Christmas bauble cakes

There was a time when I always wanted the latest novelty cake pan or innovative piece of baking equipment from Lakeland - to be fair I still do want those things but am realistic to know I don’t have space for much more and don’t have time for the sort of elaborate bakes I used to do! But it’s fun to dig out equipment I haven’t used in a long time - or in this case had never actually used.

This is a silicon mini cake pan in the shape of Christmas baubles - I think I bought it in the January sale one year and had never actually used it!

The only instructions on the back said to use a two egg cake mix so I used this recipe from the BBC Good Food website  but had far too much cake mixture so made these reindeercupcakes as well.

I had to guess how long to cook them for as though the cakes are small they are fairly deep so I did them at 180C for 20 minutes.

You can see the design on the cakes when they came out of the pan - some baubles have stars, others stripes and two had a snowflake pattern that looks really pretty if you go over it with white icing with a fine piping nozzle.

I went over the other designs with icing with varying degrees of success. My piping has never been neat! These look quite effective when all piled together on a plate though I don’t think I’d have the patience to ice more than six, it would be a fun activity to do with children.

Floral letter decoration for girl's bedroom

My daughter is now two and a half and during lockdown we decided to redecorate her bedroom. She has a lovely mural on one wall (a giant decal sticker) and a bookcase full of books but other than that we hadn’t much much effort in, as she doesn’t really play in her bedroom yet apart from a few minutes after going up to bed. We decided it was about time we made the room nicer and somewhere she might want to play, plus she needed more toy storage as she has so many toys!

 I had been browsing photos of girls’ bedroom styles on Pinterest etc for inspiration and decided to put up a couple of shelves with pretty decorative items on them. I’d seen a few things I liked, in particular the child’s initial either in a picture frame or three dimensional and covered with flowers. It looked easy to make so I thought I’d have a go, and got everything I needed from Hobbycraft.

They sell wooden fillable letters (£4.40 each) many of which seemed to be out of stock online so I signed up to be emailed when they were back in stock. The first time I had such an email the letter I wanted was already sold out again by the time I went online so second time I was ready and made my purchase while I was getting up in the morning!

The flowers are fabric wired rose heads, I used three packs at £3 each - each pack is one colour. I used most of the packs to fill the letter and only had a couple of flowers left over. I cut and shaped pieces of florist oasis to put into the wooden letter and stick the flowers into, alternating colours and making sure there was no gap.

The oasis seemed firmly in place so I didn’t glue it in as I had intended but this would make it more secure. Hobbycraft also sells a small wooden stand (50p) which will help if you want the letter to stand up on a shelf.

I’m really pleased with how this turned out and how simple it was to make - once everything turned up from Hobbycraft it took about ten minutes!

Decorated Salted Caramel Arctic Roll

Arctic Rolls were very exciting when I was a child - a rare combination of ice cream and cake that we had as an occasional treat. I haven't eaten it for years - possibly since I was a child - and I've never tried to make one before. But after seeing some beautiful and elaborate arctic rolls on the Great British Bake Off this year I decided I wanted to have a go at baking a cake with the decoration on the outside.

I was also sent some vouchers for Haagen Dazs ice cream recently and made this amazing dessert; I had one voucher left to use and an arctic roll seemed the perfect idea.

Making the Swiss roll part was very easy; I then looked up online how to do the decoration on the outside which I changed slightly and then used a much better alternative than the traditional jam between the sponge and the ice cream - dulce de leche caramel! So I guess I can call this

Decorated Salted Caramel Arctic Roll - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

For the cake:
3 eggs
100g caster sugar
100g self-raising flour

For the decoration on the outside:
1 egg white
20g cocoa powder
20g plain flour
30g caster sugar
30g softened butter or marg

For the filling:
half a tin of Carnation caramel or dulce de leche
500ml tub Haagen Dazs salted caramel ice cream

First prepare the decoration to go on the outside of the cake. Mix all the ingredients together to make a thick paste and spoon into a piping bag (you don't need a nozzle). Line a Swiss roll tin or baking tray with baking paper. Snip the end of the piping bag off so you can pipe a thin line and pipe swirls or whatever patterns you like all over the baking paper.

Put in the freezer for 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile cream the eggs and sugar together for the cake and fold in the flour. When you are ready to take the decorated baking parchment out of the freezer, pour over the cake mixture and bake in the oven for about 15 mins.

