake!

I've also been busy trying out the art of sugarcraft. I have found some great sugarcraft books in charity shops and made the roses for the cupcakes using pink sugarpaste. I will try and put a step by step guide on how to make them on my blog soon!