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!!! 

:-)