Oh la la! What a stunningly glamorous spread our Peony Ruffle Wedding Cake was featured in recently! We’re honoured to have one of our stunning bespoke wedding designs grace the glossy and chic pages of Bridal Guide magazine over in the USA. Our gold sequin embellished cake was featured in Bridal Guide’s November/December 2015 ‘Shine Bright’ inspiration spread alongside luxurious designs and products by Guerlain, Deux Lux, Marchesa Bridal and Kate Spade!
Our work in Bridal Guide magazine USA!
We created this gold sequin encrusted cake finished with our signature hand made sugar peonies, berries and leaves last March and so far it has been listed on various blogs and onlinearticles, featured in a book, re-posted and share a number of times on social media, garnered so many emails and phone calls asking about it, found its way into the pages of Wedding Cakes by Squires Kitchen, and Bridal Guide; plus it’s also scheduled to appear in a few more magazines later in the year.
Design-wise this cake was inspired by the current (and hopefully non-ending) trend for gold and golden sequins that have been adorning everything from high-end couture gowns to chic yet affordable notebooks. Of course, if you read our blog enough you’ll know how much we freaking love the colour gold (seriously, its too much of a luxurious and stylish colour to pass up on). We were obviously over the moon when we got the chance to design and make this cake from scratch. The happy couple came to us with such amazing ideas, colour palettes and style-inspiration and we’re more than delighted that this beauty got the amazing feedback and features it did! Everything from the delicate pink fondant ruffles, hand painting the gold sequins and arranging the blush pink peonies and pearlescent dusted berries was a joy for us!
What a way for us to kick start 2016! Not just one, but two of our most popular cakes from 2015 just so happened to be featured in the pages of the exquisite Wedding Cakes magazine by Squires Kitchen. It’s such an honour as this publication obvious has some damn high standards… plus it’s one of our favourites! You can pick up a copy at most magazine aisles (in the UK), grab an online digital copy via the Apple store, or even order it direct from the publisher.
Our work in Wedding Cakes magazine!
Our Black/Pink Forest Gateau Naked Cake graced the side of the introduction (or editor’s letter) as well as a full page at the beginning of the ‘naked cake’ section. This pretty wedding cake was like a cherry explosion! It’s a chocolate cake filled and smoothed with a vibrant pink Kirsch infused buttercream and adorned with Picota cherries, cherry flavoured macarons (Cherry Ripple and Sour Cherry), lovely pink roses and plumes of rosemary sprigs!
Whilst our Peony Ruffle Wedding Cake with Gold Sequins can be found nestled in amongst other beauties in the ‘luxe’ section of Wedding Cakes magazine! Oh la la! This creation featured the still popular hand painted gold sequin effect along the two top tiers with a toppled look on the third. A burst of pink was added along the bottom tier with textured fondant ruffles. The design was then finished with our signature handmade open sugar peony flowers!
NOTE:To anyone who has found us via Wedding Cakes magazine please note that the issue lists us as being located in the Greater London area which unfortunately is a misprint. We are in fact located in Hull and Yorkshire. We’ve had quite a number of enquires by phone, email and social media from people in the London/Reading/Essex area which we’ve had to sadly turn away.
2015 is nearly over folks and it’s been one crazy and amazing year for us! We found our designs featured on even more stunning glossy magazines and ‘book’azines, booked in some pretty exciting wedding cakes for 2016 (VERY limited dates available now), made some very important (yes top secret) business decisions, and designed some damn gorgeous wedding cakes too.
We have a few favourite cakes of the year and to start the list above is a super pretty cake we created based on the simple idea of pearls and a floral crown! Every single flower, berry and leaf was hand made and fully adorned the base of the crisp white cake. To add a little texture and interest we hand piped lots of scattered royal icing swiss dots from the top downwards before painting each individually with edible lustre.
We kick started the year as cover stars on the 2015 Spring issue of Cake Decoration Heaven magazine with our super cute afternoon tea bunny cake design! It was such an honour to have our little birthday cake grace the cover of such a fabulous magazine. We have to admit that we hovered around the magazine aisle in awe armed with our cameras and iPads snapping away. Other amazing publications our work was featured in for 2015 include… Brides, Wedding Cakes Magazine, other creative issues of Cake Decoration Heaven magazine and World’s Best Wedding Cakes by Amy Doak!
Another really exciting thing we did this year was to shut down the cake decorating supply side of our business, put our website on indefinite hiatus and concentrate on making our marketing and branding utterly perfect for us and what we want to achieve. We hired a few graphic design/branding companies, but in the end we created everything ourselves (yes, we’re those people). Felicity was left hunched over her MacBook for a cringeworthy number of hours a day for a few weeks trying to remember all those CAD and Photoshop lessons from fashion school. It was trying, but it sure was worth it in the end. Our new sparkling logo, watermarks, blog re-design, social media graphics are fabulous and we love them. Our design direction needed to be bright, light-hearted, fun, approachable and of course glamorous!
2015 was also all about finding and establishing a better rhythm in terms of work. We designed our own worksheets such as consultation forms, order invoices and blog work planners! It really helped for us to scrap our old way of keeping information and pay closer attention to how we actually work. It was also pretty cool to have our work sheets and forms match our company branding. We had to stop at gold foiling everything though or else we’d never get any actual work done!
This year, photography-wise, we utilised natural light a lot more as our photography room/studio moved over to a western facing room with super large windows. We’d relied on bright professional photography lights to get shots in overcast weather or on night times in the past, but by simply moving rooms we get to shoot things au natural!
