Chocolate creations

I love chocolate. I love fondant decorated cakes but I'm also a huge sucker for a choc-loaded creation.

This one I did for one of my best friends - a dark chocolate espresso mud layered with coffee buttercream (my new favourite combination), wrapped in a milk chocolate collar with white chocolate curls piled in on top. The chocolate curls took me forever but I love the way they look. I also suspect they get easier as you get the hang of them.

I'm thinking I'll do a variation of this for my birthday cake this year. I say this now but my birthday cake design always changes five or six times before it actually reaches my birthday (there's just so many things I want to try!).

I'm spending most of this weekend on decorations for a beautiful wedding cake I have coming up - here's hoping the rain lets up so I can get the decorations to hold their shape and dry!

Ciao

Happy Easter!

I love this time of year, just starting to get cooler (I love the cold) and there's a string of long weekends on which to enjoy the beautiful weather. Where better to enjoy said weather than the beach! Fish and chips, flip-flops and soaking up the sun!

The family spent a very relaxing Easter long weekend at the beach and the weather was absolutely perfect (well, except for the last day, but by then there was a mountain of chocolate and sugar comas to occupy our time). The beach is with out a doubt one of my absolute favourite places. To celebrate my medium length break, I carted my cookie decorating tools up to the beach and decorated a cute batch of Easter cookies. I love decorating cookies and am in total awe of all the talented decorators out there! It's nice to have the time to try some different techniques and types of icing, and add a few little extra details. These were great practice and a delicious hit with our guests.

When we got home, we discovered the power had been tripped sometime over the weekend had been off for a while - long enough to lose all the food in both our fridge/freezers. grrrr. I refuse to let that ruin the whole weekend :).

Whacked out

I took this picture at an aquarium in Thailand, apparently they're tiny eels (I don't know their proper name and I'm not going to find out what it is cause that would take the fun out of writing this - I hate research).

I currently have it as my screen saver and everytime I look at it, it reminds me of the arcade game where you have a bomby knocker (again, not going to find the proper name) and you whack the crocodiles heads - you know the one?

Obviously that's not what I'm implying should happen here - just an observation :).

Stay cool,

Cookie Bouquet

I love cookie bouquets, they look cute, they're edible and much cheaper then flowers! This was made for a beautiful lady who had her birthday recently. It gave me the opportunity to use some of my new cutters, I particularly love the dragon fly, butterflies and bees popping out from amongst the flowers.

I'm hoping do a few more of these in the future, I have heaps of great ideas to experiment with so stay tuned!!

Cookie Crazy

I finally received my cookie cutter (and other assorted accessories) order from Karen's cookies in the US - these guys have a huge range of cookie and cake stuff and I got totally drawn in on my first visit to their website (there may or may not have been drool involved).

After many weeks of deliberation, lists, more lists (I'm crazy about lists), debating the merits of the large egg cutter vs the medium and numerous visits to the website, I finally settled on my first order (the first of many). This is what I got..............

I'm soooo excited!!! I got the opportunity to use some of my new toys in a cookie bouquet I did this weekend which I'll pop up soon. I'm also planning to give the Easter cutters a go this week, so really, the timing was perfect :).

Later Dudes

Rock 'n' Roll

I made this rad (that's right - rad) guitar cake a couple of weeks back for a 21st rock 'n' roll party. The cake is a carved cherry ripe mud cake - yum yum yum! I've wanted to make an instrument cake for a loooong time and jumped at the chance to do this one. The only problem is now I want to make a matching drum set, microphone, saxophone, trumpet, piano.......tambourine..............

Have a rockin good day

Take Cover

I built this cake cover on the weekend with my awesome Dad (Thank you Dad!!). This is something I've been looking for for ages. Either I'm not looking in the right places or it isn't out there. I want it to cover cakes in the period between when I've finished decorating and when it's picked up/delivered. It's an 20" square by 90cm high (do you like how I change between imperial and metric?). It's because I'm used to talking imperial when it comes to cakes and I wanted it to be able to fit a 20"sq board, but i started talking centimetres when we were thinking about height.

I have plans to paint it/finish it off and perhaps build a set of open shelves for inside for cupcakes/cookies - oh the possibilities. Better let Dad recover from his first day with an apprentice (with no upper body strength) before I brooch any other projects :).

Welcome

I've started this blog to share my sugar adventures!  To kick it off, below are some emoticon cookies I did last week - I've been wanting to try these for a while as the faces lend themselves so nicely to round cookies. These are vanilla sugar cookies, my favourite (although I can't decide if I like the dough or the final product more!) and they're such a good canvas for cute decorations.

Hopefully my photography skills will get better as my decorating ones do!

Happy Saturday!

Courtney