Gardener's Spring Flowers Waterfall Card

Maternity leave so far seems to have been all work and no play - and a lot of naps as I’m so tired all the time. I thought I’d have plenty of time to do things like sort out photo albums, file about two year’s worth of important documents sitting in a drawer, and maybe read a book while enjoying a cup of tea. Instead I’m working my way through a massive list of things we need to do to prepare before the baby is born - everything from setting up the baby monitor to checking we’ve got enough sheets for the Moses basket to writing my birth plan, which I’d intended to have finished about a month ago and still haven’t done!

But at the same time all work and no play isn’t much fun, so one evening when my husband was doing something on the computer I decided to go up to my craft room - which is now the spare room as we’ve had to move the bed out of what is now the nursery - and do a bit of card making.

I was careful to only take out a couple of boxes from my craft cupboard and ones that were right at the front - getting everything back in when you’ve taken it all out is a bit tricky and I knew I wouldn’t have the time or energy to do that at eight months pregnant.

I found something I’d bought in a bulk purchase from a local seller who was getting rid of some of her stash - a waterfall card kit from Quick Cards that promised everything I needed in one small kit to make an unusual kind of card I hadn’t tried before.

 

Unfortunately it proved a lot trickier than it looked! There were no instructions in the pack at all so I’d hoped it would be fairly self explanatory but it wasn’t. I ended up going on you tube and watching this video from Dreaming about Rubber Stamps to understand what I needed to do.
 
Even then I found I needed extra things that weren’t in the pack like a couple of brads, and I had started to use a long strip saying ‘happy birthday’ until I realised it would go behind the ‘waterfall’ and you wouldn’t be able to read the words, so I switched it for a patterned piece of card.

The way a waterfall card works is this: you have three or four overlapping images in a line down the card, and a tab at the bottom. When you pull the tab the picture squares turn over to show the other side in a sort of waterfall effect, and when you push the tab back up, the pictures all turn back the right way up.

What I didn’t like with this kit was that the yellow flower images provided had nothing on the back so when they had flipped you were left with plain white squares. They also didn’t take up much of the card blank provided with a lot of white space around them, so I decided to customise the card.

 

I used the three spring flower images you can see below, and stuck them onto the piece of card on the right - aside from the 'happy birthday' / 'happy mothers' day' strips down the side which are separate, there was a long section of card already scored in the right places for the waterfall card folds.

 

 

But I found it far too plain as I said, so I used a piece of backing paper from the Born to Shop- Go Green range and mounted the waterfall cards on that, along with a 'happy birthday' sentiment from the Quick Cards pack. I used a 'with love' tag as the piece you pull, though the strip that holds the waterfall cards on was made from a scrap piece of card covered with another piece of the Born to Shop paper and secured by two brads as glue wasn't strong enough.

 



 

I also didn't like the fact that when the flower cards turned over there was nothing underneath; I think this sort of card would work much better with a 'reveal' of similar images or even a surprise greeting on the other side. For this one I used more of the same backing paper and a picture from the same Born to Shop Go Green set but next time I might plan something that's a bit more of a surprise!

 

Here's a video of the card showing what happens when you pull the tab! Please excuse the wobbliness, I was trying to hold the card and pull the tab and film at the same time!

 

 I'm sharing this with Crafting with Dragonflies where the theme this week is special folds.

Orange and White Chocolate Cake with Flower Nozzles Piped Buttercream Flowers

This is the cake I made for Mother's Day this year and finally tried out my set of flower piping nozzles which I got I think for my birthday last year - I hadn't gotten around to using them as I hadn't really made anything that I wanted to decorate with buttercream, but now I've seen how good they are I will definitely use them again!

The nozzles have different patterns of dots and swirls and allow you to pipe different types of flowers that look amazingly realistic and detailed. You just squeeze the buttercream out and pull up, which cuts off the flower -you pipe one at a time. These would work really well on cupcakes, or as I've done with different types and colours of flower covering a large cake, or you could do all the same type of flower on the top of the cake.

You use regular buttercream for this - it needs to be stiff enough to hold its shape but not too stiff that you can't pipe comfortably.

The cake itself is a recipe from the Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook, edited by Lynn Hill. This is one of Lynn's own recipes which I adapted a little; I didn't make the orange syrup and I used more milk as I prefer a looser batter.

You need:
225g butter
225g caster sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
225g self-raising flour
zest of 1 large orange
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp. milk

For the filling:
150g white chocolate
grated zest of 2 large oranges plus 4 tbsp. juice
200g butter, softened
75g icing sugar

Preheat oven to 190C / 170C fan. Cream the butter and the sugar and beat in the eggs. Fold in the flour, orange zest and baking powder and beat in the milk.

 

Spoon into two greased round cake tins and bake for 20-25 mins

When cooked, allow to cool in the tins then turn out onto a wire rack.

