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

 

 

 

Personalised Hand-Decorated Ceramics: Father's Day Plate and Egg Cups

I love crafts and making homemade and personalised gifts and this year I kept seeing decorated plates and bowls that I thought looked really cool. I’d seen them on various sites including the local Facebook selling group and could tell they were homemade, so had a look online to figure out how to make them so I could do something myself!

 

You can buy pens that let you draw or almost paint on ceramic crockery; they are not that expensive and you can buy a basic set with a selection of colours for less than £10 on Amazon; they are also available in craft shops. It’s important to make sure that the pens are non-toxic! I bought these ones from Amazon:  Fine Paint Oil Based Art Marker Pen Permanent Chalk Pens Boxed for Metal Rubber Glass Waterproof 12 Pack Colors

 

Some of what I’d read online suggested you need to put the ceramics in the oven after you have decorated them, to fire and set them so the design won’t wash off. I baked the plate at 150C for 30 minutes; I followed the advice to put the plate in a cold oven so it would warm up gradually to prevent cracking.

I'd be interested to know what other people have done because my parents told me even after a few washes it looks like the colour was starting to come off a bit.

 

I created this plate for my dad for Father’s Day but it's also a good idea for gifts at Christmas or any time of year. I bought various bits of ceramic very cheaply at Ikea and decided a plate was the most likely thing my dad would use.

 

He likes a fry-up on the weekend so I decided that would be a good theme for the plate. I like Emma Bridgewater’s style with words around the edge of the plate so I decided to do something similar and started with the words ‘Dad’s big breakfast’, then a star in a different colour, then ‘fry-up’ and another star, then as I still had space, the word ‘yum’ – which makes the plate a bit fun and irreverent I think. There’s plenty of white space in the middle to put the food on, which I think looks better than if there was a design across the whole plate.

 

It was very quick and pretty cheap to do if you intend to use the marker pens again.

 

 

I used them again almost straight away on these two egg cups, which again were very cheap from Ikea. I had a personalised egg cup as part of a set (with a mug as well) as a young child, I remember having it when I was about 8, and I’ve still got them today! I simply wrote the names of my friend’s two daughters on the egg cups and decorated them with polka dots – I think I will give them to the girls at Christmas. 

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!

 

 

Patchwork cutters and painting on cakes

I recently bought a Livingsocial deal for a cake decorating class that was described as "applique" and painting on cakes. I was hoping to learn a new technique as this is something I haven't tried before, and didn't really know how to go about it.

The class was at The Place of Excellence in south London.

We started off covering a small cake board in fondant - this meant we could keep our designs for ever if we wanted, and was a good idea, though I would have liked the chance to have a go at painting on a fondant-covered cake as well. The class catered for all levels, and some people had never used fondant or covered a cake or board before, so the tutor - who I think was called Shola, apologies if this isn't right but the course was a while ago now! - talked us through how to do this.

She then emptied a huge bag of patchwork cutters onto the table and allowed us to choose the one(s) we wanted to use. Even though it was only October, I thought it would be nice to make something I could potentially use as a Christmas decoration or give as a gift, so I chose this pair of bells and a sort of Celtic knot design.

The technique turned out to be very simple - we used the cutter to press down on the fondant gently enough to leave an outline.

Then we took some edible dusting powder and mixed it with a little liquid - you can use a clear alcoholic spirit such as vodka, or a flavour extract like vanilla or lemon extract. You can't use water, as it would be too runny and won't dry properly. Here you can see a small amount of gold lustre powder that I took out of the pot, before I mixed it with the spirit.

We were then told to simply dip a fine artist's paintbrush in the mixed colour, and paint onto the fondant, following the lines from the cutter.

We could also use the cutter again to cut out the same shape in flower paste, and then layer it onto the fondant to build up the picture in 3D. I started doing this but then changed my mind - the flower paste was so thin the picture was almost as flat as if I just painted straight onto the fondant, and we only had white flower paste so I would have then had to paint it in the same way I was painting the picture directly onto the fondant.

Here is the finished picture - very festive!

This beautiful one is the handiwork of Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker -
we took the class together. Ros did a particularly good job on the dove I think!

We were given a box to take our cake boards home, though as I had quite a long journey on the tube then bus, I found it impossible to keep this flat and it did get a little bashed around in the box, so I decided I couldn't really give it as a gift, though I will display it somewhere in my house for Christmas.

The class was advertised as lasting three hours, but doing all this only took two and a quarter hours - and I have to say I didn't feel it was particularly good value for money as the teacher explained the technique - which was basically "use a stencil to make an outline, mix the lustre dust with some liquid and paint on your outline" - and then we sat there for an hour painting. The sort of classes I prefer, and where I really feel like I've got my money's worth, is where there is a lot of interaction from the tutor - they show the class how to do something, then help each individual improve their technique and so on.

To fill the extra time we made roses by rolling long strips of fondant, and the tutor also showed us how to cover a round cake with fondant (though we watched rather than doing it ourselves). I'd done both of these things before so I think it would have been quite good for people who hadn't done it. The tutor also demonstrated "lace work" which was also done with a particularly delicate patchwork cutter. If you use flowerpaste it dries hard enough that you can stand the piece of 'lace' up around the sides of a cake, and make some really nice designs.

It was interesting to learn a new technique that I'd never thought to do before, and when I went to Cake International in Birmingham not long after, I bought some patchwork cutters (though I haven't used them yet). It would have been nicer for the class to be a bit more interactive, especially as it wasn't very cheap even after the discount, but for people who hadn't done any sort of cake decorating before I think it would have been particularly good.

The Place of Excellence also offers balloon modelling classes, which I thought looked really interesting, and quite an unusual combination with the cake decorating!