Little Lamb

When I bought this Cuddly Lamb Pan from Pastry Pro at 50% off, I had no idea when I was going to use it, just like all my other tools. So, when Yan suggested that I bake a lamb-shaped cake for Quan since he loves his little lamb so much, I quickly agreed.

Many years ago, I bought Yan and Quan each a little lamb soft toy from New Zealand. Yan's little lamb is still in fairly good condition as she takes good care of it. Quan on the other hand, plays with it all the time as he claims that the little lamb is his favourite amongst his many soft toys. He throws the lamb down the stairs, sit on it, squash it and hugs it too. That's how a boy treats his favourite toy. His lamb has lost all its "wool" and has become a grey lamb instead of its original white. Hope that he likes this lamb too.

Kyra's Teletubbies

Kyra is turning 2 next week but mummy and daddy wanted this cake so that she can "tumpang" her cousin's birthday party today. After all everyone from daddy's family will be there. I understand that there will be another celebration with mummy's family. Lucky girl :)





According to daddy, Kyra is into teletubbies. Got this picture from the internet and made them in advance. As this request came with short notice, there wasn't enough time to let the different colours dry completely. Some of the red colour spread to the green and yellow. Had to do some touch up and wasn't really please with the outcome. Pipe stars all over the cake and that took me the whole night! Can see some gaps between the stars :( Definitely need more practise. It's easier when working on a small surface and showing the right way to my students. But when your hands are tired, things won't be that perfect, I've discovered.



Well, daddy and mummy looked please when they picked up the cake. Hope that they will like the taste too.



Have not been getting enough sleep over the last 2 weeks. Made 6 cakes during this time. I'm surprise that suddenly there are so many requests. Today's cake is the last of the 6. Am very tired but at the same time very satisfied. Time to go to bed. Good night.

Goody Bag n Shopping Frenzy

When I agreed to make these 2 cakes, I kind of broke some "rules" that I made for myself. Firstly, I do not deliver cakes on weekdays due to my work schedule. Secondly, if it is the first time that I am making the cake, I will make them twice. One is for practise and the second one is for delivery. But this time round, I did not have the luxury of time.

When you get to know this colleague of mine, you will discover that it is very difficult to say no to her. Hence, I broke my own ruke. One of her daughters, Airina, will be celebrating her 9th birthday but she needs 2 cakes because the other daughter, Izzati, also wants a cake on her sister's birthday. I understand that when it's Izzati's birthday, Airina also wants a cake. So, it's always a double celebration. We talked about many different themes and design and she finally picked Debbie Brown's designs. And she wanted the cake on a Friday so that she can have the party on Satuday in Seremban where she lives.

I made in advance whatever that I could because I knew there was a lot of work to be done and I don't have much time on week nights.... been going to bed only after 12 every night. Even then, by 2.30am on Thursday night... Friday morning rather, I still had not assemble the little girl. I decided to leave that to the next morning as I would be on leave. It was a last minute decision to take the morning off and am I glad that I did!

When I woke up in the morning, to my horror, all the upright shopping bags toppled and there were creases and cracks on the bags. Surprisingly, I did not panic. Just told myself to re-do lor.... I guess I was too zoombiefied to panic. I did all I could to fix the bags but the humidity in my home was working against me. Didn't even think about switching on the air-con. hmmm... the effect of lack of sleep... couldn't even think properly :)


I felt so bad about the condition of the 2nd cake that I wanted reduce the price but I really couldn't as I was only charging her "friendship" price. My colleague was so nice that she didn't appear upset when I explained the situation to her. Surprisingly, she said that we'll try another design next time.


When the other colleagues saw the cake, one of them said that he wanted me to make a Coach bag cake for his wife. I was speechless.... these people has too much faith in me la.... How am I going to make one?

The next time, whatever I make, I'll make sure that I abide by my first rule ie. to make on weekends only. If it doesn't turn out, I'll still have ample to fix them :)

Car Cake

This car pan of mine has been sitting in my kitchen cabinet for over a year now. It finally made its debut some 2 weeks ago.

As this is the first time that I have used this pan, I wasn't sure how to decorate it. Decided to use some green fondant left over from class to cover it. The cake looks kind of fat, like a volkswagon.

Here's the view from the side.

Sent this cake off to my brother's place for the kids to enjoy. Too bad, the older kids were not around.Only Hao and mum my were at home.

Hao, being his usual self just smile...... and smile :)

I thought mummy was more excited seeing the cake. She went "wow....... car..... car cake.....nice..."

I'll take that as the reaction from the older kids :)

Cake Order from office

My colleague ordered this cupcakes for her boyfriend’s 27th birthday. She specifically requested for purple swirls with silver decorations. At their party, each one of them ate 2 pieces. Am glad that they liked the cupcakes.

Here’s another order from the office.