Allow to cool; meanwhile take the ice cream out of the freezer. I took mine out a bit early and it melted more than I expected which made it a bit messy when I came to assemble the arctic roll so you are better off leaving the ice cream solid frozen.

One reason I used Haagen Dazs is that the ice cream comes in a carboard tub - you need the ice cream to be a tube shape and there are various recipes online showing how you melt the ice cream, fill a metal tube with the ice cream and refreeze it, but that all looked very complicated. With a cardboard ice cream tub that is a cylinder shape, you can just cut it off and the ice cream is ready to use!



Normally you would spread jam inside the arctic roll but I used Carnation Caramel from a tin which went perfectly with the salted caramel flavour ice cream.  I wrapped the cake spread with the caramel around the ice cream - you can see the pretty decoration on the outside - and sliced it up to serve. A lovely festive dessert!

This recipe uses eggs so I'm sharing it with Simply Eggcellent hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen.

Family Photo Letter Collage

It was a year ago this month that my boyfriend and I bought and moved into our lovely house. We spent a couple of months working all-out on the redecoration, taking 2 weeks off work and then using every available weekend to paint, oversee new flooring, assemble furniture and so on. We took a breather as it was coming up to Christmas, and then… never really started again. Most of the house is finished – we just need to paint the bathrooms – but some of the finishing touches haven’t been done. To me, that’s things like putting up coat hooks and mirrors – but there are also a few decorative touches left to think about.

Ages ago I bought some cardboard letters spelling the word ‘home’ and some others spelling out 'Love' from Hobbycraft, and put them away until I could decorate them to display in our new home.

I hadn’t really thought about how I would decorate them, other than with patterned paper or fabric. Then Snapfish, the digital photo printing people, came along with an offer of a voucher towards products from their site – as long as I could craft with them.

That’s not as easy as it first sounds – they have loads of gifts and ready-made products on their site that you can personalise with photos, like photobooks, canvas wall art, mugs, calendars, jigsaws and so on. Most of those wouldn’t give me much to play with in terms of crafting. Their main offering of course is getting your photos printed so I decided to take that as a starting point for my crafting.

I remembered the cardboard letters and hit upon the idea of making them into a photo collage. After all, it is family and friends that make a house a home. This is also a good way to display a lot of photos if you don’t want to have a frame on every windowsill or shelf!

The letters I had were quite small – only about 10cm high – but luckily Snapfish has a product that is just right for this. If you’ve never bought a collage print before I highly recommend it. You can select up to 20 photos, and a print size of 6x4, 7x5 or 10x8 and it will arrange the photos in a collage – making some of them bigger and some of them smaller. If you don’t like the arrangement, you can shuffle and do it again. The largest size is only £1.09 and looks really nice in a frame – I did one of these with photos from a USA holiday I took a couple of years ago, and I also gave one to my parents with photos from a day we spent at Chelsea flower show a couple of years ago. The smaller photos are only 12p for 6x4 or 22p for 7x5.

You can cut these up to make wallet-sized photos or in this case I cut them up to glue onto my cardboard letters.

The 'love' letters came in a cute little box but the 'home' letters were from a different range (they may not even have been Hobbycraft actually) and weren't in a box, and I couldn't find the letter 'e'! Rather than turn my craft cupboard upside down I decided just to use the word 'love'.

This was much faster to make than you might think - I actually did it on the kitchen counter while I was cooking dinner! I simply cut up the collage print, selecting pictures that would fit on each part of each letter and glued them on. I covered the edges with offcuts of photos as you won't really see these, but I didn't want to leave them blank. I didn't bother covering the backs of the letters though.

It looked even better than I was expecting and fit perfectly into one of the cubes of this Ikea shelving unit that we have in the living room. The letters really stand out against the black wood and this now has pride of place in the living room.

Thanks to Snapfish for a voucher code for their site.

Homemade Christmas Wreath Decoration

It's been a while since I've done any crafting but what better time than at Christmas? It's the perfect time of year to make cards, decorations and gifts for yourself and your family and friends. So it was perfect timing when Country Baskets got in touch - they supply craft products, floristry items, pottery, glassware and wedding products.

When they said they were sending me a hamper of craft products I was expecting a small cardboard box, but I actually got a larger wicker hamper tied together with ribbon - the hamper itself is available to buy on their website and I will definitely be reusing it. That is if I can figure out how to get it home on the train - I had it sent to work as I knew it would come while I was away, but wasn't expecting it to be this big!

