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.
One of the first character cake pops I did was Ninjago cake pops. My eldest was a big Ninjago fan then, and it was the craze around school. Strangely enough, I’ve never done a traditional ninja till now, a good 6 years later. I decided to do the ninja as a pure cake pop, sans fondant.
Ninja ‘stars’ aka shuriken cookies were also requested. These were hand-piped, then painted with edible silver paint.
A brand new Playtime at Chatswood Westfield celebrated its opening by having a special VIP night. Stormtroopers were striding around and playing table hockey – it was very cool, I tell you.
It was also uber cool *ahem* because they served Mario and Luigi and Mushrooms and Star cake pops.
We made a lot. You’d be surprised how long it takes. I was surprised how long it takes.
If you have seen those endless pictures of tall double-barrel unicorn cakes with the golden horn and black lashes, I’ve finally made the cake pop version.
The client ordered unicorn cake pops, cookies and cupcakes all in the same matching pastel theme.
This theme appears very popular – Bob the Builder must be still going strong! It isn’t the first time I’ve done these safety hat and safety cone cake pops.
I send off hammer cookies in fear though. Any cookie with a narrow long stem is at risk of breakage. Flamingos are another notoriously fragile one when their long necks are. Although every cookie is at risk of breakage during transport, I find it personally affronting when any of my products fail to arrive in the condition they were sent off in!
To reduce the risk, I suggested reducing the amount of hammers in the mix, and I also sent off a few extra hammers. She reported only one broke, so that happily means all cookies were accounted for!
When someone called up and said they wanted the coconuts from Moana, I was like, “Huh?” I loved Moana, I thought it was one of the best animations I’d seen in a while. But of the life of me, I could not recall any coconuts. After the client showed me a picture, still nothing rang a bell!
My memory must be going because apparently these coconut pirates are really popular.
Oh, how I loved making this set! I am a huge fan of Dr Seuss. Okay, maybe I got a bit tired of the Sleep Book after reading it zillions of times to my kids and secretly wished the book would disappear for a bit (hey, that is one loooong bedtime book!) but he is still very close to my heart. The backdrops to the cookie and cake pops are well-worn books pulled from my library.
The challenge here was making them look ‘drawn’, just like on the book covers. Also, because there are no Cat in the Hat shaped cookie cutters in the market, the cookies had to be hand-cut.
