Jemima Puddleduck

Months and months ago, a friend contacted me on Facebook and asked if I could bake a cake for her daughter's first birthday in October.

She wanted something sweet, with a vintage-feel to it, preferably in pink with a little duck on it.

After a couple of weeks emailing back and forth, I finally came up with the idea to do a cake covered in a mixture of fondant and buttercream. With a little fondant duck on top.

Now the duck in question took a bit of deliberation - she didn't want a typical rubber ducky, and we wanted something to fit the theme. So after foraging through ducky images on the Internet, I chanced upon Jemima Puddleduck, from the Beatrix Potter series. How delightfully perfect!!

Next up - to actually make the cake! A Red Velvet affair, with white chocolate ganache, to feed 50 people!

 

I'll post up a mini-tutorial on how I did the duck soon.

Have a great weekend!

(PS. Big thanks to Sandy for the pic of the cake at Sophie's party!)

Of Ruffles and Sheep

Here're some pics from cakes I've made over the last couple of weeks:

I've been really enamoured by the look of ruffle cakes lately, like the ones seen on Martha Stewart, and Sweetapolita's so I thought I'd give it a shot:

 

It's a choc fudge cake covered in peanut butter ruffles for a friend's little get-together. Delish!

A week later was a client's order for a Farmyard cake. She and her husband were moving to the country, and wanted a cake for their "house-cooling" party before their big move. Just a small one for about 12 (this one I made would feed 20, and she later told me they only finished a quarter of it!), with a couple of farm animals on it. So I came up with this:

The cow and sheep were made courtesy of tutes I'd learnt from the very very talented Lorraine McKay from Extra Icing in the UK (who's coming to Melbourne to teach next year, yay!)

And I came up with the little ducky myself (altho' to be perfectly honest, it kinda looks like a yellow platypus! LOL!)

All the figurines were made entirely out of fondant, and the cake was a chocolate mud with dark chocolate ganache. Ooooooh.