It was our head baker Carol’s birthday last Sunday and of course we created her a rather lovely cake to celebrate the occasion. After a few initial ideas we set our sights on a recipe book themed cake adorned with roses, sweet treats and a rather fancy teacup! We also had to add Carol’s favourite colour purple to the cake’s colour palette to help tie it in with Carol’s birthday decorations and gifts. We didn’t even make her bake the actual cake herself!
We created a lovely little edible teacup with gum paste / modelling paste hand-painted with gold lustre dust edging and detail. Alongside this we also created a matching edible side plate for all of the delicious chocolate truffles to be piled upon!
We have an old tutorial up here to help you create a sweet edible teacup and saucer of your very own!
To add the gold detail with used some gold lustre dust mixed with a little vodka and carefully painted the edges with a fine paintbrush used only for food items. This takes quite a steady hand so practice makes perfect indeed!
Above are our Cherry Macarons, Passion Fruit Macarons and handmade sugar gum paste roses and leaves. We toppled the macarons onto each other and then adorned them with florals to add a nice little touch of whimsy!
For the macarons we created them in sorbet influenced flavours such as Raspberry, Passion Fruit and Cherry to help establish a lovely bright, Summer colour palette; perfect for a June birthday!
We added one of our head baker’s favourite recipes for Lemon Drizzle Cupcakes to her recipe book cake by hand-painting in the illustration and ingredients list. The left side of the book cake displays baking instructions for our fruity Strawberry Cupcakes filled with home made strawberry preserve.
We created a sweet yet cluttered scene with the placement of hand-made sugar roses, hydrangeas, chocolate truffles and edible chinaware!
Making the edible teacup took two hours to cut, shape and paint; it then took some patience and a few days to harden and be ready to assemble and place onto of the cake. A top tip is to use melted white chocolate in a disposable piping bag to seal the joint of the teacup and affix the shaped handle to the side. White chocolate sets fast and keeps a good hold.
Here are some of our Raspberry Macarons filled with a raspberry preserve alongside a fruity Passion Fruit Macaron filled with a lemon curd whipped buttercream.
Some of the extra features on this birthday cake are sugar hydrangeas, a gold painted braid bookmark, hand-painted wood stained board and a lightly ruffled napkin placed underneath the perched edible teacup.
We’re happy to say that we not only had the chance to actually devour a little bit of this cake, but that Carol seemed to be rather enthralled with her birthday cake!
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