Cakes, cakes and more cakes

Deepavali celebration is finally over. The week before was baking, baking and more baking. During this time, I should be busy doing murukku and cookies for Deepavali but here I was making cakes to fulfill the orders I received. Not that I am complaining.

I hardly make stuff for Deepavali. I usually pinch my supply from my mom or order them. This year, I actually made pineapple tarts and ghee biscuits ... only because my friend, Sakthi, wanted to learn and make them for Deepavali.

Other than that, I was baking for other people. I only wanted to make the rich sugee fruit cake for the home but never got to make it for Deepavali as I had the orders.

I have been wanting to make this cake for months now ... I wanted to soak it in brandy for a month in time for Deepavali. Yummy!!! Still not too late for that. Last night, prepared the fruits and soaked them in brandy. Tonite I will make the cake. :) Finally...

Here are the cakes that I made last week:

Sakthi's gals have been very enterprising. The got one of their classmates to order her birthday cake from them and made their classmates pay for some cup cakes. They promoted my cakes to their classmates. Thanks gals. Good job!
My friend, Hema, ordered some plain cup cakes for her family for Deepavali.Cake Connection had two birthday cake orders for me as well as a 'hantaran' cake. The flowers on the cakes are from Cake Connection except the flowers on the chocolate cake which I made.

The carnations on the 50th birthday cake is made out of royal icing and the roses on the hantaran cake is made out of sugar paste. You can get a beautiful variety of flowers from Cake Connection. They are so pretty that you will not have the heart to cut the cake.

This one's for the teacher

This is a cake for my kids' tuition teacher. Iced it last nite. We will give it to her when she comes for class today.

Happy birthday to you

Today my colleague celebrates her birthday. (I shall not reveal how young she is.) I decided to surprise her by turning up at her place this morning with some cup cakes. Made them last night. My son made her a card. Hope you have a memorable birthday, Manjeet!

Different kind of baking

Weekends seem to be the busiest time for me. My friend Sakthi wanted to make some cookies for Deepavali (this weekend). She wanted two cookies and we decided on ghee biscuits and pineapple jam tarts.

Since we baked them, I decided to write about it in my blog. Armed with all the ingredients, my daughter and I went over to Sakthi's place. I decided to make my cookies here as well.
We started off with the ghee biscuits. We finished making them quite fast. It was fast because we had six pairs of hand; sakthi and her two gals, her aunt, my daughter and myself.

The pineapple tarts were a bit tricky cos it needed a lot more work. We had to press out the dough and then roll it over the jam. The kids did most of them and they were much faster than the adults.

In fact, the gals enjoyed making it so much that they were seeing the $$$$ sign by the end of it all. They wanted to start a business doing jam tarts. They started making plans to market it and the whole works on how to set up their business.They were quite disappointed when we told them that they can only do this during the school holidays.

So much for the Deepavali cookies...

I also baked two cakes; a birthday cake for Chitra's mom and a company's 10th anniversary cake.
I found the anniversary cake very challenging. They wanted the company building on the cake. This is my first attempt at constructing a building out of cake. I covered the cake with fondant and then iced it.

The cake had an indent in the middle. Even with dowell rods, the building was slanting a bit.
Decorating this cake was not as easy as I thought, but one thing I know is that I gave it my best shot. Maybe next time I need more time to work on projects like these.

Stethoscope Cake

Robert just e-mailed the cake photos, the ones that I have been waiting for. Thanks, Robert. This is the 'medical' theme cake that I made beginning of this month. The photos that I took just disappeared into the twilight zone. So here it is.

My first gum paste project. :)

Gum paste shoe

I have been looking at various ideas to make cake decorating more personalised and interesting. And of course, without spending money. Yesterday I found time to make a shoe out of gum paste.

It is a very simple shoe. Didn't attempt to make it look elaborate cos I just wanted see if I could make it look like a shoe.

I followed the instructions and cut out the templates and then rolled and shaped the gum paste. It wasn't difficult to do.

If you don't want to cut out templates for the shoe, there are places that sell these moulds. And they are pricey.

Within an hour I finished making the shoe. Here's my masterpiece:As you can see, I have not taken away the support. The shoe is supposed dry for about four to five days depending on the weather. Only then can you remove the support.