In my current office, we always buy a cake from Secret Recipe across the road to celebrate the birthdays of my office mates. My boss had said many times that the next cake will be made by me. I agreed provided the cake is delivered on a Monday so that I have enough time to bake on Sunday. This order was initially for a Monday but was postponed to Thurs as one of the birthday girls was on leave.

Bake the cake after I got home from work. Could only start decorating the cake after the cake has completely cooled and slept at 1am that night! Turned out that they like the cake very much both in terms of look and taste.

Another colleague has place an order for cupcakes …. Will update once done.

Chocolate banana cake

Finally, I am using this tool that I bought some months ago, to make chocolate fence to decorate my cake.

I made a banana cake and frosted it with chocolate whipping cream and covered the sides of the cake with this chocolate fence. And added some flowers on top.

A few months back, I saw Martha Stewart making this cake which she called "Secret Garden". The top part of the cake was actually a flower bed with a variety of flowers and a "pebble" walkway. The garden even comes with a garden hose to water the flowers! Since then, I have been looking for some thing that I can use to make the fence. I even bought some Rocky biscuits to make the fence. But that didn't really look nice. And finally, I found this chocolate mould that comes in the shape of fence sticks. All I had to do was to melt the chocolate and pour it into the mould. When it hardens, stick them all around the cake.

Fondant Flower Cake

Kelly dropped by at my place recently and I showed her what I've been doing lately. They were going to celebrate her daughter's birthday the following week and decided to buy a cake from me. When her daughter saw this cake, she like it very much and wanted this design for her cake. Mummy Kelly even asked her if she like the bee hive cake. She didn't want that.

So, here's Jo Earn's flower cake....Happy Birthday Jo Earn!

Hazelnut Coffee Cake

In November, we celebrated BL and Nancy's birthday. Over the last couple of years, we've made it a point to meet up in the month of one of our birthdays. As each one of us have our families and careers that take up so much of our time, it takes effort to make this gathering happen. Sometimes, we have full attendance, sometimes not. Without fail, there's always lots of food and lots of sharing and educating each other in dealing with husband, kids and our all time favourite ...... MOTHER-IN-LAW!!. I really wonder what makes a woman so mean after she has been upgraded to the status of mother-in-law and/or grandmother. And the funny thing I noticed is that, mothers-in-law are only mean to their daughters-in-law and not to their sons-in-law. Is it true? Or is it because men don't talk about this kind of things to their friends, or they just couldn't be bothered? Anyway, these sessions are really therepeutic especially for my fulltime homemaker friends.

Now, back to the cake. I learned to make this cake in Homechef a couple of months back when I wasn't working. Instead of using Boncafe coffee powder, I've replaced it with Nescafe Gold. This coffee powder makes the cake so fragrant that you just want to eat it right away . I'm not a coffee drinker, but I just love this cake especially the streusal topping.. The coffee aroma blends well with the hazelnuts ...... giving us a satisfying end to our get-together session.

Castle

Inspired by the recent theme in Wilton's 2008 year book, I have suddenly become so ambitious to attempt to make this cake. As usual, the process took longer than I expected. At the end, instead of following the exact pattern provided in the year book, I came up with my own simplified version.

Everything was made from scratch, which explains the long process. The castle towers and flowers were made in advance to allow them to dry and harden. The rest of the decorations were made and assembled on the same day itself. The ice-cream cone that I bought were not exactly even, making the towers look tilting at certain angles. I had a hard time piping in the stars on the cone at an upright position.

At the end of the day, it's another mission accomplished for me. Having learned the right method, I believe it is possible to make the cakes in any design. Just need some inspiration and lots of creativity :)

Lightning McQueen

“Car-car eye”, that’s Lightning McQueen to my nephew, Guan Yu. He really-really loooooves this car very much. He has got several t-shirts printed with all the car characters from the movie Cars, which he will wear most of the time. Of course, as in the movie, his hero is none other than the red car Mcqueen. He’s even got McQueen on his pyjamas!

AB’s and JF’s sons are also very fascinated with this car. AB’s son has been asking her to bake a McQueen cake for his birthday. And JF’s son has several car toys and a poster with pictures of all the car characters. I guess it must be because of the “eyes” that kids love the cars so much. I supposed that’s how “Car-car eye” came about :)

So when my sister came visiting recently, I decided to bake this cake for my nephew as a surprise. Yes….. he was surprised and was speechless and used his hands to gesture his mum to come over to look at the cake. My sister knew about this earlier, of course.

I used the filling-in method to create the car and frost the cake with fresh cream. The car breaks when the cake was cut as it was made of royal icing. I felt “sayang” to see the car break and thought that my nephew would feel the same and not allow me to cut the cake further. On the contrary, he wasn’t and he said “Never mind, cut cake is like that wan…”. Now it was my turn to be surprised! I couldn’t imagine that coming from a 5-year old kid. Ha…..kids nowadays are so smart, they grew up so fast ….