We were asked to make a Guinness cake, in the shape of a wooden keg, it sounded like fun and let us try out new recipes to get it right! In the end we settled on the Nigella Lawson Guinness and chocolate cake, it was rich and flavourful, a definite winner! With the cream cheese icing to balance it it was wonderful!

We didn’t want to do a full keg, but it ended up being more of a half-a-keg, I guess it was a 3/4 keg! We stacked 6 layers and then carved the sides.

To create the wood effect we marbled the fondant, and then scored in the graining. The sides were all done as individual planks, the top as one circle.

I took a look at actual Guinness kegs, but they looked pretty boring, so I took some artistic license. Two metal bands at the top and one at the bottom (if it was a full keg it would have had two) and then a plaque with the Guinness logo on it.

Our good friends at the Austin Astronomical Society once more got their holiday party cake from us. It’s such a pleasure to get repeat customers like this, although it does mean we have to constantly strive to top last year’s cake!

As before, they had a butter cake with our English buttercream, a nice simple flavour that’s a crowd pleaser.

Before covering the cake we took a melon baller and an ice cream scoop to create some larger craters. Then once it was covered in fondant we added some smaller craters with a balling tool. We pinched the fondant up to create a ridge around a couple of the larger craters.

A blast with the airbrush filled in some shadows, and spread a thin sheen of luster over the entire cake.

.. I feel like I need to photoshop an alien into one of these photos!

So, I know I’m about a week late in posting a Halloween cake, but lets just ignore that and carry on shall we?

This cake was a personal one, I made it for our Halloween party which is always a good time to test out recipes on our guinea pigs *ahem* friends! I initially had huge plans for an extravagant cake, as I do, but time, money and home renovations nixed that idea.. I’m not going to say what it was since I now intend to do it next year. So there was last minute brainstorming as I just could not decide how to decorate my cake.

Cupcakes were an initial idea since we had found some skull sprinkles that I really wanted to use, but since cupcakes dry out so quickly I likely would have been making them the day of the party and I really wanted to avoid that, so a full cake it was.

But I still wanted to use those sprinkles, and so the design blossomed. The skulls could go on little fondant plaques to make something akin to cameos… where to use the cameos? Well, as a joining point between swags would probably work. Ok, swags… what next, it’s Halloween, lets add stripes on the sides, definitely black.. and purple would work, nice traditional Halloween colours. So that’s the sides sorted, what about the top. Definitely a piped design, probably in royal icing, but what. I just could not decide and then Michael suggested a nice big spider, even sorting out a design for me so it had a skull on it’s body.

I actually ended up making this cake start to finish all in one day!

Once the cake was stacked and crumb coated I kneaded the colour into the fondant. I was aiming for purple but starting from scratch (rather than buying pre coloured fondant) purple is really a pain to make. We’ve tried in the past and ended up with a really gray-ish shade, so once I hit this shade of burgundy I decided that I was happy with that.

The cake was covered and then taped up with a very low tack masking tape so I could airbrush the stripes. They ended up fuzzy around the edges rather than sharp but I think that gave it a nice look.

This was my first attempt putting swags on a cake, definitely something to practice on a personal cake. They weren’t as perfectly even as I would like them to be but not bad at all for a start. I stuck them on with royal icing and put on the cameos with the same.

I had prepared the spider body early in the morning, piping the skull and then filling in the body so the skull was in the body rather than on top (it also meant I could trace the design), it got a few cracks as I put it on the cake, after piping on the spider webs, but it looked pretty good. I gave it an outline and then piped on some loooooong legs, so they spread over the entire top of the cake – that’s a 9″ wide spider *shudders*

A band of orange ribbon (that I had actually bought to finish my costume) gave the cake it’s finishing touch.

Firefly has always been a favourite show of ours. Neither of us discovered it until it had sadly ended but it hooked us in and is a show we can happily re-watch (when we have that elusive thing known as free time).

Apologies to anyone not familiar with the show Firefly, a lot of this post is going to seem like gibberish, guess you’ll just have to go and watch the show to find out what I’m talking about! *grins*

The cake needed to be relatively simple so we were left with the brief of Firefly “themed” and just make sure it feeds the right number of people… And make sure it’s chocolate, lots of chocolate! (it’s chocolate cake with a rum syrup and chocolate buttercream).

Size wise we went for a half-sheet cake (12″x17″) with a 10″ round cake on top. This splitting of layers meant that we could incorporate a couple of different elements into the cake. We decided early on that the round cake would be turned into the Serenity logo. The metallic red disc with a burnished gold centre and Chinese characters (that we assume actually say “serenity”).

What then to do with the sheet cake underneath? Finally we settled on decorating it to look like a metal hull (of a ship), albeit a rather rusted one.. maybe it’s a Reaver ship! *grins*

Then we added two logos onto that cake. The Browncoats and Blue Sun, both influential in the plot lines. I wish I’d taken a picture of the full Blue Sun logo before half of it got covered!

A banner at the front declared Happy Birthday to the birthday girls, in both English and Chinese since language in the series contains Chinese elements.. at least I hope the banner says Happy Birthday in Chinese.. I’m going on what google translate told me!

A finishing touch of blue gloves for the “hands of blue, two by two” and the cake was done.

It’s the first time we’ve used fabric to cover a cake board and we’ll definitely be doing it again. We really loved how the textured red looked under the cake.

We got a request for a peanut butter cup cake, it didn’t need to be huge, the shape and flavour were the important bits.

We umm-ed and ahh-ed over trying to make a peanut butter flavoured cake but finally settled on a chocolate cake with a peanut butter flavoured icing.

