Fifteen Followers! Fantastic!!

Very exciting stuff. To celebrate, I am doing three giveaways, one a week, all around the different things I make and do, so you can choose the giveaway that matches your own passion, or try for the hat trick! :)

This week's giveaway is all about cupcakes. There are well over 150 cupcake papers here for every occasion, including the stand alone ones, and five plastic icing bags (they are disposable but also very reusable).

Sorry to my lovely international followers but because this one is quite bulky, it's only open to kiwis. (sorry Duchess!) however, the next two are going to be sewing related and will be open to all! :)

All you have to do is to post a comment telling us all why cupcakes are better than [...] (which can be anything you choose) I will include my cupcake and butter cream icing recipes with the giveaway so you'll have everything you need to get started (or keep making if you are already a cupcake convert like me!)

I'll leave it open until next Sunday kiwitime. International followers and commenters are welcome to join in, you never know, it may get you brownie points towards the next two giveaways! :)

You learn something every day!

This is my mother's favourite tea pot and I have to say it makes a wicked cup of tea. Perched on its handle is a parrot made of fabric lined with some kind of batting. Apparently these were quite common once, as a sort of  'ovenmit' for the hot teapot handle. Who knew! If I had come across a parrot like that, I'd not in a thousand years guess what it was for.

As an aside, I wasn't trying to take a fabulous photo but overall I think it came out really well, don't you? And you can just make out the photographer and her mother reflected in the teapot's surface. :)

And finally...!

The finished cake. It tasted great and went down a  treat. Could have been half the size, but hey, the children of quilters all over Wellington are well pleased that I didn't make it smaller! :)

Exterminate! One mouthful at a time...

I need practice, this one would never be able to take on the world!!!

Followers

I just realised this blog has thirteen followers! I've just decided that when I get 15, I'm doing a prize draw. So if you are lurking and reading but not following, there's an incentive to do so :)

More cake things

 Well I made the rest of the HOF blocks, and took photos of the process. Not all came out, but enough to get the idea. :) 

 

 I rolled the fondant icing out between sheets of silicon baking paper, and trimmed to a 7 inch square.  I then scored the 'patchwork' lines onto it for guidance. Before starting on the red, I painted glitter patterns onto the bits of the white that will be showing on the final piece.

I then rolled out the red fondant in the same way, as thinly as I could, and marked and cut the pieces needed.

These red pieces then got the glitter paint treatment. I love glitter!!!

Lastly, I carefully placed the cut pieces onto the white background, using the score lines to get the positioning right. All done! :)

OK, this is not the same one as you can tell by the different pattern of glitter, but they all look the same otherwise, which is the whole point of scrappy patchwork ;-)

Cake icing meets patchwork!

Wow. I said I'd make an enormous cake for my quilting club's 25th anniversary, and it's this Saturday so I've started already. Our emblem is the Hand of Friendship block, so it made sense to me to use it in a fondant icing quilt, in our colours of red and white. It's also the BOM for the same meeting. My contributions are all going to edible!

The cake is 24" square, divided into 3 x 3   7" blocks and a red border. Five blocks are the hand of friendship, the spacers are white and will have writing on them. Tonight I made two h.o.f's and one plain one.

this is how I did it:

I printed out the words in a nice font, and traced through the paper onto white fondant, pressing hard so the line showed on the rolled out icing.

Then I outlined it with this very cool edible felt pen I got from the cake supply store. They think of everything!

It looks cool like this, but I couldn't leave it alone!

Here I am filling in the outlines with glitter paint. This is just edible glitter mixed with a little gin, makes it east to apply with a brush and the gin evaporates.

I then scoured the icing to look like quilting, and used white glitter to paint some squigglies on the white - it's supposed to look like a tone on tone print.

These I made earlier and forgot to photograph as I made them. I've got three more to make so I may yet do so. It is really easy to do this. Much faster than I thought it would be. The red is fondant icing also, they make it for Christmas, it comes in green too. Amazing!

I may get time to do something else this week! Especially since I have farmed out the actual cake baking. It's actually going to be two cakes, one chocolate and one banana, butted together. MrC is making a BIG cake board for me :)