Characters are actually one of the most difficult things to do in piped biscuits. You need a whole lot of precision, something that I don’t really have the patience for. If the mouth is 1 degree off its actual spot, the character isn’t quite right anymore.
Fortunately, Peppa and her family is one of the easier characters to do.
Peppa
I love unique gifts, and cookies like these show how far you can go with a personalised and custom-made biscuit.
The lavender is the colour for the Aveeno Baby range. The logo was made with a custom-made stencil and is stencilled directly onto the cookie – no use of edible image prints here. Edible images are useful to get the most accurate representation of a logo, but it can be clunky and you lose the seamless look. If we wanted to make the logo appear flat on the baby onesie, it could have been airbrushed too, but I like the added dimension that stencilled royal icing gives. Because they were handing out 2 each, I suggested to alternate the colours so you have a ‘set’ there and it adds a bit of interest.
The design of any cake pop has to take into account how it will be transported and displayed. If it will just be sitting pretty until someone takes it out of its stand, then I can go all out. In this Snapchat filter cake pops’ case, they were going to be in a clear cello bag with ribbons and handed out as surprises to the guests. I had to reign in my inclination to do gravity-defying feats with the bunny ears and such (though I could not resist making the dog’s ears stand up!)
This floral headband is my favourite of the lot. If only you could see it live, it was soooooo sweet and pretty, They are arguably the most time consuming of the lot too, as those flowers had to be moulded one by one, and placed on one by one with the leaves.
So all this obsession with unicorns and rainbows of late, reminded me that I hadn’t posted this one yet. Fluttershy of My Little Pony, while not a unicorn, basks in rainbows all day.
She is a toughie to make. The hair goes on strip by strip of fondant. The eyes are painted white, then blue, then black, then white and then black is used to outline and add eyelashes. Repeat with other eye.
Luckily this cake I made skipped all that with the use of toys as toppers. For this piece, I loved airbrushing the clouds, or rather airbrushing the sky and adding the subtle gradients. I think nothing beats an airbrush for a sky with clouds.
We specialise in custom treats throughout the year, but at this time of the year, I get requests for a “Christmas catalogue.’ So here it is!
https://popolate.com.au/christmas-2017/
Please remember to place your bookings in early.
In my day, we called these emoticons. I could never remember anything beyond the smile, the sad face and the laugh. 🙂 🙁 :)). Trying to do the devil or the prayer was beyond me.
Nowadays, you get them all animated and at a click of a button. And they even made a movie out of it!
So I’ve done the woodland theme twice recently. The first time involved an airbrushed woodgrain plaque, and the deer and squirrel.
The second time, the birthday boy was one, and while the client was happy with the above design, I suggested making the animals cuter and ‘younger’. I was also dying to make a fox, and successfully persuaded the client to add this animal in. Love this version, don’t you?
Did you know lips are actually harder to pipe than they look? Without that little pull at the corners, or the indent at the center or those curved corners, they just don’t look right, and can end up looking pretty flat.
These were both made for different beauty brands.
So this was a pretty big undertaking for me, not because of its size. I’ve made cakes and I’ve made cookies but I’ve never actually put them together. This is actually trickier than it sounds! Fpr one, cookies take a long time to ice and dry, so I could not quite change my mind when making the cake, as I sometimes would when putting fondant accents on. It’s really quite a unique cake though, not something you see every day and I loved it and so did the client. So grateful she had the faith in me!
Here are some close-ups on the cookies :
Aren’t these colours pretty? These macarons were individually packaged and were a feature at the Revitalising Newcastle booth at the International Convention Centre Sydney.
I’m used to colouring chocolate and fondant to a T, but macarons are harder to colour. Because of the almond content, there is a cream-ish tinge to start with. You also can’t colour correct mid-way through a batch, as you could with the other mediums.
