You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘flowers’ tag.
For my birthday, I decided I wanted a tea party, complete with cute little cup cakes and triangular sandwiches. Originally I was going to buy the sandwiches, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend £20 on a plate of them when I could make them myself for half the price. So R and I made batches of cream cheese and smoked salmon, rare roast beef with horseradish mayo, Belgian ham salad with dijonnaise and cheddar cheese with red onion chutney. Delicious!
But of course, I had to do something with all my cake decorating goodies!
So R and I dyed some fondant with the Wilton paste colours I bought at Hobbycraft, and rolled it out. Then, we used the set of four blossom plunger cutters from PME to cut out these cute flowers.
I also tried out making a patchwork effect on some of the flowers using a spice brown food colouring pen. What do you reckon?
It worked well using that colour on the pink icing, because it turned a slightly darker pink. I’d like to play around with this idea more on other projects.
One of the things I really wanted to try from Peggy Porschen’s Cake Chic was her anemone flower – if you have the book, you might have seen it on the back on the cover. Everything I needed except the veining tool turned up from Jane Asher, but the anemone cutters were much smaller than I had thought they’d be. But as you can see, the flower still turned out pretty well!
I decided to use ivory lustre powder instead of a pink blossom tint on this, and I think it came out quite well! The only thing is, the petals were very delicate and the whole thing got stuck in my palette when I tried to remove it. Totally tragic! But, I like the effect so much I might try doing the same thing with red petals to make poppies. The only things you can’t eat about this flower are the stamens, which are made of wire.
Here are the flowers sitting in the palette, drying off and getting a bit of shape to them. This is just a cheap plastic artist’s palette from eBay, which only cost a couple of pounds including postage, bonus! The perfect shape for little flowers. Don’t they look sweet? I’d leave them here if I didn’t have a load of cakes to decorate!
And here they are! Peggy Porschen’s cupcake and buttercream recipes. Her cake recipe calls for four eggs for 24 cupcakes, which seems like a lot, but works perfectly. Once you’ve baked them, she asks you to soak them in sugar syrup as well, which seems excessive, but does make a nice moist cake. The buttercream is nice, but I think I’m a bit over how sugary it is. It’s a bit toooo sweet.
Here’s one of my patchwork flowers on the top of a cupcake.
It’s so easy to decorate cupcakes with these – the plungers are really easy to use, and although I curved the petals with a boning tool and set them in a palette, you could skip these steps and they’d still sound great (get me, I sound like I know what I’m talking about!).
I’m still not confident about piping on the buttercream – it never looks as good as other people’s, but luckily I think I’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice!
Here they all are – pretty as a picture! But, please don’t look at my poor little anemone… It broke when I tried to take it out of the palette, and also when I tried to put it on the cupcake. Darn it!
Well, I had a lovely birthday thanks to my family and friends, and a great time trying out sugarcraft properly for the first time… I just wish I knew what to do with rose petal cutters!
Here’s a sneaky preview of my weekend’s activities… I’ll post a full report tomorrow!
My good friend Lisa, who lives an hour and a half away from me, and whom I don’t get to see very often, had her birthday a couple of weeks ago, so R and I had the fantastic idea of baking her a load of cupcakes and taking them with us when we went to visit.
So, we got to work. The plan was R would bake the cakes during the day, I would prepare the buttercream and organise cutters, and then we’d decorate them in the afternoon before we drove up.
I made a new recipe for cream cheese frosting, which included delicious shards of caramel, making a great crunchy texture and smooth sweetness to contrast with the cream cheese.
Rachel even made the world’s creepiest and disturbing Care Bear, which to me looks like one of those poignant social services adverts about broken childhoods.
We dyed fondant all kinds of beautiful bright colours, cheerfully telling each other how much Lisa would love to see her gorgeous little cakes, and how much we’d appreciate it if someone made us some kick ass cakes for our birthdays.
Then, when we were halfway through, I remembered something somewhat vital.
Something that, had we remembered before we started, would have been most useful indeed.
The last time we met her, Lisa told us she cannot eat flour.
She’s on a gluten-free diet.
Oh pants.
Sorry Lisa.
We hope you enjoyed looking at the cakes, anyway… Ah, fudge.
Please note, no Lisas were harmed during the making of these cakes, and also note that I did buy her a present she could use, unlike R, who bought her chocolate which now Lisa also cannot eat. We love you Lisa, please forgive us!
One of my favourite things to do is go to our county’s farmers’ market, which is held on Sundays. The best one is held in Winchester (home of King Arthur’s Round Table… sadly not actually the real King Arthur, but still, cool enough!) on the second and fourth Sundays of every month, and man, is it big. There are loads of stalls, selling the best of the produce grown here on the south coast of the UK, where (even though I am biased) I have to say, it’s a little sunnier and warmer than the rest of the country.
The market doesn’t just sell meat and vegetables – there are plenty of stalls selling flowers, cakes, bread, pickles, wine, cider, liquors, hot chocolate… you name it! Although I don’t have money to spend at the moment on beautiful flowers, a picture lasts longer, right? Check out that gorgeous autumnal display at the back!
Although when I went to the market it was at the end of August, autumn was definitely creeping in – I had to take some photos of this gorgeous sugar pumpkin reclining with its bed-mates… right before I bought him, of course.
Pumpkin is one of those things I love but never seem to eat enough of. I would love to eat this beauty in a delicious Thai-style coconut soup… or maybe in a sweet, creamy risotto…
These guys, though, you can enjoy simply cutting off the top, scooping out the seeds and replacing them with a drizzle of olive oil and a dot of butter, plus seasonings, then baking in the oven. They were delicious – and called ‘Little Gem squash’ – how could I resist?
Hampshire also grows some pretty nice blueberries. I love blueberries! Unfortunately, by the time I got mine home, they had fallen out of the open punnet and gone all over the bag. Luckily, I knew just what to do, thanks to Nigella’s Express…
Cook ’em with maple syrup and eat ’em with pancakes, of course… I’ve got three blueberry bushes in my garden, and so far I’ve harvested two berries, directly into my mouth. I think they need bigger pots…
A real Hampshire speciality, though, is watercress. Hot and peppery, it’s a semi-aquatic plant that thrives in what look like overgrown ponds, but are actually watercress fields, I guess. Alresford, Winchester, is supposedly the ‘watercress capital’ of the UK, and there’s even a railway line called the Watercress Line named for it, which used to carry the watercress harvest to London.
Did you know that watercress is one of the oldest known leaf vegetables eaten by man? (Thanks Wikipedia!) In the UK, we don’t just eat watercress in sandwiches. We’re also pretty good at making watercress soup and watercress pesto – and even watercress pate, crepes and shortbread.
Cresson Creative is probably the most prominent watercress seller at the market, and they also have a catering company as well. Their crepes are delicious!
I’m all farmers’ marketed out now, but I still want to tell you all about Isle of Wight garlic (the best!) and my favourite meat and vegetable stalls at the market. Stay tuned!
Distracted Gourmet 