Purple Peacock Card

Here’s a card I made for a friend’s birthday using a set of toppers from Hunkydory. They have a membership club that is free to sign up for, and every so often you get an offer for a ‘free club gift’, a set that normally retails at £9.99 where you only have to pay postage of £2.99. You get several A4 pieces of printed card and four sheets of die cuts to press out, all on a particular theme. This theme was peacocks and I decided to buy the set.

I do find using these a little difficult however as I’m never quite sure what to do with them. The toppers are usually a picture with several frames and I never know whether to use just one frame or all of them, and the printed cards aren’t that practical for cutting out the picture from as it feels like you are then wasting the design on the card. So what I did this time was fold the A4 card in half to make the birthday card itself but again that feels a bit of a waste as I don’t need a design on the back of the card!

The Hunkydory website does have design ideas for using the set if you are stuck, but no instructions for how to make them. Most are quite straightforward though!

For this card I used one of the large peacock toppers and all three of the accompanying frames which I raised up at different levels with adhesive pads (though you can’t really see that from the photo). It’s for a friend who likes deep purple colours so I hope she liked it!

Flamingo birthday showstopper cake

I celebrated my birthday during lockdown this year and it wasn’t too bad at all - I’m at home with my husband and two year old daughter who makes every day special. I had some nice presents, including an Instant Pot which I will blog about once I’ve used it a bit more, enjoyed a takeaway lunch from a nearby cafe and a takeaway dinner from a local Italian. My husband and I both took the day off work as well and it was nice not juggling working from home and looking after a toddler for the first time in a while!

This year my birthday cake was a chocolate cake from the supermarket - the first time in many years I haven’t made my own. But I had no free time before the big day and didn’t really want to spend hours in the kitchen on my birthday so was happy enough with a shop-bought cake.

But I’ve realised that I never actually shared the cake I made for my birthday last year, so here it is! It was a milestone birthday so I had an extended celebration, including a visit to my family, a weekend in a hotel with my husband and daughter followed by a weekend back in my home town with my school friends where we had a professional photoshoot, did an escape room and went out for dinner.

I made a cake to take with me as we were staying at a friend’s parents house while her parents were out of town (it’s like we were 16 again!). I settled quite quickly on a flamingo theme - I prefer llamas but I thought flamingos might make for a more glamorous cake!

One of my friends I was getting together with is vegan so I looked online for a suitable cake recipe and used this one from One Green Planet:

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-recipe/pink-strawberry-cake-vegan/

It was really moist and delicious and the perfect cake. 

Here’s how to decorate a flamingo cake:

To start with I covered the cake with buttercream but realised the sides were quite messy (I never understand how people get perfectly neat sides!). So partly to hide it, and partly for a fun nostalgic throw-back, I added a cake banner, if that is the correct term. We had one made of foil as a child that was put on every birthday cake for me and my sister year after year, and carefully cleaned and put away again – I can remember exactly what it looks like. I had some flamingo print wrapping paper which I used to the same effect, but of course as it’s paper it can’t really be cleaned and reused!

For the top of the cake I knew I wanted the centrepiece to be a flamingo. You can make one from flower paste or even a fat 3D one from fondant, but as I was in a bit of a hurry I decided to cut a flamingo shape out of cardboard. I did however make the wings, by melting white chocolate and adding a little pink food colouring. I placed a piece of greaseproof paper on a board and using a silicon brush, created the wings by sweeping the melted chocolate in the shape I wanted and leaving them to set. I did a few layers so the wings would be thick enough to pick up when they had dried, and I was able to stand them on the top of the cake to represent the flamingo’s wings just as I wanted.

For the final decorative touches I added mini meringues – again you can make your own and if you want this whole cake to be vegan (which makes sense given the recipe is vegan!) you can actually make vegan meringue. Did you know that? It’s actually quite surprising given meringue is usually made with eggs – you can make a very good substitute meringue from aquafaba, which is the liquid you get in a tin of chickpeas!

I also used some white chocolate buttons (which were vegan) to fill in a few spaces on the top. I was quite pleased with this cake as it delivered a lot of bang for its buck – it looked fairly impressive but didn’t take a huge amount of time to make or decorate and tasted delicious, so I’m glad I’ve been able to share it with you at last!

Baby Hand Print Get Well Card - A little bird told me you're not feeling so chirpy

My mum has been in hospital for nearly four weeks after being suddenly struck by a serious illness but she is recovering really well and will hopefully be back home soon - a huge relief for all of us.

 

I live a couple of hours away so in between visits I’ve sent her a few things in the post, including a get well card that I made in haste and forgot to take a photo of.

