Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines Day all.

I was very busy this weekend and being as nice as I am I made lots of cupcakes and cookies for my work colleagues.

These are mini Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese frosting and mini chocolate hearts on top. I made about 50!! Yes this is a huge egg tray they are in they fit perfect and I put the lid on and it was perfect to transport them too work.

I had never tasted Red Velvet Cupcakes before and they were all over when I was in America in Nov but for some reason I never tried them. I bought a box of the cake mix and the tub of cream cheese frosting from wallmart as they were sealed Duncan Haines. Since I have only been on my new account for 2 months and not many people know me they were a bit wary of trying them!! (which upset me alittle as Id spent all weekend cooking! But my new manager had quite a few and told the rest of the team how nice they were and that I'm not going to poison them - long and short of it they didn't last much longer after that)

I also made some sugar heart cookies with marshmallow fondant on the top they were delicious!!!



Hope everyone is happy and feeling loved today even if your single :-)

Love Sam

Anniversary Card and Cake

30 years ago today my parents were married.

I made them the canvas which I posted last time I also made them a card and a cake (my first attempt at making and decorating a cake!)

This is the card I made for them using papers from Joanna Sheen Backing Paper Pad Victorian Calligraphy and a vintage decoupage picture by Search Press. I used some vintage cream lace, silk ribbon roses misted with Bronze Cosmic Shimmer Mist. I made some hat pins with plain white seamstress pins and glued pearls on and added white peal off numbers.

I made some roses and leaves from marshmallow fondant which I made by melting some marshmallows with a little water in the microwave and mixed with icing sugar until it forms a ball of fondant. You have to be very careful when melting the marshmallows and watch them like a hawk while they are in microwave (as I discovered! I was talking to my brother and forgot about them and they bubbled up and exploded in the microwave making it huge gluey mess!!!!)
I tried to make the roses like Ive saw the paper ones with a 5 petal flower cookie cutter but this didn't really work as the fondant gets too sticky the more you handle it. So i used the flower cutter and used one of the petals to cut out 8 or 9 individual petals and shaped them into a rose. it was very fiddly and time consuming but for my first attempt they turned out ok. For the leaves I used a round pastry cutter with the jagged edge and cut a half circle then cut it again to form a leave then used the back of a knife for the veins.

The cake was very lumpy and hard to cover with the rolled icing. I have been watching alot of "Cake Boss" on TV and I love the cakes they make. I am only a beginner when it comes to cake decorating but my mam was so pleased Id made the effort and it was a surprise. The cake was make from 2x 8" round cakes stacked with Jam and butter cream in each layer. I covered the full cake with cutter cream them covered the cake in rolled icing. It was very hard to get the icing to roll to the size of the cake so I did a bit of a bodge job and icied in panels. The pink trim is the marshmallow fondant. I used the left over butter cream with some red food die to to the shell border and the writing as you can tell I dont have a very steady hand.

All in all the cake was pretty tastey even tho it wasnt a master peice :-)