You can't eat the G string!

- Pretend for a moment that it's Saturday, because that's when I wrote this -

One week ago, I had zero plans for making any cakes (which pleased my husband). No one had yet booked me in for their special loved one's birthday cake, and it was a somewhat nice feeling having a free diary (though it did look a bit boring)!

Well, within a couple of days of that thought, I received the request for a train cake, and then late Thursday afternoon, my husband says to me: "Hey, it's Tristan's birthday next week, and this Saturday will be the last Redwoods practice before it... Do you think you can quickly come up with a guitar cake or something? I've already told the guys I'd bring cake."

Pfft. Do I think I can come up with a guitar cake?? Baby, I know I can. Consider it done.

And this is how I did it.

With 8" and 6" chocolate cakes (and a knife), I made the shape of a guitar. I'd made a rectangle from the part cut out of the bigger circle cake for the neck, but didn't end up using it:

I bought some 'caramel brown' colouring paste from my local cake shop, hoping that I could add a little bit (to white fondant) to make the body colour, and a lot to make the neck colour.

N.B. When you're covering a guitar cake with fondant, it doesn't matter if all the colour doesn't mix through evenly - it actually gives it a really nice look if it doesn't! :)

For the neck, pretty much because it's really tricky to cover little bits of cake with fondant (discovered when covering the head of the lady beetle cake), I used a Tim Tam. With a skewer, a small hole was made in the delightfully delicious little chocolate biscuit, and then pushed through until almost the other side (of the biscuit), and poked into the side of the cake!

I cheated a little with the next bit. With small white fondant circles, and wire, I made the strings for the guitar. I stuck them onto a strip of darker caramel brown fondant, which I also used to add some decoration onto the guitar later.

The final touches were black dots on the string plug things, and the tuning pegs (which were white circles painted silver, and stuck into the Tim Tam with wire). I'd cut the wire to match up to where the tuning pegs were, and it was about that time when I looked across at the guitar I'd been referring to the whole time, to notice that the neck should actually come all the way down to the sound hole... Oops!

My oldest son exclaimed that it looked really awesome (when I showed him in the morning), but that next time I should make the guitar bit smaller so that I could make a whole guitar... Thanks mate.

Nevertheless, my husband was impressed... And so was the band :)

Here's the birthday boy playing his (disproportionate) guitar cake:

Happy birthday Tristan! Rock on!

I choo choo choose you!

Is it strange that when we (because surely I'm not the only one) think of drawing trains, we naturally lean towards the cartoon version? And when we're asked "what noise does a train make?" the answers tend to be "toot toot" or "chugga chugga" (or both); then we make motions with our arms, and pretend to pull on the cord that somehow makes the tooting sound?

If you have kids and watch Play School, then you'd certainly do that!

I was asked this week to make a train cake for a little boy's birthday. I wasn't sure where to start with this cake, but I knew it was going to be cartoon-style... So, I started with a cartoon setting: Blue sky, and green hills. I knew that I was going to make steam 'clouds' getting bigger and bigger, come out from the train (a lot easier to draw cartoon-style as well), so made those out of flower cutters, and then just with a knife for the biggest steam cloud:

With red, yellow, and orange fondant, I had the colours of the train ready. With a rectangle cookie cutter, I cut them out, and lined them up on the cake, on top of Cadbury Milk Chocolate Melts that I used for the train's wheels :)

Using left over fondant rectangles, the front driver's carriage and smoke stack were added, and the cake was looking so bright and colourful! I had an idea that the train could be coming out of a tunnel, so I added a black arch around the cake to represent this (which I'm not sure actually worked all that well)...

The final touches were painting birthday wishes into the 'steam' and adding some birds (yes, that's what they're meant to be) randomly into the 'sky'. After that, I glued some purple flowers in between the front of the train and the 'tunnel', just to fill in the big gap that was there.

And the train cake was finished!
(though it took a lot longer than it appears)

If I was to do this again, I would take out the tunnel, and add a couple more carriages to the train instead. I may even attempt to make a train track out of Kit Kats or licorice or something around the cake board... Nevertheless, I loved the brightness of this cake, as well as the cartoon style of it, and I really, really enjoyed making it and seeing it develop, even as the wee hours of the morning ticked on!

Happy birthday Slade! Toot tooooot!

Giant. Cupcake. SMASH!

Before this week, I had never heard of a 'Cake Smash' (though I've certainly experienced many times my children have smashed cakes unexpectedly)... But to make a cake for the sole purpose of asking a child to go nuts with it? Sounds like the perfect scene for a photo shoot!

This is exactly what this cake was made for. To be smashed and splattered everywhere by a toddler, being photographed the whole time...

Well, before it was smashed and smothered over clothes and walls and the carpet, it needed to be made! And I was privileged to be the one making it!

The theme was purple, pink and white... With butterflies.

I prepared a white chocolate giant patty case, the same way I did for the EOFY cupcake, and also this one, but the white chocolate one didn't work out as well as I had hoped! It set really thin (I think that by the time it had set, so much had drizzled down to the bottom to make a really thick bottom, but thin, flimsy sides), so, it cracked when I tried to separate it from the silicone base! Ohhh man! It was the night before the cake needed to be ready by the morning, and so I quickly asked my friend (who I was making it for) if she would be okay with the base not made out of chocolate, and made, perhaps, out of fondant. Thankfully, she was fine with that!