 

This is the second get well card I made, or rather that my ten month old daughter made. We go to a class occasionally called ‘Baby Picasso’ that is basically hand and foot painting with some messy play as well. There is a theme each week and we have the opportunity to make one picture or card or other item (before Christmas for instance we did tree decorations) using hand prints and one using foot prints.

 

It gets quite messy - you have to put paint on your baby’s hand or foot and then stop them wiping it on themselves or you before you are able to get them to place it flat on a piece of paper! Then the other details and embellishments are added by the parent, as this particular class is for pre-walkers so the babies are too young to do it themselves.

 

The theme this week was birds, and my little girl made a picture of two robins sitting on branches with handprints in paint.

 

I decided to turn it into a card so when we got home I glued the picture onto a blank card and had a think about a suitable sentiment. The phrase ‘a little bird told me’ sprang to mind straight away then the rest followed and seemed perfect for a get well card - ‘you’re not feeling so chirpy’!  I wrote the sentiments on the computer and stuck them on the front of the card and inside printed ‘get well soon’.

 

I gave my mum the card when I went to visit a couple of days later addressed to granny from my daughter - she really liked it and hopefully it helped cheer her up a little bit!

 

I'm sharing this with the following craft blog challenges: The Male Room - nature (this card would work for a man easily!)

Paper Funday - anything goes

Everybody art challenge - anything goes

Unicorn challenge - things with wings

Heart 2 Heart challenges - creative cards

 

 

 

Handmade Peacock Anniversary Card

 

I recently signed up to the Hunkydory Craft club - Hunkydory is a craft brand that is particularly known for ready made toppers and die cut images and sentiments. Their club gives you a discount when you buy, but the reason I signed up was because you could get a set of toppers for only the £2.99 cost of postage as a new member.

The set I got included flamingos, birds - and peacocks. I decided to use one of the peacock images to make an anniversary card for my husband for our second anniversary as we'd had peacocks at our wedding.

You can read more about the venue and our day in my post from 2016 on our wedding at the Larmer Tree Gardens.

To make the card, I chose a larger than usual A5 card blank and covered it with a piece of the cardstock that came with the Hunkydory set. It had a strip of a different pattern across part of the card which I positioned along the bottom of my card and added a border from the same set. The peacock and frame are all different elements from the Hunkydory set too.

Finally I added a glittery thick card word saying 'anniversary' which I think I bought from Tesco (though I could be wrong!).

I'm sharing this with:

Daring Cardmakers where the theme is weddings or anniversaries

TGIF challenges has the theme 'all that glitters'

Alphabet Challenge - G is for great outdoors, and the peacock represents our outdoor wedding

and at Tuesday Taggers it's 'things with wings'.

Pink Flamingo and Balloons birthday card

 

Flamingos are a really popular motif at the moment and one night while feeding the baby I decided they would look really good on a birthday card, and bought a flamingo stamp from Dovecraft on Ebay.

I also bought some die cut balloon shapes - it would be cheaper to buy the die in the long run and cut my own shapes but time is something I don't have a lot of at the moment (I'm writing this while the baby takes a nap but can already hear signs she is waking up!) so I just bought the shapes pre-cut.

I was playing around with shapes and thought the card would look nice with several layered embellishments in different shades of pink - there's quite a lot going on on this card but I really like how it turned out.

To start I covered most of a white square card blank with a piece of pink patterned paper, leaving a small white border clear around the edge. I stamped the flamingo onto a piece of cream card and coloured it pink with a Promarker pen.

I cut a scalloped shape around the edge of a slightly larger rectangle of purple paper (which was actually a recycled birthday card envelope I'd received) and mounted the flamingo card on that. I found a wide glittery pink ribbon in my stash that I'd bought and never used - it is quite wide and very pink and glittery so a bit OTT for most cards but I decided it worked for this one! I stuck that across the middle of the card using double sided sticky tape and mounted the flamingo topper on that.

The final touches were two die cut balloons, one in pink and one in purple, and a stamped 'happy birthday' sentiment from the 'Say it with stamps' set from All Night Media on a piece of the same purple paper as the topper which I cut out with a wavy line. The perfect card for someone who likes a bit of glitz and glamour!

Here are some of the products I used:



I'm sharing this with Stamplorations where the theme is 'things with wings'; Crafty Ribbons challenge, As You Like It where the theme is pink or blue, and Creatalicious Challenges where anything goes with the option of 'all that glitters'. As I re-used an old envelope I'm also sharing it with Use Your Stuff where the theme is upcycle/recycle, plus Addicted to Stamps challenge where the theme is 'ribbons galore'.

