The Insane month of March

This month has been a bit crazy! Ok more than a bit.

I've got two freelance jobs going on at the same time, and I like both, but I'm kinda kicking myself for it now. Achy hands at the end of each day >_<

Plus I have the craft fair, and a baby shower cake for family, which I really REALLY wanted to do. Why do I do this to myself? Overachiever much? Oh well I think I may be taking some serious time off after all this is done. :D

For the craft fair I decided to try and get a dummy cake together, just to have a nice display. It's the first dummy cake I've done since cake school really. I should do more of these. I'm not entirely satisfied with the design, but I'm kind of fascinated by the metallic trend with cakes going on right now and I wanted to give it a try. :P

I really do love how the anemones turned out though. Maybe I should just go into making gumpaste flowers!

My Wedding Cake - part 5

Here are some pics of my finished wedding cake! Everyone really enjoyed it, and I had fun making it!

This was a whiskey sponge cake with rum buttercream icing and mango curd in between each layer.

Flowers!

My Wedding Cake - Part 3

Lots of sugar flowers being made!

For our cake I chose the hibiscus (for the Caribbean side) and clovers (for the Irish side). The only cutters I could find were 4 leaf clovers... but I guess they'll come in handy around St. Patrick's day anyways!

It's really nice to be able to use the skills I learned in London!

London - Day 19

Today was field trip day! We visited the flower market.

A giant warehouse!

Full of flowers!

Every color and shape you could want! I took a zillion reference photos!
After that we made our way to the Covent Garden Flower Academy.

People here learn to make stuff out of flowers. All kinds of plants actually! Just as we're learning to make flowers out of cake ingredients!

Hey look, it's Camilla!

Our teacher, and principal of the school, Gillian gave us a demonstration of how to arrange real flowers on a cake, which is a cheaper alternative to sugar flowers!

Then we had our own turn at making a little arrangement! I wore mine on my lapel for the rest of the day :)
Afterwards, we all went for Mexican food for lunch - mmmm yummy! I love how diverse the food is in London!

ON TO DAY 20

London - Day 14

Today we worked some more on flowers. It's nice to see the progress we're making! The workshop looks like a flower shop now! What a difference some petal dust makes...

We also got our exam info for the last week, which means designing a wedding cake from start to finish! *shakes in boots* I hope I do okay!

And with that, I'm officially half way through this trip! Turning in early tonight, cause tomorrow - I'm going to Paris!


ON TO DAY 15

London - Day 13

There isn't much to say about today, because we've started a series of classes dedicated to making flower bouquets - something which takes days of work, a little at a time, then letting them dry, then adding stuff... fun to do, but boring to watch I'm sure. Sooo much work, but the results, I'm sure will be amazing.

After that I took another walk, actually this was quite a long walk, from Covent Garden (where I ate another pot pie or "pasty" as they call them here, and tried to barter for a cool looking bag, which didn't work :P) to Green Park. It was a very touristy walk, packed with people.

On the way I visited a shop called Fortnum and Mason, which has lots of yummy confections and it was all very British. I bought myself some jam and lemon curd :)

ON TO DAY 14

London - Day 7

Today was like a casual Friday in class! What with finally assembling all of our work. So I took the opportunity to sneak take lots of pictures, bahahaha!

We made roses and it was so fun! Her method of making them is pretty awesome. It still takes practice to do, but so much less cumbersome than the methods I've learned so far. Plus, look how adorable they are!

Blank canvasses! (Shh they're sleeping!)

Learning to decorate our wedding cakes:

Everyone's so focused!

My gift box cake with the carrot cake inside. Looks like a nice one for a baby shower. Here they call it a "Christening" cake. I ended up giving this one to the people at the hostel. The guy at the reception desk was SO happy! I've never seen anyone so happy to get a cake, and he said "no one's ever given me a CAKE before!!!" It was hilarious! I don't even know if he ended up sharing it with the other people, hahaha.

  

And these mini Victoria sponge cakes are just so cute that I took a billion pics of them. I have them with me still, I couldn't bring myself to give them to anyone. Wish I could bring them home to share with people!

On with the food porn...

My finished wedding cake. Betcha can't guess which one is the dummy cake, hahaha!

So I had to carry 2 boxes of cakes home (the gift and the minis), and the Tube was absolute chaos! I was just kinda being shoved around for awhile, cause I was a bit shocked, lol.

Did I mention that I cut myself in class? Well I did. I managed to have a cold, injure my wrist, AND cut myself in the first week! It was so embarrassing! I had to get a big blue band-aid and wash every thing and throw out fondant that had blood on it, and I just wanted to cry and give up, but I didn't. Good thing it's the weekend.

Near where I'm staying there's a sushi place, with a bar, so I had me some sushi and Corona for dinner, cause damn it, I deserved it after this week.

And cake for dessert!

ON TO DAY 8

Spring Lilac wedding cake

This Saturday I finished my first wedding cake order! It was tons of hard work, and this one had the extra challenge of being gluten free. But I ended up finding something that worked (after some interesting experimentation), and everyone seemed ot enjoy it. This is a cake with chocolate and vanilla layers, almond icing, covered in fondant and decorated with fondant lilacs.

I must also give props to Nicky over at Small Things Iced. Her dragonflies inspired the ones I did here (although no where near as awesome ^_^).

Unite For the Fight, Part 1

These cupcakes were made for the Unite For The Fight bake sale, to raise funds for children's cancer.