A couple of weeks ago I made a test Anemone Cake for a lady who asked me to make a cake for her mother’s 60th birthday.  The test cake was well received, but a few changes were requested.  She requested a marble mud cake, and that the Anemone Flowers be dusted yellow instead of pink.

I made the flowers, covered the cake board and cut out the message on Sunday night.

I baked the marble cake on Wednesday night.  I used one batch of the Planet Cake Chocolate Mud Cake recipe and two batches of the Planet Cake White Chocolate Mud Cake recipe and combined the two in a 10 inch round tin.  It took 3 1/2 hours to bake!

I ganached the cake on Thursday night and finished the decorating on Friday night.

The cake was collected on Saturday morning and I think she was happy with it!  I was pretty pleased with it as well!

Anemone Cake

Anemone Flowers

xo, Laura

I have just spent another weekend at Planet Cake!  I was enrolled in Planet Cake Basics 103, which is a two tier square cake with a magnolia flower and bamboo.We started on Saturday morning with cutting and ganaching the two square cakes.  This was the most stressful part of the course for me - I definitely need more practice ganaching square cakes!  After lunch we spent the afternoon colouring our icing, making the bamboo and making the magnolia flower petals.

The next morning we started off with covering the two square cakes with fondant.  Again, I found this pretty stressful and I’m not entirely happy with it, but I just need to keep practicing!  We spent the afternoon wiring the magnolia flower, inserting dowels and assembling the cake, making and sticking on the textured band and the other finishing touches!

My next Planet Cake course is in September and is three tiers… I don’t know what I’m going to do with three tiers of mud cake!

Everyone's completed cakes

My cake

Close up of magnolia flower and bamboo

xo, Laura

Last week, a lovely lady asked me to make her a cake for her mother’s 60th birthday in August. I immediately said no, because I haven’t made cakes for anyone other than my family and I would be terrified that I would ruin it.  She then suggested if I am worried, to make her a test cake.  She wanted a simple, elegant one tier cake in black and white to feed 30 people.

Initially I though I would make a black and white version of the exploding stars cake that I have made a couple of times, but I didn’t think it was very elegant, so I decided to make a version of the Anemone Cake in Peggy Porschen’s book, Cake Chic.

I was sensible with this cake, doing a little bit every night. On Tuesday night I created my flowers, on Wednesday I made the cake and ganache, on Thursday night I ganached the cake, and on Friday morning I covered and decorated the cake.  No panicking or rushing at all!

I also discovered when making this cake that a good mud cake recipe is hard to find, and that they are quite difficult to bake.   The first cake I baked was quite shallow, and the second cake had deep cracking!  I have a bit more experimenting to do!   I also discovered that dark chocolate ganache is much easier to work with than white chocolate ganache – it sets so hard and so much faster!

I am doing Planet Cake Basics 103 next weekend, so stay tuned for the next update!

xo, Laura

I am registered for a Planet Cake Basics 103 course in a couple of weeks and I always get a bit nervous before going, worried that I won’t be able to keep up, so I thought I would practice my skills learnt at Basics 102 and make a square cake at home.

My birthday is coming up soon and I have been thinking about what I would like as a present and I have been eyeing off a necklace on the Tiffany & Co website, so with Tiffany & Co on the brain, I just had to make a Tiffany Box Cake!  It is a white chocolate mud cake with white chocolate ganache.

I ganached the cake on Saturday afternoon and covered it with fondant on Sunday morning.  Even though I thought I ganached it quite well, when I covered it in fondant I just couldn’t get the corners sharp!  After that I kind of gave up and just rushed the rest of the decorating!  I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore so I gave it to my grandmother to eat!

Hopefully I will improve on square cakes after the course!

xo, Laura

Our latest project at Cake Decorating Central’s Thursday night class was the Native Flowers Cake.

We spent the first seven weeks creating native flowers and then we iced and assembled the flowers on the last week.

I really enjoyed making this cake because I find making flowers so relaxing!

I love the way this cake has turned out!  I think our next project is a three tier wedding cake so I’m very excited about that!

xo, Laura