The fondant method was pretty simple. I turned the cupcake base upside down and covered it as I would any other cake. I kept a couple of centimetres around the edge so that I could fold it on top... With a finger, I slid up and down the waves in the side, so that the 'patty case' kept its shape:

I attached the top part of the cupcake, and started piping purple and pink roses around... It was about 3 roses later that I remembered that I needed an entire layer of buttercream icing on the cake first before I piped, so spread those roses around the top of the cake, and started again.

From the bottom, swirly, twirly;

One by one, pink and purply:

Once the roses were done, and the gaps were filled, I took some tasty little silver balls of sugar (aka cachous) and aimed them randomly at the cake - from all possible angles... I sprinkled, pegged, and pretended to be a famous giant basketball player, shooting them from the other side of the kitchen as if this cake was the hoop... You know, just to add a bit of glamour.

Enter my husband, who almost slides across the floor like Marv on green paint* because most of them missed, BUT, these were the ones that stuck:

Earlier, I'd made some light pink and purple butterflies that I pushed a stencil into to create pretty patterns on their wings, and thenfolded them over a bowl to set... They were placed ever so carefully onto the cake (covering the most dodgy parts, sshhh), and then with sugar glue, some were randomly glued to the base of the cupcake as well:

And now for a couple of photos from the actual shoot!

What a sweet little lady. Barely made a mess by the look of it! :)

Happy birthday Sophie!

* Home Alone 2 reference.

It's always a scary time!

School holidays. The perfect time to take your children out to see a movie at the cinemas. Well, it was a cold, Wintery Sunday night, the end of yet another busy weekend, and we went and saw Monsters University.

I've recently wanted to practice making coloured chocolate for cake pops (well, that's my excuse anyway), and what better time to practice than when you're about to go out and see a movie, right!

So I made some Monsters University cake pops!

... Okay, that's a lie. I wanted to make these,

but all I managed to make were cake flops :(

It just so happens that when you colour white chocolate, you need special colours that aren't water based (annoyingly)... I thought I had the system right when I made the Smurf head cake pops, but turns out I had this false sense of confidence that was quite clearly shattered tonight.

Mike Wazowski.

He had fondant for his eye, and tic tacs for his horns, but he lacked the shine and smoothness that he has on screen that he would have had if the chocolate didn't turn dodgy...

What... What did you do to my face?

With this big chocolate fail, I didn't even bother adding a smile to his head, or trying it again to make 'Sully'. So we went out to the movies without thematic cake pops to eat...

And it was still a great movie even without cake pops - we all loved it :) Even Jonathan, who spent the second half of the movie climbing over the chairs and practicing being stealthy...

It then (in the middle of the night, as it usually does) occurred to me that perhaps I used the wrong chocolate?! With the Smurf heads, I remembered that I used white chocolate melts... And with these ones - I used white baking chocolate. There's got to be a difference.

Well, there's clearly only one way to test this theory ;)

So after cleaning up the mess that these first attempt produced, I was ready for take two, aaaaand ACTION.

N.B. When melting chocolate - do NOT use bowls that heat up too much and burn your fingers when you take them out of the microwave... I learnt this from, uh,  a friend of a friend of mine. It hurts! And the chocolate goes weird because of it. Make sure you use a microwave-safe bowl, or heck - even a Pyrex measuring cup.

This time, the melts worked fine (ish), but with the colour, it was still a little bit chunky... The result s then, were almost the same, but I was able to make a few more cake pops... And because it takes ages for white chocolate to set, I forgot to come back after a few minutes to put the tic tac horns on... Oops!

This version of Mike Wazowski, though he has a mouth, looks even scarier (and not in the funny animated movie kind of way) than the first version! :(

AAAHHHHH!! You're just making it worse!!

I was  flattered that my children could still make out who it was supposed to be... Actually, that's another lie. I wasn't flattered at all... What else is round, green, has one eye, two horns, and is related to a movie we all just went and saw? They are lovely kids, though, and always tell me that the things that I make look amazing and beautiful, and that they taste delicious...

Hmm. Perhaps that's where my false sense of confidence stems from?

Either way, I think I might just stick with making plain white cake pops like these ones for now...

One cupcake to rule them all...

Cupcakes. A love of cupcakes so great that you wish you lived next door to Wayne Szalinski, in hopes that you could bring one over, and he would zap it with his whacky-doo-wham-bam machine making it it enormous, just as he accidentally did to his baby...

Well, obviously someone had a love of cupcakes similar to this, and subsequently invented these (which makes me wonder if they'd feel less guilty still eating 'just one cupcake'):

It is with this rubbery contraption that I made the EOFY cake, and also the cake I'm about to write about now - A giant cupcake for a girl who has just turned the milestone double digit age of 10 :)

It started out much the same. An ordinary day, filled with enormous amounts of flour, sugar, butter, and chocolate waiting to be melted and moulded into the perfect shape... The shape of a giant patty case, of course. Though this time, there were two colours of chocolate ready to be melted, to make a stripy chocolate patty case for the giant cupcake. White chocolate stripes first, and then milk chocolate to cover the rest of it.