Inside there was a whole selection of products; Country Baskets asked me to use any of them to make some kind of Christmas decoration, and said I could also use products that I already had at home or buy anything else I wanted to go with it. My craft supplies at home are more of the card making variety, and as we were in the middle of redecorating the spare room and having my parents visit (note to self - should have tried to finish one before having the other!) I didn't really have the time to dig out any other items I had, or to go and buy anything else. Besides, half the fun was seeing what I could make from the selection of items they sent me.

First I found a large box of Christmas tree baubles, which were very pretty and will look great on my tree. I did think about how I could incorporate them into a Christmas decoration and thought about making some kind of table decoration featuring the baubles, but in the end made something else (I was only allowed one decoration as an entry into the competition run by Country Baskets).

I was pleased to find this set of plain cardboard trinket boxes as I have seen them in other shops before; you can decorate them however you like so this is definitely something I will use.

Here we have a selection of smaller items including some white lace, some small silver baubles on bendy wire sticks, some pink petals, green buttons and white snowflakes.

I was also given a couple of squares of what appeared to be wood; I kept the green ribbon from the hamper itself in case I could use this as well. I'm a very thrifty crafter (read: hoarder)!

There were also a variety of fake flowers, leaves and winter berries all on long stems, which were fairly stiff but I realised could be bent. This immediately gave me an idea for what I wanted to make as my Christmas decoration: a wreath. I wanted it to look natural and rustic, and incorporate leaves, flowers and baubles.

I was also sent a packet that contained several thin silver strands and another pack with a long chain of little bells. Also in this picture on the far right you can see a giant clear plastic Christmas tree bauble, which you can open and put something inside. I think that's a great idea - you could put a picture or ornament made by your child inside and hang it on the tree, or fill it with tinsel and sequins, or even put a stocking filler gift inside and hang it on the tree, and see how long it takes your loved ones to find. In addition I was given a polystyrene star and a packet of small wooden stars. I wanted to spray these gold, and even bought some gold spray from Robert Dyas, and intended to hang them in the middle of my wreath, but by the time I had finished I realised there wasn't really the space and there was already too much going on in the wreath.

Helpfully, I was also given a selection of florists' wire in green and silver, plus some grey/silver string and some ribbon.

To make my wreath I took two of the largest fake flower stems - well, more like twigs, they were so thick - and bent them around, tying them together with green florist wire. I didn't think glue would hold it, and quite liked the rustic effect of the wire being slightly visible at the end.

Here you can see it starting to take shape.

I added some more pieces including some silver leaves which I wove in around the other flowers and twigs.

Finally I wove the chain of silver bells around the wreath. When you hang this outside the bells should tinkle in the breeze.

Here you can see the wreath hanging on my cupboard door, with the bells hanging down

 And here it is on my front door. It looks very festive!

You could also use this as a table decoration by placing the wreath on a silver cake board and placing some candles in the middle. If you are going to light the candles though, make sure they are standing in a holder such as a small glass candle plate.

Top tips for making your own Christmas decorations:
Lay everything out so you can see what craft products you have and something might inspire you that surprises you.
Group your products according to theme e.g  glitter, rustic, wooden, colourful etc.
Sketch out your design on a piece of paper to see what it will look like, and so you know where to start.
But don't force yourself to stick to your sketch - if you see something you think will fit, or wonder 'how does it look if I place that here', go for it.
Make sure you have tools including scissors and glue or wire before you begin.
Have a purpose for your decoration in mind - do you want something you can hang on the tree, or a table decoration, or an outdoor wreath?
Make sure there are no sharp edges that would hurt and try to make sure your decoration isn't too fragile, you want to be able to use it year after year.

Thanks to Country Baskets for inviting me to enter their Festive Face Off and for supplying me with the craft hamper.

Christmas decorations

I decided to have a go at making some Christmas decorations after my boyfriend's mum bought me a pack of pine cones. They definitely work out cheaper than buying ready-made decorations- this huge bag was only £1.49 from the local garden centre! I also bought a can of silver spray which was about £3, and a couple of cheap decorations (plastic holly for 50p, anyone?) from Robert Dyas.

All I did - as time is a luxury I don't really have right now - was lay the pine cones on some newspaper and spray them silver. It wasn't as messy as I'd thought!

Then I arranged them in a bowl with the other decorations I bought. They don't look bad at all, for just a few pounds and five minutes work (plus about half an hour for the pine cones to dry).