This cake stood at 13″ tall, that’s pretty hefty for it’s 8″ diameter even though it still wasn’t completely in proportion to perfectly match the 16oz can we were replicating. Any taller though and it would have been dying to teeter over during transportation. It was a little scary carrying this one about due to the height!

Our always popular chocolate cake was filled with chocolate buttercream and of course covered in fondant before using a mix of fondant cutouts and royal icing piping to form all the detail work.

Not everyone wants chocolate Easter eggs (really? where are these people?), it does get rather warm here early in the year so I imagine they melt pretty quickly if you let them. Why not try some of these egg cookies? They have a light refreshing lemon flavour and can be decorated in any range of colour or patterns.

I decided for these that light pastel colours fitted the season well and stuck with simple patterns.. I tried a couple more complicated ones but preferred the simple eggs.

They are 3″ tall and we’ll be selling them for $18 per dozen.

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.

That time of year that calls for the mass genocide of that little bug called a crawfish is almost at an end. I’m going to leave the boil details to the Southern boy but I couldn’t let the event pass without making a little something.

When we were buying king cake babies earlier in the year we saw some themed cookie cutters; gators, masks, fleur de lys and of course a crawfish. Well, we couldn’t pass them by… I think I may have a “thing” for random cookie cutters, you never know when you’re going to need one shaped like a margarita glass!

My lemon sugar cookies are my favourite for cut-out cookies, they hold their shape well when baked out. This time I decided to change things up a little by using lime instead of lemon, a minor difference but a tasty one!

The cookies were baked out and left to cool, I had a lot of them!

Next I made a deep red royal icing and piped my outline round each one of them. They’re really a simplified crawfish, doing all the details would be exceedingly fiddly and take a long while.. these took long enough!

Keeping a little bit of the dark red icing to one side thin the rest out and make it a little lighter. Flood inside the borders, using a cocktail stick to spread the icing to fill the gaps.

When that’s dry come back with that thicker dark red and pipe some spots on the crawfishs’ backs. As you can see an actual crawfish has these lumps all over, but that made the cookie look too busy and not so good. Again, this is a simplified crawfish.

Leave to set fully then store in an airtight container until you want them. Of course, I couldn’t let the crawfish get boiled without the “cousins” getting to meet each other!

Yes, we’re still with the Halloween goodies, get used to it, we’ve got at least another week of Halloween themed treats. I know, I know, any good blogger would have planned ahead and made them before the holidays so they could go up early and provide you lovely readers with inspiration.. Well, I never said I was a good blogger, or at the very least an organised one *grins*

I made all these treats for Halloween and as such they’re going up now! Today’s treats are some Halloween cookies. I got so distracted by all the baking that I forgot to take many photos so I’m cramming two types of cookie into one post.. That, and to save you from putting up with Halloween for any longer than you have to.

First up, gingerbread. As I expressed a couple weeks ago with the gingerbread cake, I like my gingerbread rich and dark and full of spice. This is a recipe I adapted a while back, it appeared in it’s original form in the BBC Good Food magazine. Since it’s for a house it holds it’s shape very well, and for cookies you don’t need to bake it out as dry as you do for a house. I like them nice and soft in the centre.

I completely failed to take photos of the dough being made, so you can see them as they come out the oven. They’ll be just firm to the touch and will have changed colour  evenly across the surface (darker in the centre means raw dough). I went with a skull, a tombstone and a pumpkin.

Back in the summer when I did the lemon sugar cookies I used a technique known as flooding to decorate them. These were a little simpler. Because all the designs had a single base colour I spread that on (in royal icing) with an offset palette knife (white for skulls, grey for stones, orange for pumpkins). It can get a little uneven, but if you’re careful you can get a nice smooth edge.

Once they’re dry to touch you can add the detail work.. Whatever you want! For the skulls I used black to outline some eyes, noses and mouths. For the stones I added some black inscriptions and came back with the green to do some grass and vines creeping over the graves. The pumpkins got red faces (I ran out of yellow, they have red lights inside them!) and then a green stem and vines.

Be creative, have fun!

The second cookie made for Halloween takes up back to the lemon sugar cookies. Using that dough, which we know is nice and firm and keeps its shape, we made witches fingers.

The dough was made, and then me being me, split into one ounce portions. Roll the dough into a sausage shape.

As you’re rolling form the knuckles. You want very defined, knobbly knuckles, swollen and arthritic! This took some effort and practice, the first few looked a little….. interesting!

Place onto a baking sheet and using a knife score the knuckles. Add a sliver of almond for a finger nail. I went for mostly whole slices of almond, but the occasional broken one was used as it looked like a ragged or torn nail.

Chill them! I can’t stress this enough. I thought half an hour would do the trick and it really didn’t. Rolling these out will warm the butter up more than you realise (especially if you have warm hands like me). After 30 minutes in the fridge my fingers still spread out and attached to each other when they were baked. Less like long, spindly witches fingers, more like stubby, chubby ghoul fingers!

Still tasted good though!

Recently we acquired some new cookie cutters, one of which was the most adorable little tea cup, with a matching tea pot. Well, I just had to make something with them, the tea cups were so small, we thought about using them to top a cupcake.. But what cupcake would have a tea cup on top..? And then it hit me – A tea cupcake!

I love tea *grins* it is the answer to everything and the perfect cure all! I’m not actually a fan of drinking Earl Grey tea.. and have been known on occasion to refer to it as poncy!

Earl Grey, named after the 2nd Earl Grey who was Prime Minister in England in the 1830s, is a blend of Indian and Ceylon teas flavoured with oil of bergamot.

However, while I don’t like drinking it, I do have a habit of using it as a flavour in other dishes. Back when I was in class I made a panna cotta that had been infused, and when in England I once had the pleasure of eating a duck breast that had been steamed in earl grey tea before being seared.

I took my vanilla cupcake recipe and set to work. The recipe has milk as it’s only liquid, so I warmed it up and added some tea bags to steep. It’s so little liquid in a batch of batter it needed to be nice and strong to carry the flavour through, there were 5 tea bags in 2 ounces of milk! I left it to steep for a long time too.

The rest of the batter was made as usual, but taking a taste the tea flavour wasn’t strong enough. So I opened another bag of tea, making sure the leaves were ground small, I added it straight to the batter.. That tasted better! Portioned into cups and baked off they were then left to cool.

Next I made some lemon sugar cookies (more on them next week) and cut out my tea cups. Their size meant they took no time at all to bake.. I think I may have even over cooked them a little!

Finally, the icing! With a tea cupcake and a lemon cookie the icing needed to involve honey. We had some cream cheese in the fridge so I decided to run with that! Beaten down I added some powdered sugar and then some honey.. But the honey in a large enough quantity to taste made it too loose, so more powdered sugar was added, and then some cold butter to firm it up. Back and forth adding a little of this and a little of that until I got a taste and consistency I found acceptable.

A swirl of the frosting on the top of the cake, the cookies were iced with royal icing and placed on top and they were done! I actually think these were my most successful cupcake to date. The flavours balanced well, the tea was flavourful but not too strong, the honey didn’t overpower the tea but complemented it, and the cookie was a nice finish, and an attractive garnish.

Have no fear, I will be making these again.

The stars are pearl dragees and royal icing, for some variety in size, then we added some large stars on wires.