New Cake Lace Amazingness!

Hi Cakey friends!

As you know in my last post I made a peppa pig number 1 cake, for this Saturday I am making a peppa pig picnic cake for a little girls 2nd birthday so I have started putting the figures together and will show you step by step how I created them later this week. But now I wanted to talk about a new cake decorating product on the market that I have purchased (and sadly got a bit excited about!) called Cake Lace. It is created by the fabulous cake designer Claire Bowman and is available to buy at www.thecakedecoratingcompany.co.uk 

I purchased the Chantilly Lace Large Mat, the spreading knife and the mixture, not cheap but was so very worth it! It is similar to the sugarveil but is a lot quicker as you put this in the oven for 15 minutes and it's ready to use, ideal for when you need it in a hurry or just need to make lots of lace.

The mix comes in two parts, a powder and a liquid.

First you put 50ml of water into the cake mixer and add 4tbsp of the powder mix. Then mix it on high speed for a couple minutes, then add 1 teaspoon of the liquid mix and mix it all on high speed for 5 minutes until all smooth.

Once mixed you then spread it onto the mat, it smells very sweet and is very sticky so don't worry about it spilling over. I was also worried as I didn't have any baking trays big enough to keep this mat flat in the oven but as it turned out it doesn't matter how it sits in the oven as the whole mat and lace is flexible so will come out perfect regardless!

Then you keep spreading the mix with the knife until it looks like this:

Then put it in the preheated oven at 50-70 Celsius, which isn't even half a gas mark so very low, for 15 minutes and hey presto! Place it upside down on greaseproof paper and carefully peel the lace out of the mat.

I lustered mine with a lustre spray, although do be careful when doing this as if it gets too wet it will start to melt a bit, but it's very flexible and easy to stick to the cake using a bit of water.

Here is the lace stuck onto the cake, I think it looks amazing and looks very effective. I got so many compliments on this cake which was actually very simple to create!

I love this new product and will definitely be using it again and again, if you are making a smaller cake or just want the border at the bottom then it is very easy to cut as I did on the top tier. But is just as effective on one tier as two.

 

Next post will be the making of the peppa pig picnic, I will finish the figures in the next couple of days and put them up for all to see and hopefully help some whose kids are just as crazy about Peppa as mine!

It all had to start somewhere...part 1...

Hi my cakery friends!

So I thought I would give you a little background into my love of baking. My mum was lucky enough to be a stay at home mum until I was 12 years old and used a lot of her spare time baking and dress making. She has always been very creative, I don't know if it's because she is Japanese (they do tend to be more creative!) or if it's her character or a bit of both. She went to the same dress making college as Issy Miyake (famous japanese designer, probably better known for their perfume though!) and although she has tried to get me to understand the art of dress making I failed miserably. But luckily she also loved baking, and I grew up in a home always filled with the smells of yummy home baking.

I then turned into a dreaded teenager and wasn't very bothered with baking, I would make a cake here and there but never really loved it like I do now. I went to Uni, came back and worked full time in London. My life pretty much consisted of work and play and not much inbetween. Then I had my gorgeous little girl, Miya, she was born in 2011 and all of a sudden I had a whole year at home with nothing to do! Babies sleep, and mine slept a lot so I decided one bored day to do some baking and then that was it, I was hooked!

Piped buttercream rose with sugar butterfly dipped in edible glitter

I started with a friends birthday cake and then quickly went on to cupcakes. I loved decorating individual cupcakes and trying different techniques like the grass on this cake.

My first cupcake decorated using a multi hole icing nozzle / wilton grass nozzle below. So effective and so easy!

This is such a useful nozzle, not only for cupcakes but also for the bigger cakes with an outside theme. It helps to make the grass appear more realistic even if you just add a few tufts of it here and there. It is best used with buttercream and obviously for grass, green buttercream! You can also use this nozzle for hair if you are making a bear cake or even on people if the figure is large enough.

 

There are so many easy techniques that you can use that can make cupcakes look amazing and I will run through more in this blog as it's where I started my passion for decorating cakes :)

 

Until the next instalment...enjoy!