Too Cute to Cut

The gorgeous Miss Charlie celebrated her First Communion on August 29th, and her mum Narelle asked me to make her cake.  With exactly what she wanted in mind, here is what we had.


A rather large cross, about 35cm long, and 30cm wide at its widest point. This was created from two cakes.  A new challenge definitely ensued, in how to cover a cake with so many corners. Done with only one attempt I was pretty happy with the result. especially my bow, which is all made from icing as well. 



Congratulations Charlie :)

Front view

My best friend of forever had her little girls 1st Birthday in July and part of my present was her cake.  For a little girl that is in love with all things duck, the only suitable cake was a duck themed cake!

Using Debbie Brown's 'Cute Chick' Cake as inspiration I set about creating a duck fit for a 1st birthday.  Having been petrified of carving, I think Im getting not to bad at it!


And a close up of the face;

Now....to catch up on August and September's cakes!

The important details......It was a 6" and 9" choc mint mudcake loaded with dark chocolate ganache.  How long did something like this take to make, oh about 10-12 hours!!!

Well its been a very busy few weeks, cakes galore!  This week of only one lot of cupcakes on Monday has given me a chance to catch my breath, and get into my new role at my day job. 

So without further a due here is a catch up of some of my most recent cakes.

Week beginning 21st June

 A mini 'Exploding Stars' cake for one of the girls at work.  This was a tiny 6" white chocolate mudcake, loaded with white chocolate ganache for her husbands birthday. After the previous weeks big cakefest it felt like a piece of cake!




Chocolate Buttermilk cakes with chocolate cream cheese icing.  Donna Hay = win!  If you happened to buy her anniversary edition of her magazine a few months ago, this is the recipe of the gorgeous layered chocolate cake on the front cover.  These were for our HR Manager at work for her birthday.  I do all of the cakes for our Marketing and HR departments at work, it gives me a great chance to experiment with new flavours as everyone gets to pick an idea of a flavour that they want.

Last weeks cake-a-thon went really well.  It has been fairly hectic so has taken me a little while to get in here and tell you all about it.

Here are some pics of my first wedding cake, and my very spunky nephews first birthday cake, Im sure you can tell which is which!



Want to know how it all came together?  

Starting off with splitting, filling and ganaching the cakes to give them that oh so tasty and very useful covering of smoothness make the icing so much easier.  That said, as you can see doing this much cake takes up a little space in the kitchen!


Look at all that chocolate, so much mudcake, and about 5kg of white and dark chocolate ganache!


From here I cover them all, with fondant, white for Sesame St, and Ivory for the wedding cake, kneading 7kg of icing to make it pliable is a great workout for the abs and arm muscles if you are doing it properly too! As you can see the kitchen bench just wasnt cutting it anymore and we had to take over the table too.
 


Then there is the practice run to make sure that they are going to be all nice and flat before it gets put together.  You may be wondering what the pole is for coming out of the middle of the cake.  That is to hold them all nice and steady while it is being transported, each tier is threaded onto that pole, and wahlah, no movement.

 

Then it all gets put together and about 18 hours worth of work later, you come out with the two cakes at the top of this blog!

So now that these two are out of the way, I cant say I am in a rush to be doing two large cakes in one week, while I am working fulltime, again.  I absolutely loved doing them though and the gorgeous people they were for hopefully loved them as much as I loved making it for their very special day.

So whats next?  This week we have an 'Exploding Stars' cake, followed by a bit of a break for next week, then the week after my spunky sisters hopefully very glam 21st cake where pink and black is the order of the day.  That is hopefully going to be one impressive looking cake :)  A masquerade pyjama party is the order of the day.

Mmmmmmm.......my house currently smells like White Chocolate mud cake.....yummmmmmm