Practicing Sugar Craft

Pretty In Pink

  

Right after I went shopping for some new cake decorating bits, I baked some lemon biscuits using a recipe from BBC GoodFood. The recipe uses lemon curd in between two discs of dough and they tasted delicious! However, they weren't flat enough for me to practice icing, so I baked some without lemon curd in the middle.

I practiced mixing sugar paste and getting different colours together. I really liked the pale vintage colours I managed to mix up, this was easy to do with a large amount of white sugar paste! I used various cutters, but as you can see my favourite cutter was the butterfly one, I think I will buy some flower cutters next! Sugar paste is very easy to work with and I can see why lots of bakers use it, but I also want to practice the harder aspects of cake decorating.

I made up some royal icing using SliverSpoon powder (add water and whisk). I then copied a pattern from a book my mum gave me and pin pricked it onto the sugar paste base. Then I carefully iced on the butterfly onto the biscuit.

I really love how this one turned out! It did take me a while to do and its not perfect, but its a start!













I also practiced making sugar paste roses, this took me a while to achieve! I watched several different videos on YouTube but settled on one which uses a simple method of rolling out a tube of sugar paste, flattening it and then making petals with your finger. You then just roll up the flattened tube and pull out the petals!

Next time I am going to bake some double chocolate chip cookies and practice more icing techniques!

Thanks for reading!

Beginner Baking Set

Generosity

I visited my parents at the weekend and mentioned to my mum that I was practicing baking and getting more and more interested in it. She then gave me a massive pile of books she has collected over the years. She used to make cakes for me and my brothers when we were younger.

Some of these books are really old (the green one on the top of this pile is my late grandma's!) but they still have so many useful tips and provide great inspiration! My mum also gave me some molding and pressing equipment for sugar paste, so expect some new creations soon!

Shopping!

Today me and my boyfriend went to the local bakery/baking shop SweetSuccess. It smelt so amazing when we walked in! Hmmm I just wanted to eat cake! So I wandered round, amazed at all the things you could buy for a good hour or so! I picked up some white sugar paste, gingerbread men sprinkles, star and heart sprinkles, edible shimmer, a butterfly cutter and shape cutters and some pearl/silver balls. My boyfriend was kind enough to offer to pay for all of these! I was well chuffed! :)

Lets get baking!!

Halloween Bakes

Halloween Cupcakes

So I had a lot of time to spare a few days ago and thus, thought baking some cupcakes would be the best way to spend my time! I popped into Lakeland and purchased my first icing set, with all the different nozzles and got creative with different icing techniques.

The cupcakes themselves were made using a very simple lemon sponge recipe. I used lemon butter cream for the piped icing and the rolled icing is shop bought (purchased from Lakeland a few months ago).

I looked online for inspiration for a few different Halloween themes. These two cupcakes are just simply orange and orange and yellow pipped butter cream with different sprinkles on.









I made these cupcakes using the 'grass' nozzle that came in my kit and just halved some rich tea fingers for the grave stones.

These were my favourite!

The base of these cupcakes were made from mixing shop bought rolled icing/sugar paste. Then I just iced the spider designs on top in black butter cream.










These two were made with rolled icing bases and black butter cream icing. I kind of just free-styled these ones! 









 

Graveyard Cake

I made this cake from a recipe from BBC GoodFood, however, I didn't have a large enough tin, so I used two smaller tins and just sandwiched the two layers together with a white chocolate butter cream. I really enjoyed making the cake, but it was a bit of a challenge for me, as there's lots of different processes in order to get the end result.

The cake didn't turn out how I wanted it to look but it still tasted great! My little ghosts were supposed to be meringue but had to be iced instead (hence why they look a bit sad). I did (after many attempts) actually make some meringue but they went all soft and sticky. I heard this happens if its a humid/damp day outside, and this is Britain, so it was naturally raining! 

The gravestones are chocolate covered rich tea fingers and iced with (runny) white icing. And the soil is double chocolate chip cookie crumbs (some cookies didn't make it to this process).

Next time I try this one I think I might use a different chocolate cake recipe, as it was very dry. And I would probably make the meringues and cake one day and decorate it the next, as it took a long time to make. :)