My first week out!

So its a week since I set up my facebook page and I'm absolutely bowled over with the response I've had, I've been buzzing all week with all the lovely reviews and feedback I've had.  For me its just a hobby that first started when I decided to make B's own smash cake for her first birthday, the photographer Debbie from the brilliant Ollie & George Photgraphy was so impressed by my amateur attempt she has since asked me to do more smash cakes for her, which has ignited my passion for baking.

My first giant cupcake photo courtesy of Ollie & George Photography

Then my in-laws paid for a cupcake decorating class with Niki from The Lemon Tree Bakery who was brilliant and so inspiring egging me on to have a go, she gave me loads of tips for setting up a cake business, which is what I hope to do in the coming months after I've had a new kitchen fitted!

My cupcake lesson

Since then I've been practising by making charity cupcakes:-

Birthday cupcakes:-

Mother's day cupcakes:-

Aside from cupcakes I've done some family birthday cakes I'm especially proud of my nephews cake which is not perfect and I probably need to go back to see Niki for a big cake class!

Then this week its all been about the pop, the cake pop!  Cake rage has occurred at home but they've gone down a storm and now want to try new flavours and decorating ideas, which should please hubby's work as they'll probably be guinea pigs so long as they don't get bored of them!

If you've read my previous post cake pop catastrophe you'll know how stressfull these little balls of lovelliness are to produce but I think there could be a market and so my challenge is to perfect them so eventually they are good enough to sell!

In other news this week there was a smash cake with a Minnie Mouse theme which was challenging technically trying to make a bow.

Up coming this week I've got Easter cupcakes to make and a birthday cake which I'm looking forward to attempting its all a bit secretive as I'm sure they'll be reading this!!

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Easter Cake Pop Catastrophe!

When we got back from holiday hubby sent me a message saying work were having an Easter eggstravaganza to raise money for a local children's charity, this was the brief

So I consulted the oracle that is Pinterest, oh how I love Pinterest I can lose days on there once I get started!  I found lots of lovely cupcake ideas then found some egg shaped cake pops, hubby said "you have to do those" "ok" says I, having only made cake pops once before at Christmas I was up for a challenge.

Making the cake pop egg like was easier than I imagined I used some of those little plastic eggs you can buy at this time of year as a mould rather than trying to shape them by hand.  This is where it starts going wrong, my cake pop sticks were too big for the stand (which would have prevented a lot of what happened next from happening!)  Because I'd bought a 'proper' stand I threw away my scrappy bits of polystyrene I used so efficiently last time.  So I fashioned something out of cardboard which was to sit in a basket for display and had to use that only I'd only put 12 holes in and now had 16 cake pops to set!

I then missed out one vital step chilling the cake pops after putting the stick in - big mistake!  I coloured white chocolate to coat them first blue they worked ok as the chocolate is cream it went a nice duck egg colour perfect for easter.  They were looking ok then started on the yellow thats when they started falling off the sticks!  So I decided to put the blue ones in the fridge to set but they toppled over! Arrrgh!

Finished the yellow got those in the fridge then onto the green, learning from the yellow ones I put them in the fridge to set a little, these were by far my favourite four pops the green was the perfect colour and so spring like!

Then I tried the pink, oh how I wish I hadn't even started with the pink.  For some reason the food colouring went into blobs and speckled the chocolate instead of changing its colour (I'll have to look into what caused that)

Then I remembered I'd got some pink candy melts I'd once bought and never used somewhere on the shelf.  these seemed to take ages to melt then when I put them on the cake pops it seemed to form a skin and slid off in chunks, it wasn't pretty, but I persevered and got all 16 pops into the fridge.

Time for a brew, got milk out of fridge and checked on the pops all four of the pink ones had cracked!  

I went to bed!

This morning when I got up there was sprinkles everywhere before I even tried getting them into the basket, anyway I got them in and hubby is pleased you'll notice I didn't use any of the pink ones!

 Now the task was for him to get them to work in one piece, he'd not been gone 5 minutes when I got a phonecall saying they'd toppled at the first roundabout!  Anyway seemingly he's got there with them only toppling another once he had to seatbelt them in!  I'll redeem myself by sending some cupcakes on Monday!

Edit:- they'd all gone before 10.30! With requests for more! 😊