Sequin cake

I've seen a few sequin cakes recently and decided to give it a go myself! You can use any colour lustre dust to make the metallic look but I chose gold for this 50th birthday cake.

I bought a few bags of edible confetti off eBay (in bags of 50 grams), I wasn't sure how much I would need. I used less than 50 grams for this cake- however, the cake I covered was only a 4/5 inch cake.

They are really small and quite colourful! I'm not sure if you can get them neutral coloured or white (this would be so much easier to do believe me.)

I covered a cake with fondant (see above) then painted it with water. It may be wise to use edible glue because I found they didn't stick as well as when I've done this technique with sprinkles.

I took a handful and slowly moved them up the cake for them to stick to the fondant (please ignore the sticks sticking out of the top!) until the entire cake was covered.

I used my painbrush and fingers to pick up loose confetti and stuck them in sections that were very obviously empty and filled in the gaps. It doesn't need to be completely filled, however the texture will be better the more sequins are stuck on.

I would then leave the cake either over night or for a few hours until all the wayer had dried and the sequins are properly stuck to the fondant.

Next you will need :

lustre dust (any colour you like- I chose gold as it is for a 50th)

Glitter (optional)

Clear alcohol (I think vodka works best but I only had gin...)

Paintbrush

My mistake was not buying enough lustre dust- I used all of the dust in the small pot and could have used a lot more.

I mix a little bit of the spirit with some lustre dust to make a paste. Don't use too much alcohol or it will be too watery. I'm not sure why alcohol works better than water however it doesn't make the same paste, apparently the alcohol also evaporates so it also dries quickly. I think there are alternative for people who don't drink alcohol for personal/religious reasons- I've heard lemon juice works well too.

Start slowly stroking/dabbing the paint over the confetti. Be aware that some of the confetti will fall off and you may be left with gaps/coloured sequins poking through so make sure you have enough left over the end just in case.

You may need to do a few layers

The "paint" should make a thicker paste over the sequins- again, you may see the colours through the paint which isn't what you want! So keep painting until everything is covered.  I then loaded gold glitter onto my paintbrush and dabbed that across it too.

I added it to a cake with ruffles and another tier on top..

Cake without any colour- I also added some glitter around the cakeboard

Then added a large sugar paste rose to add some colour!

I love this cake, I think it wouldn't look out of place at any celebration- especially a wedding or a golden wedding anniversary, but also for birthdays or baby showers etc! I would love to try it in silver or another metallic colour too.

Dinosaur cake

This is our first blog post in over a year- hoping to do a few more of these every so often!!

This blog post is about a dinosaur cake I've made for my boyfriends (25th) birthday (I also made some superhero cupcakes- please tell me other men are the same?)

I made the head out of rice type cereal- chose your own brand! I've never used this method before- however, as you may be able to see by the finished product I was a bit excited to finish so I really don't think it's the best it could be. I'm going to  focus more on the dinosaur head rather than the finished cake- because if you can or can't tell I put the head on the cake as soon as I crumb coated and it and it kind of slid everywhere. I'd seen a cake of a dino coming out of a shell so that was the idea I was looking for.

 

To start I used-

100g of butter in a pan until it was 

melted

I then put in-

175g of marshmallows

Keep stirring til it looks like this-

Then I added it to 170g of cereal.

The standard rice krispy cakes we all made as kids- cake decorators use these because it's so much easy to get the right shape with these, if you make too much you can just shave it down to the size you want (and eat the rest.)

I used saucepans to be my moulds, as I didn't have much in my kitchen I could use. Bowls or even shaped tins would be better, but you have to work with what you have!!! I greased these with butter. I put them in the fridge for 45 minutes.

One was smaller than the other- so o used this as the top piece of the face. Apparently (according to my boyfriend) it should have been the other way round- I wanted to make a t-Rex but he has informed me it "just looks like a dinosaur" so take whatever you see as a Jurassic Park hybrid...

 

Using a knife and spoon I scooped some rice out for a mouth piece. They should before when you take them out the fridge but soft enough to manipulate.

