Beetle Drive

Unfortunately I have been unable to access this blog due to a small registering-my-email-address-incorrectly-type-error and meanwhile my little cooking experiments have been stacking up, including lavender cakes and honeycomb. However, in response to the last comment I feel I should post a picture of the cake which Liz incorrectly describes as a Mini. 

Any fool can see it is a Beetle. Made for mine and the twin’s 18^th it was obviously made many moons ago and my icing looks decidedly shaky. I can’t help feeling it is rather like a combination of left over advertising brainstorming ideas for female car insurance and sanitary towels embodied in cake form. That said, digestives as wheels are always a winner and I was very young...

The Impressionist Cake

No not a Rory Bremner cake but a cake in the style of a Monet.  My dear and increasingly eccentric father has a thing about bridges (well before retiring to play golf he was an engineer) he also held an impressionist themed garden party last summer (more impressionist theme foodstuffs from that to follow...see here). So naturally the choice for his 65^th birthday was the Japanese bridge Monet style

I made the bridge from white chocolate (coloured green) and piped onto acetate.  I made it in three bits, two ‘c’ shaped edges and then tapped a piece of acetate into curve and piped a rectangle onto that to make the tread (with me so far?).  When all bits were solid I them glued them together with chocolate and voila a bridge, perched on blue icing.  And I very nearly didn’t have to explain to people what it was.

In the Night Garden

My two year old nephew was reported to be a fan of "in the night garden" and so I settled down to watch it with him in advance of making his birthday cake. For those of you that haven't seen it, it is wildly psychedelic with odd sequences of changing perspectives and a story line involving characters loosing their trousers on a mystery train tour. It must be one the reasons children can't buy mind altering drugs because they clearly don't need them with entertainment like this.

Anyhow based on the characters I made these cupcakes. The colours of the characters are rather muted which was due to me colouring the sugar paste with liquid food colouring. If there was a next time I'd buy ready-coloured icing to give a good bright colour, that way the figures would match the crazy story-lines.