Gumpaste Roses

Last year I signed up to do Chef Nicholas Lodge's "Ultimate Sugar Rose" class on www.craftsy.com, but it was only earlier this year that I finally made time to watch and learn from it. Chef Nicholas is a wonderful teacher, with a wealth of knowledge and experience to share, and I would definitely recommend his Craftsy classes. He even inspired me to try making my own gumpaste, which was far less difficult that you might think.

With a new skill to try out, when Valentine's Day rolled around and when I got to celebrate my (gasp!) fortieth birthday, I had a great time making a whole lot of sugar roses. I have to confess, though, that I have yet to complete a rose with a calyx! *blush* Still, I was pretty happy with the results.

 For the Valentine cake I used Satin Ice Fondant, which I found pretty tasty and easy to work with, and much easier than trying to make a homemade red fondant (I inevitable find that enough gel coloring to make a good strong red leaves the fondant tasting really bitter):

        

For my birthday cake I tried making Swiss Meringue buttercream for the first time. All I can say is wow! So silky and rich, and not as sweet as regular buttercream. It is quite a lot of extra work to make it, so I will probably save it for special occasions. I also finally used my patterned buttercream scraper for the cake sides, which I've had for ages and never used before!

So even though I haven't been posting much here, I'm still experimenting, learning and making plenty of cakes!

A Fall Birthday

A super cute little girl I know turned one last fall, and I got to make her cake! We went with an apple cake with a touch of cinnamon, and lots of fall leaves.

I made the leaves a week ahead out of fondant, using leaf cutters and silicon molds to get the vein effect. I then laid them out on crumpled foil to dry so they would have a more natural look. The little apples and acorns I just hand shaped out of fondant mixed with a little gumpaste.

One thing I've discovered is that for black and red fondant I really like to use the premade Satin Ice. When I make homemade red fondant it tends to be sticky from the amount of coloring I have to add, whereas the Satin Ice has a great texture and flavor.

Spring cookies!

Here in the depths of winter, it's nice to think about spring arriving one day. I made these for our teachers in May last year, and I'm about ready for some signs of spring for this year!

I used royal icing on sugar cookies for all of these. For the butterflies and top flowers I used a toothpick dragged through the wet icing to get the patterns. For the 'thanks' cook I freehand wrote the letters--they were a little squished, but overall I thought they turned out ok. For the bunnies I mixed a little clear alcohol (vodka I think it was) with a very little red pearl dust, and then painted in the ear color. Once the alcohol evaporated, the ears were left as a delicate pink.