Ana's Birthday celebrations

I LOVE a tea party so when my friend Julianna asked me to help create a garden tea party for her daughter Ana's 6th Birthday I said ABSOLUTELY!!!


There was lots of yummy food to eat - plates of fruit, sandwiches and some yummy sweet treats.

Here's the sweet stuff...

I decorated cupcakes with little crowns on top and tri-colour swirl buttercream icing.

Biscuits were made as thank you gifts for the party guests with custom tags.

 

Little sandwiches cut out in the shape of crowns.

 
 The Cake
I had seen this icing technique and have been wanting to try it out for a while so this seemed like the perfect opportunity

and on the inside.....

 .....3 yummy pink layers - all different shades (another technique I've been wanting to try).


The decorations were kept quite simple.  The party was held in the yard of my church which has a lovely big overhanging tree.  We held a ladies high tea there recently and I'd made a bunch of tissue paper pom poms to hang from the tree.

 There were little handmade touches like these cute little personalised bonbons which held little gifts for the party guests.

Everyone had a wonderful time including the Birthday girl!

 Happy Birthday Ana...xxxooo

Birthday celebrations and two-tone icing tutorial

My little man Nathaniel was 5 yesterday!!
It seemed like he had a week long celebration with cupcakes at preschool Wednesday then cupcakes at Early Intervention Friday then more cake with the family yesterday....he loved it!

Here are the cupcakes we took to Early Intervention.

The group had really loved reading a fire engine book earlier in the week and always love the fireman puzzles so we went with fire engine cupcakes.


I wanted to make the icing look like fire so I used yellow and red two tone icing.  The fire engine was made from fondant and white chocolate

How I made the two tone icing:

1.  Mix up two (or more) different colours of icing (I just used a buttercream icing).

2.  I used a medium star nozzle with my piping bag (see pic below).

3.  I then spooned one colour down half of the piping bag and the other colour down the other half.  

I forgot to take a photo so I drew up this diagram of what it kinda looked like when I put the icing in the piping bag, although mine was nowhere near as neat as this...

NB.  I have seen some tutorials that put the different coloured icing into separate piping bags (that don't have nozzles) and then put those bags into another piping bag (with nozzle) and pipe that way which probable gives a more uniform finish but seems like too much cleaning up to me.

4.  Pipe out some icing (onto a plate or small bowl) until the desired two-tone effect comes through.

5. Starting from the outside of the cupcake, spiral around until you reached the centre. 

NB.  If it doesn't come out how you want, just scrape it off and try again.



Here are the cupcakes that Nanny made...

Nathaniel just LOVES Mario so Nanny (and Poppy) printed out some Mario images, laminated them and stuck them onto sticks to make Mario cupcake toppers (and because Nanny is so good she did 3 colours in her icing).  The best thing was they made 2 of each image so now he has a set of Mario cards that we can play snap or memory with....great idea Nanny and Poppy!!

The last cake was a dinosaur cake to have with the family after dinner...

The dinosaurs were shaped from fondant....and didn't last very long!

poor dinosaur!

Well we are definitely caked out for the time being!  luckily we have another couple of months before our next birthday celebrations. 

If the instructions aren't clear or if you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment.

Happy creating!!

Creating.....cupcakes!

Well Charlotte's 1st birthday is coming up very soon and so I got to thinking I might have a go at making her birthday cake or some cupcakes for it - so yesterday I made up a batch of cupcakes and decided to have a trial run.

I have always wanted to try making the little edible roses so off I went and came up with these...

Still needs some practise but not too bad for a first timer (I thought anyway).

I had been to a wedding expo last weekend and saw some embossed cupcakes and thought what a great idea - so I got out my cuttlebug embossing folders, some stamps (all freshly cleaned of course), cookie cutters and some ready-made icing and got experimenting.

and here's the results.....

I love how they turned out and they were so much fun to make.

Will definitely be making some for Charlotte's birthday!

Have a great weekend!!