Don't Worry Bee Happy card

This card was made using a few stickers I was given by a friend; I don’t know where she got them from. The stickers were quite large, taking up most of the space on a blank card, so for a while I didn’t know what to do with them.

I decided to use one of the stickers as the background; it is a brown sticker with a few yellow and brown honeycomb shapes in the middle. I cut around the sentiment from another one of the stickers, and found some tiny bee stickers from another set and dotted them around the card.

With the colours I think this card is quite masculine so it would be suitable for a man or a woman.

I’m sharing it with Little Red Wagon where the theme is ‘to bee or not to bee’

 and Tuesday Taggers where the theme is ‘for the boys’

 

plus Unicorn Challenge where the theme is masculine.

Ladybird Cake

My sister Clare made this cake for our mum's birthday and I thought it was so good I asked her permission to share it on my blog.

Clare made this with the Lakeland hemisphere tin I gave her for her birthday the month before. She used the small size pan and said the cake - a simple chocolate cake recipe - took a very long time to cook, in fact she had a couple of attempts as the first time the cake wasn't cooked through.

She used ready-coloured roll out icing and cut out circles, and used pink shimmer balls for the mouth. It is a simple design and very easy to do but looks fantastic! It also tasted extremely good.

Insect cupcakes

You may remember I've taken a few cake decorating classes in the past (OK, more than a few) - I did a short four-week course before I started this blog, and I have one remaining post that I never got around to publishing. Now that the letter for this month's Alphabakes is I, there's no better time than to share my insect cupcakes with you. They also make me think of the onset of spring so they would be a nice little bake for Easter.

These are very simple to make once you know how. You need your cupcakes to be flat, so if they have come out domed you will need to level them.

Bee cakes: cover the cupcake in black roll-out icing and make stripes from yellow. Add eyes.

Ladybirds: cover half the cupcake in black and half in red, and make black dots and eyes.

Dragonflies: roll a small piece of icing for the body. Use a heart cutter to make a pair of wings and cut in half. Separate the two halves out and stick on one side of the body. Repeat on the other side. You can also use a tiny piece of straight spaghetti to make antennae.

Roses: Roll a small piece of pink icing to make a bud shape. We used leaf plunger cutters to cut out green icing.

Flower (in centre of pic): Use a small heart cutter to cut out several hearts, and arrange around a centre point to make petals.

Butterfly: I brought a small set of butterfly cutters with me and layered them to create this cake.

I am sending these to Alphabakes, which I am hosting this month; do join in!

I'm also sending these to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Kate of What Kate Baked and Karen of Lavender and Lovage, as their theme this month is cupcakes and muffins.