Hope it stands on its own after drying. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Birthday weekend

My kids have been waiting for this weekend for so long and now it's finally over. Of course it's not without drama. I took pictures of the cake before and after they were iced.
Everything was going well as planned. I baked the cakes on Thursday and iced my daughter's Ariel cake on Friday morning. Friday evening after dinner about 10pm, I started icing my son's WALL.E cake.
When I was finally down to icing the background of the cake, I decided to stop and clean up, cos I wanted to make some cup cakes. We wanted to give them away to kids who were going to attend the party. I just wanted the kitchen clean for my next project.

So far so good.

As I finished cleaning up, I just turned towards the cake... I don't know how it happened... the cake fell and turned turtle on the floor. Oh my god!!!! Oh my god!!! It felt like my life flashed just before my very own eyes!

I need a cake, a cake, a cake, cake... was all I could think of. Or else I was going to have a very disappointed child the next day.

I just didn't know whether to cry or laugh. Laugh definitely not. I was so scared to see what was beneath the board. Didn't want to see it alone. Quickly ran to my room and called my husband. He helped me turn the cake back to position.

I thank the Mighty Lord that the cake did not break into pieces. But the icing was gone. My husband helped clean and mop the floor. Had to scrap off the smashed icing and start decorating all over again. No point in crying over spilt milk... err... icing. It felt like I had iced two cakes in a row by the time I finished. Too tired to bake the cup cakes after this.

Next morning, started on the cup cakes, this time without any unwanted incidents. :) The characters on the cup cakes were my kids' favourite TV characters: Disney Princesses, Spiderman, Cars and High School Musical. They turned out cute.

I thank my lucky stars that my kids were not around to see the disaster. This is the first time such a thing happened to me. Well, there is always a first time to everything... Next time I will be extra careful.

Christmas tree and snow man

Since I have just started dabbling with sugar paste modelling, I was surfing around for how-to videos and tutorials on this topic. Found two simple demo by Lorraine McKay on how to make a snow man and a christmas tree. You can start practising making them for Christmas. Hope you enjoy this video as much as I enjoyed it.


How to make a christmas tree from Lorraine McKay on Vimeo.


How to make a snowman Aine2 style! from Lorraine McKay on Vimeo.

What a weekend

Feeling really exhausted from the weekend! I made two cakes and 50 cupcakes. One birthday cake, another for a baby's baptism.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy baking and decorating the cakes but the exhaution comes from other factors. I had to deliver the cakes on Sunday, so I started baking on friday and set aside saturday for baking the cupcakes and decorating. Of course my three little bakers wanted to 'help' me.

When I am in the kitchen, I like to work alone. I don't mind help as long as they don't get in my way. It starts of by one of them coming in and sitting by the kitchen table, helping me. Everything is going well until the other two come in and demand that they want to chip in as well. Fine but they all one to do the same thing as the first and of course arguments start.Mom, he did that, she did that and on it goes. Arrgh. Here I am trying to follow my timing and I have to deal with their fighting. What do I do, I chase them out of the kitchen. Peace for ten minutes or so and the cycle starts again. This went on until evening. In between, I had to stop to send them for piano and drum classes, go to the shop, break for dinner and finally, I was alone at about 10.30pm. By the time I finished, it was 3.30am after cleaning the kitchen and putting away all the utensils.

Before I knew it, it was already 7.30am. I wanted to take photos of the cakes and send the birthday cake to my mom's for pickup.

The birthday cake was for a doctor and her brother wanted me to make a 'medical' theme cake. What I did was mould a stethoscope using sugar paste. I have made sugar paste flowers in the past but this was my first attempt at making a sugar paste model of something other than flowers.

I think it turned out ok as hubby and kids knew what it was when they saw it. :)

I cannot upload the photo for this cake as none of the shots for this cake was captured by the memory stick of my camera. Sigh!!! But I have asked my friend to email me the photos that was taken during the birthday do. Now I just have to wait.

Since I did not have enough sleep, my sinus started acting up. Not good cos I was invited to attend the baby's baptism lunch. Packed the car with the kids, cakes, cuppies as well as the stand and off we went to Klang.

I thought the stand looked really nice with the cuppies. Everyone enjoyed the cakes. Had to leave right after the cake cutting cos by then I was having a bad flu. This one will only go away if I sleep it off.