Skip to main content

A few more cakes

The customer gave me a free rein on this one; as I recall they wanted the "Happy Birthday" and the four names in the corners, and then said, "make it look pretty". So I went for a vaguely mediaeval look. It would have been nice to been able to plan it out on paper first, but I like the general effect.

Nothing super-spectacular here, but I had to get a photo because it came out so perfect! When the icing consistency isn't just right you get airbubbles, lumps or squiggles, but for once all the lines were beautifully smooth.

This design was adapted from one in the book we had at work, but the champagne bottle was all my own work. Adds a touch of sophistication to what would otherwise be a little girl's cake.


This was a big cake - a full sheet, which is something like 13" x 21". Hannah Montana had been a popular design for a while but this lady wanted something different to our regular design. As I recall we had about five separate conversations about the cake, but she was happy with the end result.

These little things are brownie bites. The store used to just sell them ready-packaged, undecorated, but then some bright spark got the idea of decorating them in TCU colours (the local college) for their football game. It was the biggest game they'd played in a while and we sold hundreds. And then it was Christmas. I had fun at first, coming up with cute Christmas designs, but believe me, the magic wears off after the first thousand or so.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks!  I learnt a new word today!  I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian .  Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist.  Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials.  All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal.  That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter.  So why the need for a fancy new word?  Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal.  But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course.  The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Bonnie Prince Charlie Walk: Lees to Derby

These final two Bonnie Prince Charlie walks were quite a contrast: the first across empty fields and along quiet roads; the second crossing from country into city as I walked into Derby. I started both walks at the Great Northern Greenway car park, just off Station Road in Mickleover.  Walk 1 In order to keep walking the Bonnie Prince Charlie way in the right direction, I first found my way back to Lees by an alternative route. The first section, along the cycle path, was well paved. After that it quickly got very muddy. At least it's a popular walk from Mickleover to Radbourne, so it was easy to find the path.  St Andrew's, Radbourne, is rather dominated by memorials. It looks as if the preacher would be hemmed in by tombs!      I liked this bench outside, with the text, "The thoughtful soul to solitude retires". Writing this, I only just realised it was a quote. Turns out it's from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam . The rest of the walk certainly provided solitude,