Jude's Fender

If you are a follower of the The Coloured Bubble Cakery on Facebook  or Twitter then you might already know that I am now officially the auntie of a teenager!

Yes, it's true, my wonderful nephew Jude has just turned 13 and of course he had to have a super cool 13th birthday cake to properly mark this moment in his life.

We'd been thinking it over for a few months but ultimately Jude knew exactly what he wanted from the start.  As a talented guitarist (and future rock star) he chose an electric guitar but he wanted it to be designed like an ace of spades because of his love for card tricks... I can confirm that he's always got a deck of cards in his pocket and a trick up his sleeve to amaze & wow us!

I based the cake on a white Fender Stratocaster (mainly because I love painting the Fender logo but also because of it's iconic shape) and set about creating the cake.  It's at moments like these that GCSE maths comes in handy (Jude, note to self!) as I used ratios to create a scale model of the guitar... ridiculously measuring the image on my laptop screen with a ruler and scaling up from there, I'm sure there's probably a more technically correct way of doing this but it did the trick!  Here's the template...

I had intended to buy the cake board in advance but as ever time flew and I was left with a choice of just one suitable board from my local cake supply shop which turned out to be 30" x 18"... it was HUGE!!

Jude couldn’t decide on a flavour so I took it upon myself to decide for him, making the cake a mixture of vanilla & jam, chocolate & Nutella and lemon drizzle & lemon curd, with flavours dotted all over the place so it was a bit of a 'cake flavour lottery' 
when cutting it!  Here's what it looked like naked...!!

And here it is fully clothed and finished...

Jude totally loved his cake...

and of course, cut it in his usual style...

Although he had already been warned about becoming a stereotypical 'Kevin & Perry' teenager, my sister informed me that his first word on the morning of his 13th was "ugh?"... as a joke... cheeky blighter! :)

Happy 13th Birthday JUDE!!!

lots of love, Auntie Rachel. xx

(sorry if this embarrasses you at school!!!)

Personalised Guitar Cupcakes

These cupcakes were designed specifically for Mike's 59th Birthday.

His brother in law ordered them to be based around his 3 guitars, his Fender, his Gibson and his Guild using blue, green, orange and red.  

After throwing a few ideas around we decided to include personalised plectrums!

The Dark Side of the Moon

As a total & utter nutter when it comes to music (both good & bad according to my sister!) I'm always over the moon to be asked to replicate iconic album covers.  
My only beef being that I'm not asked to do it often enough!!

The only time I've been asked for an album over it was for the super iconic Born in the USA featuring the lovely bottom of the lovely Bruce Springsteen!  I very much enjoyed shaping and modelling that one! ;)

This time around I was asked to create the also massively iconic cover of The Dark Side of the Moon... the 1973 Pink Floyd classic.

As you may already be aware, Pink Floyd have a MASSIVE following and I have many a friend that absolutely RAVE about them, in fact it seems that Pink Floyd fans are quite literally everywhere, I felt a huge amount of responsibility on my shoulders to make sure I did it justice so to make sure my mind was in the right place for the job I spun the album as I worked!!

As always, with every cake I make, I like to learn something along the way so with the help of the incredibly informative 'wikipedia' I can inform you all that "The original album artwork for The Dark Side of the Moon was created by Hipgnosis and George Hardie and features a beam of white light, representing unity, passing through a prism, which represents society. The resulting refracted beam of coloured light symbolizes unity diffracted, leaving an absence of unity.".  You just never know when you might need this kind of information!

Anyhoo, that's enough trivia, back to the cake...

It was made with my yummy traditional vanilla sponge filled with lashings of raspberry jam and decorated to celebrate Peter's 50th Birthday...

And here's a little 'taste'imonial from Peter's wife...

"The 'Dark Side of the Moon' cake went down a storm for my husband's 50th party last night! Thank you so much for an amazing looking cake and an incredibly delicious tasting one! Will rave about it to all. Shame we were a little worse for wear to put the CD on!"

The Ferrari of the Tractor World...?!

Now, I'm no expert when it comes to tractors but after discussing this cake with a friend he kindly informed me that this tractor is no less than the Ferrari of the tractor world!!

So with that in mind I would like to present to you the...

Fendt 936 Vario!!!

Made from vanilla sponge and yummy raspberry jam, the Fendt 936 Vario is completely and utterly edible!!

The Sugar Buddha Cake

I'm super excited to tell you all about last weeks Sugar Buddha Cake!

I had so much fun making this one.

The customer was brilliantly specific with their order.  They wanted a square vanilla and jam sponge with a golden laughing Buddha and a bottle of red saying Happy Anniversary Mum & Dad, 60 Not Out!  

So, I set about fashioning a Buddha out of sugar, which I have endearingly named The Sugar Buddha.  

And this is how I did it...

Using white fondant icing mixed with a little CMC (a powder that allows fondant to have more elasticity and set harder) I modelled him starting with his magnificent belly...

...then I added his legs, creating his feet and toes along the way, then covered them to create his lounge pants...

...next I modelled his breasts (for want of a better word) and his arms and hands which started off looking like this...

...again I added more fondant with CMC to create a lovely robe to cover some of his modest breasts and his arms, and then roughly rolled out a ball for his head...

...with one of my faithful modelling tools I sculpted his fabulous laughing mouth, nose and eyes and attached his brilliantly over sized ear lobes...

...next, with black food colouring I painted in all the dark areas and details...

...and finally I sprayed him using the amazingly effective PME Edible Lustre Spray and left him to dry...

We became quite attached during this process and I was sorry to see him go.  He sat on my side until I was ready for him to be stationed on the cake and every time he caught my eye his expression made me chuckle!

Anyhoo, this cake isn't all about Buddha (although that was my favourite part) I also created a tiny little bottle of wine and hand painted 'Pinot Noir 2012' on the label....

All that was left was the golden lettering...

The Carpenters Cupcakes

I have a friend named Angie

She’s really rather handy

At making things

From other things

& I think that’s just dandy!

 Yeah, so I've got this friend, and her name is Angie and she makes things… mainly out of wood, wood that she finds lying around on the streets, outside people’s houses etc, I’m sure you get the idea, the recycled kind.

Angie is amazing; I gave her an old chest of drawers once and found out that it's recently been re-fashioned into shelving for another friends vinyls.  Recycling like that just warms my heart.

In Angie’s house nothing is wasted, while visiting the other day she explained how she’d found a use for a tiny slither of lacy fabric she’d stashed over 30 years ago… two little dolls summer dresses… obviously.  She’s a little bit nuts but I wouldn’t change her for the world.

Then, it turned out that last month while I was considering new coffee table designs, like you do, Angie was also considering what she could possibly make next and during a little get together a new project came about.

Therefore, to thank her for my absolutely perfect new coffee table that I love dearly and to wish her a Happy Birthday I created these cupcakes featuring little tiny carpentry tools.  They went down a treat at the local pub over a beer or two, or three… ummm… I forget the details.

And just so you can appreciate Angie’s handiwork, I present to you, my new coffee table!!!

& here’s a little something from Angie…

“My Birthday Cupcakes were not only a wonderful surprise but tasted as good as they looked. The degree of thought which went into the personalised decoration was awesome, of course you have to know me to appreciate the relevance but that’s what you're great at doing Rachel. BIG THANKS. Angie :-) X”