My wedding cake adventure

It seems like I have been abandoning this blog again and I'd like to apologize for that. I've been having this thing called laziness. It was hard for me to focus on both my food blog, and book review blog.

Anyway...

Last month, I was super busy with a friend's wedding. Since she's one of my closest friends (I've known her for 20+ years!) I told her that I wanted to make her a wedding cake (for practice purposes) and some decorated sugar cookies as the door gift.

Let's talk about the wedding cake first.

I sucked at cake decorating. And I have not much experience with fondant. I didn't even know how to cover a cake with fondant. So, I took a class on fondant cake decorating a few months ago. And it was super easy to cover a dummy cake. And with the help with the amazing instructor, I managed to make my fondant cake looked as amazing as the picture below. 

As you can see, the pretty roses was done by the instructor. I managed to make only one of them, and they didn't resemble rose very much. I need practice!

I was confident that I could perhaps make a cake that resemble something like this again. My friend (the bride) loves black, and gray. I thought that I could probably make a presentable cake. But this is what my cake looks like...

I know.

I'm so disappointed with what I did to my friend's wedding cake.

If you look closely (at the top tier), you will notice how I didn't have much skill with fondant or cake decorating. It was a good thing that I have those store bought gum paste roses. And it's a good thing that I was planning to make cupcakes and put them on a stand like the picture above. I'm not so sure if I can handle a 3 tier fondant cake. And people didn't really care about the cake on the top tier once they saw the mini cupcakes. Ha!

Oh! And those are chocolate cake with salted caramel buttercream.

Let's take a look at the sugar cookies I made for the door gift.

First, I have to draw the black section, and let it dry. Then, the white section. After the white section dried, I have to draw the lace with the white icing. It was a good thing that I got an amazing set of lace stencils from an art store. I was planning to buy some stencils from Wilton, but they are too expensive for me. When the white lace, dried, I have to paint them with AmeriColor' air brush gold color.

Frosting these cookies took so much time. But the bride requested some black and gold. And I decided not to frost them all with black as I was afraid that people might freak out with the color. I'm glad that I frosted them with a bit of ivory. They looked much nicer, sweeter.

I have a few extra sugar cookies and decided to make them into this:

The extras look pretty good. I googled a few pictures and decided to try them. Frost the black section, draw some flowers with white icing, dragged them with brushes for the texture, and painted them with gold. I really like this one!

Now I'm done with my wedding cake & sugar cookie adventure. I'm not sure if I'll be updating this blog as frequently. But will try my very best as I do have some photos of cakes I haven't shared, and recipes I haven't posted yet.

Until then...

Experimenting: Decorated Sugar Cookies pt.2

The last time I made sugar cookies for my sister, I had trouble to flood the icing on the cookies as my icing was too stiff. A couple days later, I read that I could actually add in some water into the icing to thin the icing. So, this time, I decided to try again. This time, I made some gingerbread cookies.

This is how my cookies looks like! What do you think? I bought a packet of instant royal icing from bakers' city (I usually used egg white to make the icing), and they turned out really good!

Experimenting: Decorated Sugar Cookies

Last Tuesday was my kid sister's final day in primary school. Next year she'll be going to secondary school. So, I was thinking of making something for her to give to her friends as souvenir. And I thought that I could make some decorated sugar cookies!

I decided to go with chocolate sugar cookies as I am a big fan of chocolate. Of course, I let mysister to pick the color for the icing. She decided with blue and a bit of purple. Frankly, this is the first time I'm making this decorated sugar cookies. I've never learn how to decorate them. This could be my first experiment on making them. I was thinking of preparing a cookies with the kids name on it. So, I was a bit excited and nervous.Of course, my sister was excited too when I told her my idea,and requested her classmate names.

I used the flower cookie cutter as it is the only cutter which is big enough to write on :) And it was the first time for me to write in small letters (I usually pipe in capital letters). There were 31 pieces of cookies, including my kid sister's teacher. I hope they were all happy to receive these cookies :D