It seems that everyone between the ages of about 7 and 14 is currently obsessed with Minecraft, and my son’s best friend Alex is no exception. “May I have Minecraft chest cake pops, please?”, he asks!  “Why not?”, I thought.
Well…   mainly because making cake pops tends to be way more hassle than it’s worth!

After looking at pictures of Minecraft for rather longer than I might have liked, I worked out my design, colours and construction process:

First, I made sheets of Victoria sponge – half plain, half chocolate – sandwiched them together with buttercream and cut them into roughly 3cm cubes, gluing the sticks in place with coloured royal icing.

While they were setting, I made some holes in some polystyrene (styrofoam) blocks so I had somewhere to put the pops after each stage.

Then, I finished icing each cube with the base colour and placed them in the “drying stand”.  It’s amazing quite how uncomfortable it becomes, holding and rotating a tiny stick with a weight on it!

When they were dry, I used a darker brown to ice along each edge – as well as around the chest 2/3 of the way up to represent the lid – then added the clasp in white.

Then I had to figure out how to display them for the party.  I used an image I’d found online to make up some “grass block wrapping paper” that I printed and used to turn the drying rack I’d made earlier into a themed display stand.

The birthday boy was thrilled, and so were his friends.
These Minecraft cake pops looked great and tasted even better!

My life had been blissfully free of Annoying Orange until last week, when I was asked to make him for Jakob’s 10th birthday.  How could one refuse the demand of a kid starting his second decade?  I found myself totally unable to watch the show on YouTube but did find some good images through Google and enough key details from Wikipedia that I felt able to take on the challenge.

The final creation, made from layers of Victoria Sponge sandwiched with marmalade buttercream and carved into half a sphere, was coated with orange-coloured buttercream and decorated with features formed from coloured fondant.Truly annoying, indeed!

When the makers of Wizard101 launched Pirate101 recently, Aron’s cake became a foregone conclusion. He presented me with a number of screen shots, and a challenge: to recreate the flag of his pirate ship!

It’s a basic Victoria Sponge, sandwiched with raspberry jam and vanilla buttercream, then covered in yellow buttercream.  I piped the star, sword and snake from royal icing over templates I’d prepared, then then stuck them in place with more royal icing, adding finishing touches (and the odd repair) freehand.

The cake went down well with his class, with no plank-walking required.

My younger son has always loved insects and this summer, after an especially great class at Challenge Camp called “Insects, Bug & Squiggly Things”, he asked for dragonfly for his birthday!
After some interesting research, I found some beautiful images of dragonflies for inspiration, including some wings which I blew up to the right size, printed then covered them with clear plastic. I iced over the images to create an intricate web of strands which was, I hoped, thick enough to take its own weight, and left it to dry for a couple of days.

In the mean time, I made the sponge cake, carved the body to shape and made crumbs from the offcuts – which I then combined with buttercream frosting to form the head, eyes and legs.

I used nature-inspired colours to decorate the cake in patterns I’d seen on-line on real dragonflies then, at the absolute last minute, after taking a very deep breath, placed the wings on top.  With a little extra hidden support, they managed to stay in place long enough for the children to admire it, sing Happy Birthday.

…and we did manage to get a few photos, including this one of Ethan, with his close friend Avery, waiting desperately to demolish it.

The cake was gone in moments!

Researching vegan recipes for a close friend’s birthday, I wondered how realistic it was to expect a cake made without butter or eggs to be anything other than bland.

I needn’t have worried – this chocolate cake, topped with home-made chocolate-coconut butter and flakes of dried organic coconut, turned out to have a great texture and taste as good as it looks.

Jezebel is a 1916 Dennis N type fire engine and student mascot of the Royal College of Science, one of the founding three Colleges of Imperial College.  She is maintained by the RCS Motor Club, of which I was a member when I studied Physics there from ’83-86.

I had the honour of making the cake for her 70th birthday celebrations in 1986 – an approximately-to-scale model made using the engineering drawings as a base for the design.  All elements of the cake were edible, with bodywork and trim (including ladder) made as royal icing runouts, with a fondant hose and bell.

Here are some pictures of Jez herself, with some of RCS Motor Club, parked outside my parents’ house in Littlehampton – and some images of the cake from similar angles.

Another “Star Wars challenge”, this was one of my most fun recent assignments; how exactly does one make something look slimy and appetising at the same time?!?

I built up his general form with layers of victoria sponge and buttercream, carved it to shape, then added skin and features in various shades of green, yellow and beige fondant.

A lick of sugar syrup to give him a slug-like sheen and Jabba was ready for his approving audience.