To make the filling, melt the white chocolate in a microwave or bain marie and allow to cool until it is still a consistency that you can stir. Cream together the butter and icing sugar and stir in the melted chocolate and the orange zest and juice.

Mix the buttercream (about 500g icing sugar to 250g butter) and separate into different bowls and add a couple of drops of food colouring to each one. Use the different flower piping nozzles in piping bags with each colour buttercream and pipe groups of a few flowers all around the cake. I filled in the gaps afterwards with green buttercream and a leaf nozzle, at least I think it was a leaf nozzle as it doesn't look quite right, but I still think the overall effect of the cake was good - and it tasted really nice too!

Below are some close-ups of the different flowers I piped:

 

I'm sharing this with Cook Blog Share

 

Colourful Garden Birthday Card

There's quite a lot going on with this card but I think the colours work well together and I like it. The backing paper is actually all one piece of paper with a mixed pattern showing watering cans, green leaves and clouds and more. One of the very first things I bought for my cardmaking stash was a packet of paper flowers, with green leaves and red flowers. I still had some of them left so used foam pads to layer them on to the card. Finally I cut a small square out of the remaining backing paper that was a box with scalloped edging, and put a 'happy birthday' outline sticker on it. I used another foam pad to stick this on the card and raise it up.

Blue Buttons Card for Dad

Looking through my craft stash I found some large foam flowers and stems which I don't use very often; they are quite difficult to get a professional finish with as they do seem more suited to children's crafts. But I remembered I had a bag of buttons and decided to make a flower shape using buttons. The topper says 'to a special dad' and was from a pack I bought on Ebay, while the background to the card is a piece of backing paper from a male themed set that has various words ranging from 'football' to 'couch potato' - luckily quite small so you can't really see them!

Floral tag initial birthday card

Here's a geometrics-meets-floral birthday card I made for a male friend of my husband. There's no reason why men can't enjoy flowers, but the fact that these have browns and yellows as the predominant colours makes them a bit less girly.

I had a pack of sticky card toppers that featured a tag - the one in the centre of the card -that consisted of a brown background with the words 'just for you' on the bottom (I'm not sure what the words across the middle are supposed to say!) and a brown flower and a couple of buttons. I decided to make this the centrepiece of the card but knew it needed something else.

I covered a square white card blank with brown paper and added a wide strip of patterned brown paper down the side. I used two corner stickers with brown and yellow flowers from the same pack in opposite corners of the card.

Once I bought a pack of cardboard letters and have used them a few times to spell out different names so now I only have odd letters left. I had the letter D, which was this friend's initial, and the letter was brown with flowers so it worked really well with the other colours on the card.

Flower Stamped Birthday Card

I went a bit crazy with the rubber stamping on this card! I had a flower stamp that reminded me a bit of a geometric shape at the same time, and decided to stamp it all over a pink card to create a background. I used black ink, letting the pink of the card show through, and deliberately stamped in a fairly haphazard fashion. I had a pre-cut circle of pink card in my craft stash and stamped the flower again onto that, and secured the circle to the card with adhesive pads so it would stand out.

Finally I stamped the words 'happy birthday' onto a piece of pink card, cut the ends to make it more like a banner, and stuck that on the bottom of the card.

I'm sharing this with the Simon Says Stamp challenge as their theme is 'make it girly'.

Brush embroidery: a step-by-step guide

Last year I signed up for a wedding cake decorating course at Sutton College of Learning for Adults (SCOLA) – I’d already done a brilliant one at South Thames college where I decorated these cakes.

 

 

When I saw a course at SCOLA, which is actually my local college, that was aimed at an intermediate level I thought it would be a great way to practice and gain new skills. And then I got engaged and decided I was going to partly make and decorate my own wedding cake, so hoped the course would come in very handy!

 

In the first session we covered brush embroidery, though I was a little disappointed overall. I have done this before and think that what we did at South Thames college was much better – both in terms of the design but also the fact that at South Thames, we covered a dummy cake with sugarpaste and did the brush embroidery on the cake itself, whereas at SCOLA, we did it on a covered cake board. I think doing it vertically is harder and looks a lot better than doing it horizontally and I wasn’t particularly proud of how it turned out.

 

Brush embroidery can look very pretty. You use royal icing – which can easily be made from regular icing sugar and egg white. We were advised to use egg white powder as it’s safer; you can buy packets of albumen or meriwhite – a powdered egg white substitute – from cake decorating shops, but as I only needed a small quantity and wasn’t sure I had time to order online, so I bought some Dr Oetker egg white powder from Sainsbury’s. You can buy boxes of royal icing sugar which you just need to mix with water, as there is egg white powder in it already, but my cake decorating tutor said it doesn’t dry quite as hard and while it’s convenient and good if you only need a small amount, for decorating a wedding cake she would always make her own.

