Taking on this cake project is a big reason why I’m not feeling very great at the moment I’m feeling the after effects of taking on too much.

My sister asked me if i could make a cake for her step mother in law’s birthday at very short notice giving me less than a week to plan, bake and decorate. I was surprised that I agreed to give it a go and even more surprised that i managed to actually complete in time. As I was short on time I used a design from the “merehurst introduction to cake decorating” by Joanna Farrow with a few adjustments mainly an extra rose and the adding of a name instead of designing my own.

I hit one major problem whilst decorating this cake and that was the icing of the ribbon dot detailing and the name. I have very little experience in piping icing having only tried it once  or twice before and i don’t even own a piping bag. Unfortunately there was no time to buy one so I ended up using a thick plastic sandwich bag and just cut a hole in the corner at the desired size. Thankfully it worked. I also had some trouble getting a perfect finish partly because of my lack of experience and because I didn’t use the correct equipment. To compensate I used sugar paste watered down till it was soft enough to pipe  instead of royal icing which meant it actually dried slower and then used a small paintbrush to correct any mistakes after I’d finished piping.  

Somehow I managed to complete all 3 Christmas cakes in time. Some went better than others. I just ran out of time to get these exactly as I wanted them.

This one was for my sister Angie, Its a smaller version of the “Stockings” design in the “A cake for christmas part 2″ book by Karen Davies.

This one was made for my nan who takes it to my uncles and aunt’s house for Christmas day. Again its a design from Karen Davie’s book “A Cake For Christmas part 2″ this one being the “Winter Wonderland”.

The last was for us Christmas day as we had my sister Sharon, her husband and children over.This one was my own design “Christmas Pingu”.

How it was made

• The fruit cake had been covered in marzipan. Then I rolled out some sugar-paste using a bowl to cut round to make a circle which I attached to the centre of the cake with edible glue. Then I roughly coated the rest of the cake with Royal icing leaving the centre circle.
• Pingu was made using the same techniques as the penguin’s in the “Winter Wonderland” except I added a round head to the egg shaped body and made the feet from 2 egg shapes of yellow sugar-paste flattened then gently indented in two places at the bottom of the egg to make toes. His wings have also been made longer and been tucked in at the sides. Finely I added his eyes using small balls of white sugar-paste attaching to the head with edible glue and used a cocktail stick dipped in black colourant to add the middles of the eyes.
• The icycles were made from piping royal icing dyed baby blue directly onto the cake, this was my first time using a piping bag and I was running out of time at this point so they could have been a lot better hopefully i’ll get better with practice.