Created Creatively: Back in (Blue & Green) Business!

In what seems just a faint memory now, my husband and I have indeed arrived back in Australia from our little vacation in America!

We had a fantastic two weeks abroad without our children, and then one week at our family's farm with them. It was an amazing holiday. My husband did an excellent job organising everything to fine detail,

and we can't wait to do it again (... eventually)!

But, we'll probably take our kids with us next time ;)

While I work on the post about the holiday, 3 weeks without baking was a long time, and so I seemed to have dived head first (which is the best way to dive, really) back into the baking scene without hesitation!

Today at Ropes Crossing Church, we celebrated our 2nd birthday, marking 2 years since we've been meeting inside a building... So I made some cakes :)

This actually was a first for me - because I usually make cupcakes! This time I decided to try and make a big square cake... Which then turned into two big square cakes. I had this idea on the aeroplane on the way back from America (as you do), and visualised exactly what I wanted it/them to look like. A blue and green marbled cake (similar to what I made for church's first birthday), covered with white fondant, and then the RCC logo made with M n M's on top! Brilliant, right? Sadly, this amazing idea didn't come to me while we were walking around M n M's World just a few days prior, which had an entire wall of different coloured M n M's that I could have gotten just the colours I needed from!

Thankfully, my husband separated the M n M's packet that we did get into

the colours that I needed, and the colours that I didn't...

To remind you again of the church logo:

With a dodgy attempt at cake #1, I'd worked out how much batter I needed, and that it took approx. 1 hour and 15 minutes to bake each cake. To make things a bit 'simpler', I made one cake green, and one blue (rather than trying to marble them both).

I had never covered a cake with fondant before - I'd only watched it on YouTube and thought that it looked fairly straight forward... And it was, really. I measured the cake including the sides to see how big I needed to roll the fondant, then marked the spots on my bench top with sticky tape in each corner, and then drew a big dot on the tape with permanent marker. I covered the cakes with a thin layer of buttercream icing, and then carefully placed the rolled fondant on top and smoothed it out. Sure, there were a few rough patches and uneven parts, but I knew that the M n M's would cover those anyway! :)

I was so excited that this idea for the top of the cake was going to work! After practicing with the layout, I piped some melted chocolate to the cake so that the M n M's would stick... Using a mixture of normal sized, and mini ones, I did my best to re-create the church logo.

Afterwards, looking at so much white left on the cakes, I added a thick ribbon of coloured fondant around the base of each cake (blue around the blue cake, and green around the green).

I was very happy with the results from my first go at making a big cake and covering it with fondant! Sure, it took 3 times as long in the oven, but I thought they turned out well, and with the compliments of how nice they both looked and tasted, I didn't want to tell anyone that I used packet mix from ALDI... But now that the celebration is over, I can share that secret :)