The tutor provided us all with a template of a rose, which we were instructed to copy onto tracing paper and then to trace onto the covered cake board. I asked what we would do if it was going onto a cake to be eaten – I’ve been told before you can’t put pencil on real cakes, and instead have to do a very slow, painstaking process of marking out the pattern with a pricking tool. So I was surprised when my tutor said a small amount of pencil on a cake was fine – and I’ve since read online (eg on the Paul Bradford Sugarcraft School website) that using pencil on cake is perfectly safe. I’d be careful to make sure the pencil isn’t visible though – if you were serving the cake and someone could see the pencil marks they might worry! Other options would be using an edible ink pen, or using a cutter to make an impression on the fondant before it hardens – though I know you won’t always have a cutter in the shape of the design you want!

 

We folded our own piping bags which is hard to explain but very useful if you are able to do this (a lot cheaper than buying piping bags, and the disposable plastic piping bags I use for buttercream are far too big for royal icing work). We coloured some royal icing by spreading it onto a tile (just a regular bathroom tile) with a palette knife which was an interesting technique I hadn’t done before, and worked well.

 

You don’t need a nozzle in your piping bag, just snip off the end so you have a very small opening and can pipe a fine line. We followed the outlines of the rose which were numbered so you start from the outside and work in – apparently this helps give more of a 3D effect but I didn’t really notice it. They key to getting the brush embroidery right is to only do one line at a time. Royal icing dries very quickly and if you piped the outline of this whole flower, you would find the icing had dried before you could do anything.

 

So here’s what you do: pipe a line, and then take a small artist’s paintbrush and gently brush the icing inwards. Try to keep the edge of the line intact and brush from the middle – it’s not easy when you have a thin line but it looks better this way. When you’ve finished, pipe the next line and repeat.

 

 

I didn’t really like what I did for two reasons: firstly, when I mixed my green royal icing it was a bit thick so I added some drops of water, but added too much. You can see from where I piped the stem of the rose that the icing was a little too runny which means it filled the narrow stem without me being really able to do any brushing. Secondly, I think the template is too big – the outline of the petals are so large that you are barely able to see any of the brush embroidery and it’s mainly white space.

 

I think this cake looks a lot better where we did very small flowers (incidentally, we embossed these by using a patchwork cutter before the fondant set) – and I also think it looks better in white on a white cake, even though it’s harder to see from a distance. It looks more elegant and intricate and for me just has a better overall effect. Still, it was good to be able to practice brush embroidery again and has given me some ideas for what I can do on my own wedding cake!

 

Lemon and Mascarpone Mothers' Day Cake with Painted Flowers

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about painting flowers using food colouring, which we did in my cake decorating class - though we did it on a covered cake board, not on an actual cake. I'd seen a few pictures of wedding cakes online - when I was researching what to do for my own - that were covered in painted flowers or designs and thought it looked really nice, so when it came to making a cake for my mum for Mother's Day today my starting point was that I wanted to paint flowers on it!

Since the cake was going to look floral and spring-like I wanted a lighter flavoured cake. I found a recipe for a Finnish lemon Mothers' Day cake that used mascarpone cheese and looked really tasty. The cake is covered with a piped mascarpone buttercream but in order to paint on mine I needed to cover it with sugarpaste. I also decided the cake would benefit from the addition of some cloudy lemonade to the mixture! In fact I changed the recipe quite a lot in the end as it also called for 4 tbsp. potato flour which I didn't have, and after I added the lemonade I decided it needed a bit more flour. And I used self-raising flour rather than plain flour and baking powder! So here's what I did:

5 eggs
200g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
150ml no-added sugar cloudy lemonade

for the syrup:
juice of 2 lemons
150g icing sugar

for the filling:
200ml double cream
200g mascarpone cheese
2 tbsp. icing sugar
6 tbsp. lemon curd

Preheat oven to 180C and grease a deep 8-inch cake tin - if your tins aren't deep enough you could use two as I did.

Whisk the eggs with the caster sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the lemonade then fold in the flour.

Pour into your cake tin(s) and bake for 35-45 minutes (more like 45 if you have a deeper cake in one tin, less if you are splitting the mixture across two tins).

Meanwhile make the syrup - heat the lemon juice and icing sugar in a small pan, stirring until the icing sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool.

Remove the cake(s) from the oven and allow to cool. If you have made one large cake, cut into two or even three layers. Soak the cakes with the lemon syrup.

To make the filling, whisk the cream until thick, then add the mascarpone and icing sugar and whip again. Spread a layer of lemon curd then a layer of cream over the bottom layer of your cake and place the other layer on top. Repeat if you have three layers.

This looks really nice and I'd have been happy just to serve it like this!

Spread a thin layer of the cream over the top and around the sides of the cake.