The instructions for this cake were specific, from colour, to flavour, to decorations. As much as I enjoyed the creative freedom that I had for the purple cake, it was refreshing to know exactly what the birthday girl wanted. Which was: the icing colours of the bottom two cakes, mixed together like the top right cake, into piped rosettes like the bottom cakes, chocolate hearts like the bottom right, and red heart sticks like the top left        ->

I know... I checked, and double-checked, and quadruple-checked just to make sure that I knew what I was to make! But once I did, I got to work.

With the cake made and inside it's striped chocolate case (and then in the silicone base for support), I had the chocolate and white icings made and ready to pipe. It was time to get decorating!

My kitchen: where giant cupcake memories are made.

I filled in the blanks with some more icing, as I am still new to piping giant rosettes:

For the chocolate hearts, I knew that my moulds were too big, so this took me a little while to work out how to make them... I ended up melting chocolate and spread it out onto baking paper. When it had dried a little, I took a little metal heart cutter, and cut out hearts until my heart was content (and until the chocolate was all gone). Then repeated this with white chocolate.

The icing was piped, and the chocolate hearts were placed around the cake (great for covering up mistakes). The revealing of the chocolate patty case was next.

I tied some ribbon around it (an added extra for prettiness, but also for support so that the case doesn't crack under the weight of the cake). I had heaps of chocolate hearts left over, which I decided to place around the cake board for presentation (well, the ones that my youngest son didn't get to first):

The final touch for the cake were the red fondant hearts on top. I chose to stick 10 in, pretty much because the birthday girl was 10 :)

I was really happy with this cake, and though I could only imagine what it was going to look like, it was especially wonderful knowing that I had made it exactly how the birthday girl had imagined it would look like as well.

Happy birthday Emily!!

"Purple"

Freedom. noun.

The state of being free; exemption from control.

The power to determine action without restraint.

Purple. noun, adjective, verb.

A colour having components of both red and blue.

The only word I was given as instructions to make a cake.

My good friend had asked me to make a cake for her daughter's 11th birthday, and I was specifically told that I had creative freedom to make whatever I wanted, with the only exception that it had to be purple.

Too much creative freedom?? I had so many ideas... And so did Google! But I had to narrow my ideas down to just one style... Which was incredibly difficult, especially when I kept adding new ideas to the list that was already very long.

After changing my mind a thousand times, I knew that I just had to start. Perhaps the final idea will come to me as I go along (as it did).

So I made and iced a cake. Chocolate cake, on top of purple cake, on top of more chocolate cake, spread with purple buttercream icing, and entirely covered by a layer of purple fondant:

So far so good!

I chose a shape (circle), and stuck with it, cutting out different sizes of different shades of purple (and white) fondant, getting so caught up in what I was doing, I forgot to take progress photos... So the cake suddenly went from a plain purple covered cake that I wasn't sure what to do with next...

... To a purple cake with white and purple spots all over it:

I had left the top of the cake blank, knowing that I wanted some kind of fondant ribbon arranged on top. Which I had to narrow down the many ideas for, also.

But ended up with this:

It was almost finished! I added the number 11 to some wire, so that it could stick out. I put a dark purple circle in the middle of the ribbon, which the numbers would stick out of... But something was missing... So I decided that the final touch of this cake would be purple spiral streamer-like fondant decorations bursting from the centre.

Ta-da! A purple, circle, purple, chocolate, purple 11th birthday cake :)

Happy Birthday Jessica!!

Trust. Follow. Pray. Hope. Peace. Faith. Love.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.

... But the greatest of these is love.

- 1 Corinthians 13:13

I've currently been teaching the children's segment at Ropes Crossing Church. We've been learning about many things like praying, loving our enemies, showing kindness to one another, and following Jesus.

I really enjoy teaching the kids, and always spend far too much (but necessary) time organising, preparing, and creating lesson plans, activities, crafts, and stories. I'm not one of those people (like my husband is) who can improvise an entire 45 minute lesson with just 5 minutes preparation time!!

I've also made thematic shortbread biscuits for church morning tea, and with royal icing, wrote simple words that have a deeper meaning for Christians :)

No matter where we are in our walk with Christ, it's always important to be reminded and encouraged in life (and to also occasionally be the one reminding and encouraging).

"Hand it over to God. Trust in His sovereignty. Pray about it." As much as these biscuits were originally for the children to be reminded about the character of God, I wanted the adults to also be reminded of the unity and peace we have through Christ.

Do not worry about anything, but pray about everything.

With thankful hearts, offer up your prayers and requests to God.

Then, because you belong to Christ Jesus,

God will bless you with peace that no one can completely understand.

And this peace will control the way you think and feel.

- Philippians 4:6-7

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

and lean not on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge Him,

and he will make your paths straight.

- Proverbs 3:5-6

I am not ashamed of the gospel,

for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

- Romans 1:16

In Christ alone, my hope is found :)