The above two cakes (Peony Ruffle Wedding Cakes and Black Forest Gateau Naked Cake) were by far our most popular designs in 2015. We lost track at some point in October by just how many enquires and press requests we had for them. December, in fact, saw our Black Forest Gateau Naked Wedding Cake in two HUGE magazines at the exact same time (Brides by Condé Nast) and Wedding Cakes (by Squires Kitchen - which also featured the Peony Ruffle Cake).
One of the proudest moments of our year was having 6 of our designs featured in Amy Doak’s World’s Best Wedding Cakes bookazine! It’s positively crammed full of incredible cake artists whose designs we love so it was amazing for our wedding cakes to be nestled amongst the work of some huge names in the industry. We were also lucky enough to have a tutorial for our signature sugar peony featured as well as a beautiful write up with one of our past couples. We created a wonderfully pretty and vintage inspired cake for Ann-Marie and Adrian’s wedding with handmade hydrangeas, roses, blue tit birds and broderie anglaise lace trims a couple of years ago. It was amazing to read all about their big day and about how much they love/loved their cake. It’s still one of our favourites!
One half of Juniper Cakery (Felicity) celebrated her 32nd birthday this year with a pink and gold naked cake that perfectly matched our brand spanking new logo and branding look. Adorned with pink Eliza roses, golden silk eucalyptus leaves and dotted with dainty pink and gold macarons this beauty would have been perfect if we were having a re-launch party!
Of course we just had to feature the very last wedding cake of 2015 that we made - a winter influenced macaron tower cake. Not just because it was the last cake of the year for us, but because we absolutely love it. It encompassed winter perfectly for us. Not only was its colour palette soft, frosty and beautifully vintage but every element of the design filled us with excitement. Glistening silver sequins, festive macaron flavours (Pistachio and Cherry and After Dinner Mint), quirky and stunning flowers - all wonderfully winter-esque.
We’re sure we’ll have missed a thing or two in this end of year post, but 2015 was fast paced for us and now we’re super excited for 2016. We’ve already lots of amazing couples and designs booked in, a few magazine features in the pipeline and we’re like a two woman army in terms of organisation already! So now it’s time to bid farewell to the past year, drink a bit of champagne and power through 2016 like never before. We hope everyone enjoys a fabulous New Year and 2016!
We’re so excited and honoured to kick-start the new year with our afternoon tea bunny rabbit cake gracing the Spring 2015 cover of Cake Decoration Heaven - by far one of our very favourite cake decorating and baking related magazines! We created this cake back in November of 2014 amidst a rather hectic work schedule full of festive designs from Christmas tree cookies to Frozen themed birthday cakes. A pretty spring inspired birthday cake was a little break for us despite our extreme love of everything winter-related.
Cake Decoration Heaven is a fantastic magazine to pick up if your any level of cake designer. It’s full of ideas, projects and tutorials, industry news and it’s one of the most on-trend cake design magazines we’ve had the fortune to read. To purchase an e-copy or e-subscription make your way to Apple’s AppStore or GooglePlay and search ‘Cake Decoration Heaven’.
Our tea themed design took a lot of inspiration from the frivolities of spring and Easter. For us this meant lovely pastel macarons toppled and scattered around, delicately piped clusters of royal icing swiss dots, a light and airy colour palette, afternoon tea paraphernalia and of course… a playful little rabbit!
Creating gum paste edible teacups is, of course, one of our favourite decorations to make. It involves a little bit of waiting about and a very steady hand, but the end result is always nice to see. In the initial designs (which involves a teacup perched on a pink cake strewn with sugar blossoms, berries and macarons) we felt that it needed something that would make the cake appeal to both adults and kids so a little edible character seemed the most logical solution.
In late 2013 DK Books/Publishers approached us with a list of popular kids’ birthday cake ideas for their new book, Step-by-Step Kids’ Birthday Cakes, and we were more than happy to design and create a small collection of vibrant and playful cakes; perfect for children’s parties! Eight months on and now we can finally reveal our hard work… so without further ado here are the four designs we created featured in Step-by-Step Kids’ Birthday Cakes edited by Karen Sullivan which you can order via Amazon here.
Here’s a super fun and cute dinosaur egg cake we created. It’s covered with fondant and features some very novice hand-painted work along with some playful edible accents such as the tale, head and spots. To add an extra sweet touch we added a small piece of ‘broken shell’ out of fondant to perch atop of the baby dinosaur’s head!
Above is a snap of our candy train cake. We think this design would be perfect for anyone who is a beginner/intermediate level cake decorator. Toppling bright jelly beans, chocolate beans, and cookies onto each cargo carriage is a fantastic way to decorate a kids’ birthday cake!
This simple yet detailed soccer themed cake is great for a sports themed party. Adding a fondant scarf around the base is a great way to incorporate the lucky recipient’s favourite sports team!
Here’s our playful and vibrant circus tent cake; perfect for little kids’ parties. We loved the idea of having some very iconic circus characters popping out of the big top so we designed the tent to ‘open’ and feature a lion, bear, clown and elephant all smiling out of the front. We also wanted to add an extra playful feature so we created fondant balloons with floral wire string to be attached to the side as though floating up into the air!
Get hold of a copy of this book now to begin whipping up some fantastically bright and fun kids’ cakes for your next party! This book also includes lots of helpful tips, explanations and handy advice perfect for novice to intermediate decorators.