Roll out about 500g of fondant on a surface dusted with icing sugar until it is in a large enough sheet to cover your cake - an easy way to check is to measure both sides and the top of your cake against your rolling pin, so I know for instance my fondant needs to be as wide as 3/4 of my rolling pin.

Lift the fondant using the rolling pin and drape over the cake. Pat down the sides and cut off the excess, then smooth the top and sides using a smoother or the side of your hand and trim off any more excess.

To do the painting, it's best to leave the fondant to dry but it doesn't need to be completely hard to do this. See this post for full painting instructions. Essentially all you do is mix one or two drops of clear alcohol (the little bottles you get on planes are perfect for this) with some gel food colour. The best way I found to do this is to get some colour on a toothpick or cocktail stick, place the cocktail stick in a bowl or in an artist's palette, and pour a drop or two of alcohol onto it. Use your paintbrush to scrap the colour into the liquid, mixing until you have a liquid colour that isn't too runny. You can tell when you start to paint on the cake if it's too runny or pale, in both cases just add a bit more colour in the same way.

I decided to do different types of flowers in different colours and painted them on the top of the cake and around the sides, then mixed up some green and added stems connecting similar flowers and added leaves. I left some white space but I think with the green giving a connecting detail it looks quite nice - sort of chintzy but that was the look I was going for!

I'm sharing this cake (not literally...) with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, my co-host for Alphabakes as the letter she has chosen this month is C and I've used cream in this cake as well as mascarpone cheese.

I'm also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as their theme is Easter and spring.

Finally I'm sending it to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's Mothers' Day this month (in the UK anyway!).

How to Paint Flowers on a Cake

My so-called intermediate level wedding cake decorating class continued with a session of painting on cakes – or rather on a cake board as we still haven’t used an actual cake (even a dummy). It’s really very straightforward but I thought I’d share a blog post on the topic in case anyone wants to know how to do it.

 

 

 

Get some of the paste colour on the end of a cocktail stick and hold the cocktail stick over the artist’s palette. Pour literally just a drop of alcohol or lemon juice onto the cocktail stick and use the paintbrush to brush the colour downwards into the liquid. This will make sure you don’t have too much liquid as you want the ‘paint’ to be as thick as possible. You need to use clear alcohol or lemon juice so the liquid dries – water would start to melt the fondant that you were painting on.

 

 

Apparently there is no particular technique to the painting – you paint just as if you were painting a picture. We were painting on a covered cake board; most people in the class were using the same board we’d practiced other techniques on, so only had a little space. I had covered a new cake board so I would have a blank ‘canvas’.

 

The tutor knew I was thinking about a lavender design on my wedding cake so brought in a picture of a bunch of lavender for us to copy, which was really nice of her. I started with green to paint the stems as you can see above. Then I painted the flowers, using short brush strokes up and down the stems.

 

After that I got bored waiting for other people to finish and added some bunting as our wedding is going to have a bit of a village fete vibe.

 

 

 

Finally as I still had some extra time I added our wedding date on the bottom. I really like the way this looks and might actually use it at the wedding as a prop!

 

 

Sugar flowers: how to make sweet peas

Following the calla lilies I made in my sugar flowers evening class I want to share with you the next type of flower we made - sweet peas. These are very pretty though fairly small, so would look good with one flower on top of a cupcake or with a spray on top of a larger cake.

Once again you need a dedicated cutter - or can make your own template, but this only cost a few pounds from Amazon.

To start, you need to roll out some flowerpaste so it is very thin and then cut a small teardrop-shaped piece either using a small rose petal cutter or your own template. Use a balling tool to curl the edges by placing the shape on a foam pad and rubbing the tool around the edge, half on the flowerpaste and half on the foam pad.

Take a piece of florist wire - quite thin, so 26 or 28 gauge - and make a small sausage shape from your sugarpaste. Insert the florist wire and then wrap the teardrop shape around it, folding in half. This will form the centre of the flower.

Cut out two pieces of flowerpaste using the sweet pea cutter.

Take the piece with the notch cut out (the top one in the above picture) and spread a little edible glue in the centre. Then, holding the cut out notch at the top line up the notch with the centre of your flower and wrap both side pieces around it, leaving an opening, like you can see below.

Take the other petal and rub the edges with a balling tool as before to curl them. Carefully insert a thin piece of florist wire - 30 gauge is good for this - into the petal. I found it quite hard to do this without the wire poking through - you can try making your flowerpaste petal a little thicker if you are having trouble.

Stand the petal behind the ones you have already made, and bind the two pieces of wire together with florist tape.

 We then made the calyx with a calyx cutter. You either need to roll this out on a board with holes - known as Mexican hat holes - or you can manually pinch together some of the flowerpaste to make the part that sticks up, as you can see here.

Slide the calyx up through the wires and bend the leaves outwards. I think a little bunch of these together could look quite realistic!