The cake had some mild carving to give it it’s distinctive shape.

Fondant or buttercream was of course not going to do the trick so we covered the cake with milk modelling chocolate to replicate the chocolate coating.

As a finishing touch we made a wrapper for it out of, well, wrapping paper. Painting it with tempera paint in a logo very reminiscent to a famous brand but using the recipient’s name instead.

Reviews were glowing, and despite being a chocolate cake the flavour was spot-on. Hooray for peanut butter and chocolate!

We had a fun cake to make this week, one we were looking forward to as soon as we knew what they wanted. We are both fans of the films of Hayao Miyazaki, so a cake based off of Ponyo his latest, more child friendly, film excited us.

They wanted the main focus to be based around the scene with Ponyo running on the waves…

So, off we got to baking, a moist chocolate cake, four layers tall, with our rich buttercream icing (chocolate of course!).

The cake was initially covered in a layer of white fondant and then the scene on the top was pieced together from fondant. We scored some of the fondant to make more details (like the creases on her dress) and painted a few accents (facial features).

The trouble was, the sides looked blank. So they got painted with “waves” in the style of the end credits from the film. Some royal icing borders were piped to neaten the cake up.

All that was left was the writing. The line “tiny little fishy, who could you really be?” is in the main theme song so to reflect the baby shower theme that was changed to “tiny little baby, who could you really be?”

There were 2 dozen cupcakes to go with the cake, you’ll see them later this week!

Our centrepiece cake this year was a pumpkin cake.

Well, actually it was a butter cake, but it was shaped like a pumpkin.. that still counts as a pumpkin cake right?

We were attempting not to be left with too much leftover cake so we just made it an 8 inch round cake, 3 layers tall to get a good pumpkin shape that wasn’t too squat. So he was knocking 6 inches tall.

We made the butter cake a day ahead. It got stacked with vanilla buttercream and raspberry jam. Next up came the carving. I prefer to use a short serrated knife when carving cake, but find the knife you’re comfortable with and go with that, with some practice you’ll find what fits you best.

I put a few deep grooves in so they would really stand out and then crumb coated with a thin layer of buttercream. The cake was put in the fridge for the buttercream to firm up.

First up came a layer of yellow fondant, work quick to smooth it down and press it into those deep grooves.

Next came a layer of orange fondant. Once it’s smoothed down I used a ball tool to do the rest of the grooves, coming back with an airbrush to accentuate the shadows, it’s barely noticeable and that’s the point, but it makes the pumpkin look more natural.

Once the airbrush dye had dried I used an exacto (with a new sharp blade) to cut out a jack-o-lantern face, peeling out the orange fondant leaving the yellow showing through.

Dark green fondant was shaped to form the stem and then a fresher green made vines and tendrils curling around the base. I added some tylose to the fondant to form the tendrils so it would dry quickly, forming the shape around the handles of paint brushes.

He took pride of place on our dessert table for Halloween!

Don’t forget to say cheese!

This camera was for a graduate in fine arts, and an old fashioned camera was on her graduation invites. The recipient is also starting her own photography business. So when left to come up with an appropriate design copying the camera from the invite seemed the obvious choice.

The design needed a little altering to make it suitable for cake, that huge gaping hole at the bottom just had to go! We simplified it a little too.

It’s all butter cake filled with raspberry jam and as is the norm for most of our cakes, covered in fondant. The lens was made from gumpaste. A respectable size, the box at the back was 7″x7″x4″ with the front of the camera coming out at about 6 and a half inches.

Since this is a camera cake, we thought we would take the opportunity to show you our “studio.” The frames for the backdrop and for the lights is all pvc piping so we can dismantle it and have it not take up too much room. The lights are work lights from Home Depot with a frosted lampshade over them to diffuse the light, we can adjust the heights on them, though we generally bounce one off of the ceiling as you can see. And yes, that is a cake drum you see at the front, we use that as a reflector to bounce light back into the shadowy areas.

Halfway through writing this post, I had to stop, and look up the origin of the phrase I used as my title, “watch the birdie.” Turns out variations on it were used all over Europe when the cameras (like the one we made) looked vaguely like a nesting box. Some photographers went so far as to make a little metal bird as a focal point for their subjects. Other phrases, like “cheeeeeese” are used for the elongated vowel sound that shows your teeth .

July seems to be a popular month for birthdays. This is a cake we made for one of the many July babies, though we won’t mention how old this one was turning *grins*

The recipient is a regular on the blues dancing scene so the design needed to incorporate that general theme.

A testament to the fact that pumpkin isn’t just for winter, the cake is a spice cake with a pumpkin cream cheese icing, covered in fondant. All the musical notes round the sides are fondant and the hat and shades are gumpaste.

The only non-edible item on the cake is the ribbon around the hat.

Lived a ma-a-an, Who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life,
In the la-a-and of submarines
We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine….

I’ll save you the rest of the song, I’m sure we all know how it goes. I remember being taught it in primary school… It made a nice change from all the hymns we had to learn.

This is a recent cake we’ve made.. finished this morning to be delivered tomorrow. But since this is a little different from the everyday bits and pieces I’ve been putting up here I thought I’d make it a special entry. The regular Friday Round-Up will be up later today.

It’s a ten inch round chocolate cake, filled with raspberry jam. Crumb coated in chocolate buttercream then covered in fondant. All the detail work is made from fondant. Cut out and put together like a jigsaw before putting it on the cake.

Today I’ll be making some cupcakes to go alongside it.