Serendipity Bakes

I love minions! I mean, who doesn't love the little yellow bundles of fun and they're such a happy choice for a children's birthday cake. I had a request for a small (!) birthday cake this week and I promise, I promise, it did start out small! It was for a joint birthday with 3 other boys so they didn't need a huge cake and so I thought hmmm, a 7 inch cake would be perfect. Not too big, not too small. But then I had to make two times the 7 inch cake to get the height and when it was buttercreamed and covered in fondant, it was pretty large. Um, over 2½ kg fondant on this one. And that's a 12 inch board. Maybe not quite as small as I had originally planned!

I'm playing with the best way to cover cakes at the moment and have been experimenting with airbrushing them (starting off with my Darth Vader cake last week). The reason for this is that you're then only covering a light external layer with food colouring and not right the way through the fondant itself as these vibrant colours (like the black of Darth Vader and the yellow of the Minion) need a lot of additional colour to get the richness. Although after I'd knocked over my bottle of yellow airbrush paint for the second time, I was cursing my choice - although this was then tempered by the therapeutic airbrushing so all was well in the end.

The cake itself is vanilla cake with raspberry jam and butter cream and contains two 7 inch cakes stacked with a board half-way through. The base board was covered with fondant, then impressed with a woodgrain effect and handpainted with airbrush paint (I find the Culpitt brand works well for this), finished off with some washi tape.

I really love this cake. But then it's hard not to love a minion :)

This weekend I delivered my very first wedding cake. I had the pleasure of meeting the bride and groom in late summer last year and they spoke to me about their sunflower wedding. We talked about a simple 3-tier wedding cake in white with a handmade sugar sunflower. With a surprising twist of a minion bride and groom on the top! A few requests - the bride had to have two eyes (!) and the groom had to have "Dave combover hair" and wear morning suit. What a challenge!

This cake was enormous compared to anything I've made before- three tiers including 6 inch, 9 inch and 12 inch cakes. I had to clear my fridge out to set the different levels so we've been eating hand to mouth for the last few days. This cake contains 3kg butter, 3.5kg caster sugar, 1 litre cream, 29 eggs, over 1kg chocolate, 1 kg raspberries, 450g egg whites and 4kg fondant amongst other ingredients. Phew! All layers were vanilla sponge soaked in sugar syrup, filled with raspberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream, covered in white chocolate ganache and then a final layer of fondant. The little pearls in between each layer were individual edible pearls placed by hand.

The journey to the venue was the most stressful experience I can remember of late. There were roadworks everywhere and what should have been a 20 min journey turned into an hour of me hung over the back car seats into the boot clutching onto the cake at every twist and turn. But we got there. The sunflower table decorations looked fantastic and were such a sunny, happy choice of flower complementing the pop of the sunflower and the yellow Minions on the cake too.

Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Bourne. I hope you had a truly amazing and wonderfully special day!