Suitcase cake with purple accents

When I was asked to make this cake I was a bit uncertain, I'm not really into novelty wedding cakes but the bride & groom are both travel agents and he proposed while they were watching giraffes so this was meaningful to them and I like a challenge - it's my first suitcase cake.
The little giraffe toppers are hand made and I'm so happy with them

Too cute!

Note the long eyelashes on the lady giraffe, I love her. By the time I had finished I totally wanted to keep her & give her a name!

Butterfly Birthday Cake

Here's the cake that put the butterflies made in my earlier tutorial to use, I love this cake - the simple ones are usually the best aren't they?

This was my daughter's official birthday cake, she had two this year but we won't be making a habit of it! It was so much work, we threw her a party at home for the first time, usually I happily pay up and hire a big hall or soft play place - this is definitely the easy option!! It was a lovely day though, we did cupcake decorating and name necklace making on top of the usual party games & party tea, exhausted is not a strong enough word for how I felt after all the girls had gone home! I anticipate the time when they're old enough for a sleepover, feed them a couple of pizzas, hire a few DVDs and camp out in the kitchen with a book, my kind of party!
My next project is making a sugar peony, if anyone has any tips I would really appreciate it! I don't even know where to start.....

How to make royal icing butterflies

This is a simple but effective way of decorating a cake, I just used these and nothing else on my cake & it looked lovely, you could add piped or painted flowers to make it more suited to an adult (mine was for my daughter).

1. Make royal icing in your desired colours, this recipe is fairly close to the one I used http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/6350/royal-icing.aspx

2. Draw your templates out and place under a sheet of baking parchment or cellophane. Using a piping bag fitted with a number 2 nozzle pipe your outlines.

3. Let down your firm icing with a little water or egg white to give you icing of pouring consistency, put this in an icing bag fitted with a number 3 nozzle and flood your outlines.

4. Encourage your icing to fill the outlines to the corners by using a damp (not wet) paintbrush.

5. At this stage you can either pipe more soft icing into the still wet icing to give the effect shown on my butterfly cookies here http://vanillalila.blogspot.com/2010/10/cookies-almost-finished-article-honeys.html 
Or you can wait until they're dry and pipe detail on like this

6. When your icing is completely dry (approximately 24 hours) you can gently remove the wings from your parchment/cellophane and attach them to bodies.
Fold a large piece of card like a fan and line it with baking parchment. Pipe thick lines down the creases and push your wings into each line.

Leave this to dry again, 12 or so hours before gently removing.

I will post the pictures of the finished cake soon xx

Baby Shower

I went to my first ever baby shower last week (they're not that big yet here in the UK), my best friend was due to give birth any day so we were all invited to her Mum's for drinks and to guess the type of baby mush. We all had a fab time and the Mum to be got totally spoilt, we struggled to fit all the gifts in my car and her husband was not impressed with all the baby stuff that is rapidly taking over their home!

Anyway, I made her a cake, it was two tiers of dense, dark chocolate mud cake with a ganache filling. Hope you like it, L xx