For the top of the head I used scrap pieces to make lumps and horns (I'm not into dinosaurs if you can't tell) and eye sockets.

As you can see above, I just built up some more "mixture" to create shapes. This is more of a visual blog because it was the first time for myself too- so I have no idea what I'm doing. This could end up badly (I'm pre-empting it 

will.)

Following this you need a good 2/3 layers of fondant because although it may look good "scaly" due to the lumps and bumps I really wanted a smooth finish.

I coloured some green fondant for this- see picture above for lumps- and continues to cover until I was happy.

I did the same with the top. I didn't want the fondant too dark as I wanted to change the texture of the fondant later.

(I also made a deeper imprint with my fingers for the eye socket.)

Explaining the pictures above- I used yellow fondant and rolled it into a "dinosaur eye" shape (is that a thing? At this point my boyfriend said "yes you can tell it's a dinosaur now because it has a yellow eye." I have no idea.)

I then used more green fondant to role into sags and creases around the eye (do dinosaurs have this????) plus a black slit.

I used the end of a bamboo stick to make nostrils which I then put a small ball of black fondant down (I ended up later moving the nostrils further down its snout after a closer look.)

So there you should have something that looks like a dinosaur/crocodile/lizard (praying the teeth makes it looks more jurassic. Wait. Is Jurassic an adjective?? I'm so bored of dinosaurs.)

Next: more green dye on a sponge, and doing what we all did as children (except I'm an adult and this is edible...x100 more fun) 

Looking a bit more like a dinosaur? Is it? Nope... Ok.

Using a pink piece of fondant I rolled it into a tongue shape (I think.) meanwhile I'd alreDy stuck a piece of black fondant into the bottom of my dinosaurs mouth.

Which now looks like this! I was so excited to put the teeth in, I mixed small amount of yellow fondant with white to give it a bone type colour, and rolled them Into sharp teeth.

At this point I definitely should have left it over night but I was in such a rush to get it finished (because I was excited not because I had a time scale) I stuck the teeth on top, sliced a bit of the back and forced open the mouth with 2 pieces of fondant.

At this point it has started to go terribly wrong- as I decided to refrigerate it over night with bamboo sticks stuck throughout to make it stand correctly. 

I also decided to stand it on the lemon cake is made just an hour before so by the morning it had definitely buckled under the weight, and it's a shame really because it could have looked so much better.

My boyfriend also decided he wanted it's mouth pulled further to the front so I did with the help of more sticks (more cake-sliding also I'm afraid!) so loads more fondant was stuck to the sections connecting both sections of its jaw.

Stupidly also I left this in the fridge overnight and the entire thing sweat as soon as I took it out of the fridge and hasn't stopped sweating all day due to the humidity (DONT PUT FONDANT IN THE FRIDGE.)

I used blue fondant to create a pulled back egg effect .

Later I used green buttercream and fondant to make leaves around the bottom and brown fondant to act as the nest in which the egg was sat. I cut 2 piece of green fondant as front claws.

As you can see the finished product is slightly adventurous but oh well- was worth a try and I definitely won't dismiss this in the future! Was considering making the dinosaur out of cake but now realising most of the intricate models you see on cakes are definitely not made from cake!!! 

:-)

Olaf (Disney frozen) Tutorial

Frozen has over taken Toy Story as the highest grossing Disney/animation/best film ever (heeheeee) or something and I've had a load of people asking me for frozen themed cakes recently! As we all know, I'm not a professional however I'm more than happy to give something a go! So here was my Olaf for a cake a did a couple of weeks ago... If I have to say something please try make the figure a week or two before you need it because it needs to dry solid if you want him standing up!

To make Olaf:

Start with white, black, brown and orange fondant. This is generally all the colours you need to make Olaf... You can colour the brown and orange yourself however I always buy black pre-coloured because you will never be able to colour it a true black.

Roll some white fondant into a ball (the size depends on how big you want your snowman!) please note during these photos there may be two lots of everything on one picture but that's only because I was making two different sized snowmen and thought it would be easier to document it as I went along.