Easter Chick Cupcakes

These are from the same recipe as these chocolate Easter cupcakes which I blogged about yesterday, but I couldn't resist decorating a few as Easter chicks.

Ages ago I was given a set of Easter silicon cupcake cases from Lakeland - they look like the bottom half of Easter chicks with legs and everything!

I made the cupcakes according to the recipe in the link above and baked them in the silicon moulds, which I stood in a baking tray in case they fell over.

When they were cool, I cut out circles of yellow Renshaw roll-out icing and put them over the cupcake. I cut out thicker triangles to use as wings, and coloured a little bit orange to shape a beak. I also had some Renshaw black icing that I'd opened and used for something else, so used a tiny amount of that plus a tiny amount of white fondant icing (which I also had open already) to make the eyes. Do you think they look cute?

I'm sharing these with Alphabakes, hosted by myself and Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is C.

 

I'm also sending this to Treat Petite, hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as their theme is Easter and spring.

 

The theme for We Should Cocoa, hosted this month by Linzi at Lancashire Food on behalf of Choclette at Tin and Thyme, is eggs so these cupcakes fit in well.

 

Easter and spring is also the theme for Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage.

 

And finally because it's Easter I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

 

Birdcage Birthday Cake

Birdcages are a common theme at weddings and recently they have become popular as birthday cakes as well. I went to a wedding a few years ago of a couple whose surname is Bird, and they had a birdcage on each table – which I actually sourced for them – filled with flowers and decorated with little birds. I was given one of them to keep afterwards and replaced the flowers with dried ones, and I have it on display in my bedroom.

 

I’ve noticed a few birdcage cakes on the internet and thought they were really pretty and when I was sent a pair of bird cookie cutters to review by Cake Mart, I thought this was the perfect opportunity. I also used another item they sent me for review which was not exactly the purpose it was meant for, but it worked really well!

The cake itself didn't quite turn out as I'd hoped; despite making sure that my cakes all looked even, when I covered it with the fondant it looked a bit lumpy. I'm not sure how else I could have done this on this scale - if it was a smaller cake I could have left out the buttercream in between the layers, and made one or two large sponges and carved it. Maybe the way to do this is to make a mini birdcage cake!

I used the same lemon cake recipe that I made for this cake so I'm not going to repeat it here, as there are several steps to assembling the cake. Here's the cake, or part of it at least - I doubled the quantities in the recipe.

The top of the cake needs to be a dome and I would normally bake another cake in a hemisphere tin but I had some offcuts of cake left over from another recipe. I treated it like a giant cake pop, turning the cake into crumbs and mixing with buttercream until I had the consistency of a pliable dough, which I then shaped into a dome.

As you can see, the cakes look very neat when stacked together (other than the top), so I don't know what happened when I covered them with fondant! I think actually looking at the picture on the right, one of the layers shifted due to the buttercream.

I covered the whole stack of cake with ready-made fondant which I had coloured light blue with some Sugarflair gel colour. You can also buy a pre-coloured pack but that way is more expensive.

Looking at pictures of bird cages online I saw they had wide bands horizontally around the top and bottom and then thinner rungs (or wires) running vertically. I knew that I couldn't do this freehand, so had the idea of using this pastry lattice cutter that I was sent by a German company called Cake Mart - they also have a UK site. This allowed me to cut very thin strips which I separated with a knife. It worked really well and it's nice to know products can have multi uses!

For the wider strips I used a fondant ribbon cutter from Cake Boss that my boyfriend gave me for Christmas. It's a great little set that comes in a metal tin, consisting of a roller with a handle, and various wheels that give you different width and style ribbons, such as straight or wavy.

 

Cake Mart also sent me these bird cookie cutters, which come in a pretty box and would make a lovely gift. They are big enough to use for cookies but also small enough that you could use them for fondant in cake decorating projects, as I've done here. They are robust and comfortable to use.

I used a litte water to stick the bands around the top and bottom of the cake and stuck the smaller strips vertically around the sides. I made some very quick hand-rolled roses and stuck them down one of the cage rungs.

Here is one of the birds which I cut out using the cutters from the same pink fondant as the roses as I didn't want to introduce too many colours.

Another bird which I placed on top of the cage

I also made a handle for the top. Here is the finished cake - definitely not one of my best and it looks a bit messu which is largely down to the uneven cake and fondant covering. Next time I think I would make a smaller cake and carve it rather than stacking several layers together. You get the general idea of a birdcage cake though and it did taste good! I took this into work for my birthday.

 

 

I'm sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabber UK; her theme this month is 'colour me pretty'.