Viking Helmet Cake

It's the Year of the 40th's...

My lovely big brother will turn the big four-oh in June which means his school mates are turning 40 this year too and so I had the pleasure of making a Viking Helmet Cake for Mark's aforementioned 40th birthday.

I was pretty excited about this one but didn't fully take into account the logistics of attaching rice crispie cake 'horns' to a chocolate sponge 'helmet' before setting about the task... and if I'm honest the whole experience very nearly finished me off... but as I'm writing this you can assume I lived to tell the tale...

[Here comes the all too regular lack of photos apology...]

Sorry, really should've taken some photos of my progress along the way but as ever I didn't think of it until the chances had passed, so you'll just have to imagine what the photos would've looked like if I had taken some if that's ok?

Sooo... just in case anyone's wondering...

First, I modeled the horns using rice crispie cakes* (you can get the recipe and details here) onto plastic cake dowels and let them set in the fridge for half an hour or so; then I smeared them in buttercream to avoid a bumpy rice crispie texture and finally wrapped them in fondant and left them to set (cleverly propping them up in the middle of a couple of rolls of kitchen towel!).  Once the icing had set I airbrushed them both and popped them back into their kitchen roll nests to dry again.

 After carving and covering the chocolate cake, I used a fabulous favourite of mine, the PME Lustre Sprays, to colour it... using both silver and gold as I couldn't decide which would look best...typical Libran!

Once I'd added the details to the helmet I tentatively spiked the 'dowel-mounted' horns into the cake and prayed... unfortunately the universe wasn't paying attention at that moment in time and the horns decided to pay attention to that fiddly gravity type thing and started sinking through the cake!!!  Argh!!!!!!!  I should probably add that this was all happening 1 hour before delivery... and I had to fight my way back from the verge of tears before continuing.

1 hour and counting and I had to totally rethink these horns.  I just couldn't think of a way to support them until I remembered a handy hint that I'd read about a year or so before, and used just the once.  I personally think it's a sneaky little trick and I love it!!  

Basically, you water down fondant icing to the consistency you need, in this case cement/tiling grout, and liberally slap it on the spot you need it and stick!!!  Simple!!

I added some extra support around the base of the horns with some sausage shaped fondant icing, supported the whole lot with those big fat air filled packaging things and stepped away!

Phew!  The horns and their helmet made it to delivery and the birthday boy loved his cake!! Success!!

Here's Marks cake...

 

HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY MARK!!! 

* Known as RCC's in the trade ;)

The Cake Away Collection...!!

The Coloured Bubble Cakery would like to introduce

The 'Cake Away' Collection!

 

The ‘Cake Away’ Collection has been designed to create an 'off the shelf' experience to make ordering a cake for your event or as a gift totally stress-free.

Each 'Cake Away' cake is a 8" sponge of your choice which will feed around 15 people.  They can be ordered with as little as 1 weeks notice for collection only and are priced at £60.

All you need to do is choose your design along with a flavour and your order is complete!

Here are the first designs available, with more designs to be added as soon as I can…

The Animal (colour and age customisable)

The Spotted Gift (colour customisable)

Buttons

Jude's 1st (name & age customisable)

Yummy Strawberry Sponge

Trains (age customisable)

Flavours available to choose from are:

Chocolate & Nutella

Vanilla & Raspberry Jam

Lemon Drizzle

Butterscotch

Coffee Cake

Carrot Cake

Hagrids Hut

I LOVE THIS CAKE!!!

Being an enormous Harry Potter fan I was absolutely thrilled to be asked to make a Harry Potter themed cake for the 6th Birthday of little Abi.

After a few discussions on designs we decided to recreate Hagrid's Hut along with Hagrid himself, & of course Harry, Ron and Hermione.

Carved out of 7 layers of vanilla and jam sponge this cake was pretty big, and easily covered the 20-ish kids at the party... but with Harry Potter joy in my heart I went a bit over the top, I just couldn't help myself!! :)

Here are a couple of close up's of the characters, each of them armed and ready for trouble from 'He Who Must Not Be Named'. 

(I'd like to add that this is based on Hermione before she started plucking her eyebrows!)

and it's yummy innards...

 

  

HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY ABI !!!

 

Knitting Cake

 This cake was made to celebrate Sheila's 80th Birthday.

It's a delicious Vanilla and Jam sponge decorated with a quilted and crimped edge design which is unusual in my work but effective none the less.

Sheila is an avid knitter so the cake was finished with a little square of knitting and a ball of wool in her favourite colour....

HAPPY 80th SHEILA!!

Ladies Bottom (censored)

It's taken me a while to get around to posting this cake on to Facebook, let alone writing a blog post about it, as, although I'm not of the prudish nature myself and neither apparently was this customer, I have to keep in mind that some out there may find this cake offensive  not to mention upsetting the kids.

 It's an 'each to his own' type o' world after all and I feel it's important to declare that cakes can take on all sorts of forms, including, like this one, a lady bending over.

The cheeks are decorated with musical notes to touch on the birthday boy's passion for music as well as bottoms!

I have censored this image to avoid offending anyone... I hope everyone will see the fun side...

I'm not entirely sure that I'd make this cake for my dad... but as I mentioned above... each to their own!?

Boyzie's 60th Boob Cake

To celebrate Boyzie's 50th Birthday his mates all got their heads together and decided that his ideal cake would be boobs, (well he is a man) decorated in accordance with his favourite team... Chelsea.

His mates asked that they be of the extra large variety so I set about comparing pyrex bowls for the perfect cup size and decided that this would be my first boob cake to have nipples on show...

Unfortunately, as this cake was mainly discussed over a pint of cider and a game of darts it turned out that Boyzie's mate Adam had actually said 60th... oops... my bad... luckily I saw Adam in good time to be able to change it to 60th... not in time to retake the photo's but you get the idea..!

 

Sorry Boyzie... 

HAPPY 60th BIRTHDAY!!!

Motley Crue Leather Jacket Cake

This February I had the supreme pleasure of making my lovely friend Paul's 40th Birthday Cake!!

His wife (for all intents and purposes) got in touch a few weeks before hand and asked if I might like to replicate Paul's 'Motley Crue' leather jacket..."of course" I said, "I'd be thrilled!"

So I popped over for a cuppa, chit-chat-catch-up and to pick up said jacket while Paul was out, none the wiser... I knew this was gonna be a challenge but I think my legs went a little bit wobbly when I saw it in the flesh.

Here it is in all it's circa '94 glory... 

An airbrush masterpiece created by Paul's friend Martin in 1994, it's a mighty complicated picture, I had what could be described as an epiphany when I realised that the bottom right hand corner is in fact the characters knuckles but I would still struggle to tell you exactly what's going on in the scene!!

This is the part where I regret not taking more photos of my progress but it was a pretty hardcore hand painting slog lasting approximately 15 hours over 2 stints with plenty of company from friends to keep me sane so it was more a case of just wanting to get it finished on time.  As it was, I ended up having only half an hour to doll myself up, find my purse and get me and the cake to the restaurant... there's nothing quite like taking it right up to the wire eh?!!

Just in case you're wondering...

...I started by making a simple stencil of a few of the main shapes within the picture, I laid it over the icing and painted faintly through leaving a random assortment of lines but even though they made no sense they made it simpler to make sure the main parts of the picture were to scale and in the right place.  

Then I coloured it in...

 I used rough stencils for the wording too, just to give me a hand getting them perfect...

 And here he is, finished and ready to jump in the taxi with me...

 

 This is the Birthday Boy modelling his cakey leathers...

 

And this is its yummy chocolate and Nutella innards...

HAPPY 40th PAUL!!! :) xx