Royal Wedding, part 2

And here we have the interior of the 'spiderman'/Wedding cake.  It tasted great, and went down a storm with the friends (the kids especially thought it looked amazing, bless them). 

Part 2 of our Wedding theme involved mini cupcakes.  Lots of them.  After a conversation with a friend, Claire, who runs Baby Sensory classes in our fair city we agreed that I'd set up a table in her class with a selection of mini cupcakes (all vanilla with white and blue vanilla buttercream icing and delicately rose-flavoured red buttercream icing) , info and an honesty box and see how many sold.  So I  made about 90 to ensure there were enough to cover all the possible purchasers from both classes she was running on Wedding Day, and over half sold.  Woo hoo!  The rest got devoured by friends and family at a playdate, then by neighbours that evening.  Gosh that was a good feeling.  Claire made some very helpful suggestions, the best of which was that we could try doing this monthly and see how things went...

The cupcakes in their lovely tiered display stand

Royal Wedding, part 1

We're having afternoon tea with old friends tomorrow, and it's Prince William and soon-to-be Princess Catherine's wedding on Friday, so I felt I ought to bake accordingly.  I had this fab idea to do a two-colour sponge and ice and layer it with jam and buttercream icing.  I had the red and the blue and the 'white', but unfortunately not quite the right equipment.  My sandwich tins seem really quite shallow, so I figured I'd just use a normal cake tin and slice it horizontally.  As they say, the best laid plans...

Seems a good idea, right?  I put the red mix under the blue, and kind of just assumed they'd stay in those positions.  Didn't quite work out that way, more like a Spiderman blend of sorts.  Still, I sliced, layered and iced and this is how it turned out.  Will take an interior shot tomorrow, once it's been cut.

Looks aren't everything

We found out at short notice that a friend of mini-Becca #2's from nursery could come over to play this morning.  We decided we'd like to make biscuits for her and her mum for morning tea, dotted with mini Smarties and choc honeycomb chunks.  We only had 40 minutes until they were due, and this was just the right amount of time in which to weigh, mix and bake the cookies.  I don't think the problem here was time, but rather too much mix per cookie.  I had recently bought us a portioning tool (i.e. an old-style ice-cream scoop) and used this to decide how much mix per dollop - bad move.  The old-fashioned method of a heaped teaspoon would have been fine.  Still, they went down a storm with Ava and her Mummy, us, our Daddy and with Billy the reptile man after school (but that's a whole other story)...

We do savoury too...

For a fun dinner, we made our own sausage rolls using chicken hotdogs (so I could eat them too).  Here's our lovely littlest Becca Team member brushing the finished items with milk before we put them in the oven.  I was really pleased to discover that they all got eaten (with my help too).  It rarely happens that they love something new so much, yey.  Here's the finished product, before the empty plates...