This is for the face... As his face is quite long it's not going to be a "round" face. Slightly flatten the balls of fondant using your fingers or applying light pressure silicone rolling pin. 

 

I'll try to explain as best I can for the next but it is kind of a visual thing... 

As shown on picture one, squeeze 2/3 of the way up the flattened ball using your fingers to make a triangle type shape on one half of the ball for the lower half of the face (where his mouth will be), then turn the head around and squeeze the remaining 1/3 into a smaller "triangle" as the top half of his head. I know this is confusing but looking at the shape on the picture above should guide you to the desired shape.

The larger section is where his mouth will be. The second face on the picture is where I have squeezed out a top lip using my fingers in a pinching action, and then smoothing along the ridge to round it a little better. This may need a few trial and error (starting from scratch!) because I found I hadn't made the face big enough to manipulate a lip shape.

Using a toothpick, I then first plotted then carved out a mouth shape underneath the lip edge. You can also use a knife to define the inside of the mouth even more.

It doesn't matter the scraped out mouth isn't perfect or smooth as this will be covered by black fondant.

I also slightly squeezed the fondant and manipulated it with my fingers to redefine the lower lip as seen above

Next, I cut out a rough mouth shape (don't worry if it isn't very neat, this can be smoothed out once placed in the mouth "hole")

I also coloured some white fondant orange using "tangerine/apricot" paste by Sugarflair. This makes a really vibrant orange, however make sure to continuously wash your hands when handling vibrant self coloured fondant and black fondant or the colours will rub off onto white fondant and make everything look dirty!!! It's annoying!

I rolled the orange fondant into a small cone shape to represent the snowmans carrot nose

...And made small incisions using a knife for the edges of the carrot

I stuck both the mouth and the nose on using warm water. You can also see I have made an incision where I want he eyes to fall. 

I then rolled a white sausage out of fondant for the lower lip, this is why it doesn't matter if the mouth edges are rough because the lip will completely conceal the edges.

Olaf so far.

Olaf has one tooth/one visible strip of tooth, so I rolled out a small rectangle out of fondant. For the eyes I flattened some balls of fondant (getting smaller) for 

Eye shadow- black

Eye ball- white 

Iris- black

Shine- white

Looking like a cartoon eye!

So so far we have his head ready to go, which means we're nearly finished. As he is a stereotypical snowman, his body consists of two balls of snow.

You want to roll them into two different sized balls, one larger and one smaller.

I used tooth picked to attach the whole thing together, which obviously you should warn whoever may take a bite out of him (ew) before they do!

Olaf's head is slightly at an angle so I thought it best to use a couple of sticks to get the right one

I rolled out three black pieces of fondant for his "coal" buttons and stuck them on with a little pressure (try not to use water much which colour fondant because it can run into each other!)

The way Olaf stands is usually on one leg, so I made a small "leg" from fondant.. This is another reason to take a week or two for the figure to dry because it should be strong enough for the figure to stand simply on one leg, however if this isn't possible I'm sure it would look just as good with two.

My two olaf figures 

To make the arms stick out (which I didn't do on my first figure!) I have used brown fondant and tooth picks. As he generally stands with his arms stuck out I thought this may be an easier way. On the last cake I rolled pieces of fondant and prayed they dried.. I also stuck them to his body so they didn't really look like Olaf's arms 

Again this is slightly hard to explain but the pictures should help. I rolled sausage shapes of brown fondant..

I slowly pushed the tooth pick through the fondant to make sure it didn't come out any of the sides 

You can see they are quite thick once done, so I pinched the "back" of the arm and cut the excess fondant in order to make it look as thin as a twig

I pinched the end slightly and cut two small slits into the fondant for stick fingers

Next I carefully stuck the end of the tooth picks into the body in the position I wanted

To make the small sticks on top of his head, I rolled tiny bits of fondant and stuck them on with warm water

I added an extra leg and that's complete! Like I said before, unusually leave these to dry for at least a week before I need them however it is possible to leave it for less! They are completely edible (minus the sticks) however I wouldn't recommend it... 

Lauren