Carousel of Animals

When Jules asked me to make this, I thought..."oh sure, that's easy". Then when I started making the animals I realised how out of touch I was to handling the fondant and even the fondant I got was not adhering to the mixing of colours and gum-tex. But I had already bought so much fondant so I had to make it work.
Finally got the animals to look decently resembling the lion, dog, cat and elephant.
Did have some help with some videos online

http://www.vimeo.com/3873417
http://www.vimeo.com/3966579 and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4RGguwXjgg and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9u63Mh-SsY&feature=related

Overall I managed to get most of the features of the animals, but could still work on some esp when I painted on the eyes.
The cake is a chocolate cake, sandwiched with chocolate ganache, then covered all with fondant.

Chocolate Brownies

Have always loved brownies since the very first time I tried making it. Then when I started working, we used a so simple recipe which hardly takes much time to make. So have been making this since with a variety of nuts and chocolate buttons.

Blueberry Cupcakes

I guess there were still blueberries from our berry picking trip at Portarlington that I just decided to make some cupcakes. Used some whole blueberries in the cupcake and the pureed the rest which was mixed with the butter cream.

I did add some lemon rind and juice too, to the cupcakes but was not too sure how it would taste, so did not add too much.

Overall I think it turned out tasty, but could have made it bigger. Also realised that the blueberries needed to also be at room temperature before adding them to the butter cream. Otherwise it could make the butter cream split.

One way to remedy this was to allow the butter cream to stand a while longer and then beat it again.

But I really wonder why they call it blue berries...looks more dark pink to me :-)

Blueberry Cheesecake

Another first making a blueberry cheesecake with fresh blueberries, my friends and I picked the day before.
I generally think the blueberries taste so much better when they are cooked. Yes one may eat them freshly picked from the trees, but it taste even better in this cheesecake.

Aeroplane Cake

After months of not making a cake to be decorated, I received this order from Sarah; Jesse's mum.
A simple butter cake for both the aeroplane and the base. After searching the net I found a few ideas on how to actually cut the cake up to make the aeroplane (airplane). Have enclosed a few here if anyone is interested.





This image is taken from the following book



Then I had to figure out how the fondant would react in this weather as it's summer here now and temperatures were varying between 20's and 30's. In Malaysia it was too humid and needed a cool dry place to get the fondant to hold its shape. I also knew that one never could keep the fondant in the fridge. But lo and behold, the fondant hardened when I kept it in the fridge. Now that is something new for me and what a relief.

Anyways I managed to get the propellers to harden enough to keep it upright. I could have wrapped the whole aeroplane with one piece of fondant instead of in its individual pieces. But was trying to figure out how to do that and then set it on top of the base without breaking it. So made the individual pieces up and stuck them together on the base.