Gumpaste figures

A teenager's favourite things

Today's post is gonna be a just drool post, no recipe or tutorial here, but an interesting one, nonetheless. Reason being -  I am down with a nasty cold and apart from wanting to chop my nose off a hundred times, I am hibernating on the couch, on the bed and anywhere else I can plop my tired lil body on. 


However, no cold is gonna, dag nabbit, there comes a trio of sneezes in quick succession. Back from sneezy land, as I was saying, no cold is gonna stop me from posting something today. Why? Cuz I am oh so happy. Something regarding my blog and bakes has made headway today, my first step and this calls for a celebration, at least in the blogosphere, where I can pretend my flu and cold don't exist :D  


So here's presenting to you, my dear readers, my first tryst with gum paste. A dear dear friend wanted to gift her teenage cousin a hat cake with figurines of all things a teenager loves. I had 3 days to come up with something and the nervous me, called as many bakers/decoraters as I could to get them to make the gum paste figurines. As luck would have it, no one could make them in such short notice. Thank god for that, I can safely say in hindsight now :). That led to me frantically call a local vendor and request a batch of gum paste, something that they don't sell. Thankfully they obliged and I set out on my experiment, fingers and toes crossed. I holed up in my room on a workstation and spent the entire day coming up with these lil cuties. With no fondant or gum paste tools whatsoever, I rummaged through the whole house, finding stuff that I could use instead of imprint mats, balling tools etc. Call me substitution queen I say :p


At the end of the day, sore fingers aside, I couldn't believe I made these. The blackberry esp, took me a loong time, what with those tiny lil buttons to make, not to forget the BB logo that I HAD to recreate with lil bits of gum paste that I almost needed a magnifying glass to spot. Glutton for punishment, that's me :)


Anywhoo, I left these figures to dry and whilst they dried, my heart swelled with pride every time someone ooh'd and aah's about them. They don't hold a candle to some of the awesome decorators I know, but I'm mighty glad with my first time effort. Why, I still can't believe I made them. The cake came out well too, but lets not steal the thunder from these beauties now shall we?


Tooting my own horn, ain't I? :) B'day girl loved them and ate them all in fascination. No better thanks than that I must say. Well, there you have it, my sneezes are getting the better of me, so that's ciao from me till my next post.


Till then, Get Set Bake peeps. 

Simple cupcake decoration

All you need is love

I love cupcakes, both baking/decorating and eating them. They offer you so much in terms of creativity and don't make you feel as guilty as eating huge slices of cake. Whats more, each cupcake can be decorated in a different way, with different flavours, making it so much more than a whole chunk of cake. Not to say that I don't love cake, but cupcakes sit just a teensy bit higher on my lust list than cake :p
Today, I'm gonna show you how you can tszuj up a cupcake in 3 easy steps:

1. Bake your cupcakes in your favourite flavours. 
2. Pipe butter cream icing/frosting on the top ( you can find the recipe for butter cream frosting here
3. Cut out hearts out of red fondant and place them on top. You could also make teeny roses from fondant and use them as 3-D toppers. Viola, you red heart cupcakes are ready.   

Go on, Get Set Bake them :) 

Mini ombre cakes

Ombre on my mind

Some time ago, I caught the ombre craze. For those in the dark, (I was too, until lately), ombre is a french word that means shaded, a graduation of a shade, from light to dark. This translated into cake language, means a cake with layers of different shades of one colour. I was eager to experiment and the results didn't disappoint me. I chose pink for this experiment but you can choose any colour under the rainbow. The possibilities are endless. Here's how you can create your own ombre mini cake. 

Ingredients:

• Recipe and ingredients of your favourite vanilla/yellowcake
• Round cookie cutters in your desired size
• Food colouring
• Buttercream icing

Method: 

• After you make your batter for the cake, divide it into three or four batches and add one drop of your desired food colouring to the first bowl, 2 drops to the second bowl and so on to get a graduated tint across the bowls.
• Now bake your cake in different pans for each colour.
• After the cake has cooled, take your cookie cutter and press into the cake, getting circles of each colour.
• Stack the colours on top of each other, going from light to dark, sandwiching them with a filling of butter cream frosting. I also sandwiched a dark slice between two light ones, so you can experiment as you please. 
• Pipe a swirl or a rose on the topmost layer and dig in.

So get set and bake it, it will be a crowd-pleaser for sure :)

Butterfly cake

Butterfly fly away

Fancy this for a lil one's b'day to make her day extra special :)

Black Sheep Cookies

Counting sheep?

I love decorating cookies. Till a while ago, cookies to me conjured up images of either standard cookie-shaped biscuits or plain round mounds of yummness, occasionally spattered with chocolate chips, fruits etc. But all that changed the day I discovered cookies decorated with royal icing. Soon I realised cookies can be a work of art by themselves. 
While mine are nowhere near art, yet, I do manage to have fun with them and hope to inspire you to do the same. I recently joined a group on FB that gets all 'black sheep' together in a forum. The ones who paved their own path, didn't go with the flow and followed their heart. Admit it, we all have a bit of a black sheep in us :) If you think you are a fellow black sheep, do join the group on FB here
For the very first meet (oh the stories and people, I felt more grey than black compared to some of the amazing people I met and their adventures :) ), I wanted to bake the members something. Any excuse to try and make something yum I tell you :)
I wanted to make cupcakes and decorate them as black sheep, but kept that for another day thanks to transport issues. So cookies they were and I came up with this:

Black beauties

 You can personalize your cookies any way you want. For instance, I used a basic sugar cookie recipe and baked the cookies. After that, all I did was flood the cookies in black Royal icing (recipe here) and then once it dried, I piped white dots on the edges and the lettering to commemorate the event. You need not be a piping expert for flooding and dots. The text requires a lil bit of practice, but if I can do it with no training whatsoever, so can you :)
Happy cookie decorating folks.