An Upsy Daisy Cake...

We have just returned from a lovely little birthday party, and so it's time to clean the kitchen and blog about the cake - but just not in that order!

With the Lazy Daisy cupcakes from my previous post

My friend - whose daughter was the birthday girl - has just recently had a baby, so I offered to make the cake for her knowing that would be one less thing for her to worry about.  Secretly, I was going through withdrawal knowing that it would be April before I needed to make another cake for one of my own kids!

The birthday girl loves the BBC show "In the Night Garden", and especially Upsy Daisy, so a theme wasn't difficult to choose.  I took some inspiration from this image I found online, but decided to modify the design somewhat to suit the materials I had available.  It bought back quite a few memories really - In the Night Garden was the first TV show Miss S ever watched, and my first experience of watching children's TV since I was a kid.

The cake was a 20cm white layer cake (recipe is linked to on my post about the Hello Kitty Cake) in three layers with vanilla buttercream between each layer.  The board was 25cm (only size I could get) so I pushed the cake to the back of the board - rather than centering it - to leave room for the lettering and the flower decorations at the front.

Upsy Daisy took me two and a half hours to model, and there were many moments where I almost gave up as she is quite an intricate character featuring many colours, stripes and small details.  I'm glad I stuck with it though, as I learned a lot from her.  I didn't have a 3d model to refer to (normally I would use a doll or 3D toy), but found a good picture on the internet to work from.

The leaves were made by rolling gumpaste super-thin and then cutting out circles  using a piping nozzle.  I then used the same nozzle to "slice" off the leaf shapes - I was able to get 3 leaves from one little circle.

All the decorations are made from gumpaste, except the rocks behind Upsy Daisy, which are fondant.  I felt that I had probably watched enough of In the Night Garden over the years to feel comfortable making some decorations that reflected the programme's aethestic!  I finished it off with a good spray of edible shellac, which I just love because it really brings the cake alive and helps cover some of the rough spots and dusty icing sugar on the surface.

That reminds me, I have a slice of cake in a take-home bag that's calling my name...  Cup of tea time I think, the mucky kitchen can wait.

LM x

Lazy Daisy Cupcakes...

This afternoon we celebrate a little friend's 2nd birthday.  The birthday girl loves Upsy Daisy, from the BBC childrens' show "In the Night Garden", so I made these daisy cupcakes to go along with her Upsy-daisy cake (pictures of that to follow).

The cupcakes are vanilla (recipe here), the icing is plain butter buttercream tinted grassy green, and the flowers are all made from gumpaste.  I used a daisy patchwork cutter (see here) to cut the large daisy, and small daisy cutter which I have had for years to do the small ones.  I left them to dry in flower forming cups - a recent, and very awesome purchase - so they were slightly curved.

I hope the birthday girl enjoys them as much as I did making them.

Update:  Here are the pics of the matching Upsy Daisy cake.

The unicorn, the teddy bear and the tiny effelunt...

No, I haven't been writing a childrens' book, although the title of this post sounds like it would make a great kids' story!

I am happy to announce that I am pregnant with my third child, due St Patrick's day (March 17, 2012).  So, in honour of this due date, (and because we plan to not find out the sex), I will call the little chap (or chapette) "Paddy".

So far Paddy is already playing games with us and giving us some rather amusing sonogram pictures.

At 8 weeks I put this scan pic on my fridge.  Master J (2.5yrs) immediately came in to the kitchen, noticed the picture and pointed at it saying "tiny effelunt! tiny effelunt!"  Yes, there was no mistaking it, at 8 weeks, baby muck #3 looked a bit like a baby elephant.

Then a few weeks later I went in for my nucal thickening scan and the poor doctor had to work so hard to get Paddy to stop moving.  He had the hiccups and was jumping about like he was using the placenta as a bouncy castle.  It would have been hilarious had the scan not been "internal".  That's a long time to be "in that position" with your male Obstetrician. :/

Anyway, the scan showed that everything looked alright, and when the doctor went to take a picture, we got this.

No longer an effelunt, Paddy decided to pretend to be a unicorn, or a glee fan, who knows which.  At any rate, the picture made me laugh.  The "horn" is actually the row of his fingertips.

We also got this one where he looks like a teddy bear that someone needs to sew together.

Well, I apologise for the lack of posts lately.  Aside from having visitors and getting my little girl ready for her first week at school, I have been really nauseous and incredibly tired, so I just haven't felt very "create-y" lately.

I'll leave you with a pic from Miss S's first day at Swiss Kindergarten a couple of weeks ago (the first two years of school are called kindergarten here).  She is loving it so far, although the new routine is taking a bit of getting used to for both of us!

LM x