Somewhere Over a Rainbow....

Back in January 2012 I was contacted by a lovely lady named Jessica. She was having her wedding at Aynhoe Park in Banbury near Oxford. I quickly googled the venue and was instantly stunned.

Not only did it look amazing on the outside, the inside literally made my jaw drop. Aynhoe Park is not a normal hotel, it is a privately owned spectacular 12 bedroomed house embodying British eccentricity at its best. It also happens to sit in 250 acres of beautiful Capability Browns gardens.

The house is owned by James Perkins, a veteran of the music industry and a collector of curious items from  his travels across the globe. The house is a living museum to his collections as well as the amazing art of Sophie Ryder. One of the first things looking at me as I drove to the rear of the house was a huge eye crafted from twisted wire.

This amazing sculpture framed the landscape, I just knew I was in for a treat as I entered the house......anyway, enough about the house for now, what about the cake!! Well what was to be an amazing interior certainly needed a statement cake. Jessica the Bride had seen a picture of a cake in America and wondered if I could make it for her big day. 

For those that know me well, I am always up for a challenge and when she told me about the cake I knew I wanted to recreate it and so the journey began. The cake was to be 6 tiers high, a mixture of chocolate mudcake (my favourite) and zesty lemon. The best part was it was to be decorated with every colour of the rainbow. There was going to be alot of colour mixing to do.

To grade the cake from one colour to the next it had to be piped in very small blobs of butter cream, with each colour slowly mixing into the next. So as well as the main colours I had to mix all the in between ones as well. And the whole cake was to be decorated on site due to the nature of the butter cream and the long drive to the venue. Phew.

I piped the base 14" tier at home in preparation, especially as I had a feeling that this job was going to make my hand hurt!!

I got to the venue for about 9am on the most gloriously sunny morning.  Jessica was so lucky as it had rained for several weeks prior.

The family of the Bride had hired the whole house for the weekend and as I arrived they were all having breakfast. So lovely and relaxed. This is another of Sophie Ryders quirky sculptures in the sunny gardens.

I can't even begin to tell you what crazy delights greeted me as I entered the house, I even had a sneeky peek in the gents toilets (highly recommended!) and was greeted with a row of stuffed ferrets coming out of the wall. Just hilarious :)

The cake was due to be assembled in the main entrance hall on a large glass table and that is the moment when I met Hercules, the new love of my life. I knew I was going to need some help and he provided me with moral support during the 5 hours of crazy dotty piping I was to endure.

Ahhh bless, he's touching my knee and nibbling my ear, ;) and no, he's not a dog he is a full sized whopper of a stuffed polar bear! That's not to mention the mini unicorn sat on the piano opposite me (a stuffed Shetland pony I think!)

He actually became a dab hand with a piping bag so it wasn't long before we had progressed to the oranges and yellows.

You really would be amazed at how many colours went into this cake, I had a bit of a play in the kitchen at home whilst I was mixing. I used to be an artist/designer before I became a cake maker, so turned my icing into a painters palette for inspiration.

Even the blades of my electric beaters looked pretty with the graded colours.

Whilst I was decorating away, all the family members kept popping by to say hello and see how far I'd got. The children were fascinated and even the florist arrived to dress the venue  and entrance hall with some beautiful garden flowers.

After about 4 hours I started to see the end and the last few dots. Then I met Rhodri the Groom. He had a special little something for the top of the cake. I have to admit I am a bit 'anti' cake toppers, but this one I loved. Two cute little dinosaurs with a love story to tell :) They suited this crazy cake perfectly.

Before I get to the end of this cakey story I have to show you the rooms where Jess and Rhodri were getting married. Just as crazy as the rest of the house. Having a giraffe in the room on your wedding day is not a usual occurrence. And half a giraffe walking through the wall, well that is something that certainly doesn't happen every day :)

Attached to the ceremony room was the room where the reception was to be held, each room joining together to form an amazing view all the way from one end of the house to the other.....with a crocodile to boot.

And now to the cake. I have to say I loved it. In fact I loved the whole adventure. And the funny thing was, no matter where I stood to take a photo, Hercules the superstar assistant just had to be in it!

Looks like he is about to take a big chunk out of it! Please scroll down for a few more pics.

Here are a few more of my little helpers.

Me and the new assistant. You're hired :)

I hope you all enjoyed reading the story as much as I enjoyed making the cake.

Congratulations to Jessica and Rhodri who wed on July 28th 2012 ;)

Rachel x 

My Beautiful French Weekend

So......a couple of weekends ago I attended my gorgeous friend Natalie's Wedding.

 Actually it was Jubilee weekend so we all had a lovely long holiday :)

I met Natalie on a skiing holiday a few years ago, the same time as she had just met her new husband Olly. We have become firm friends and so I was honoured and very excited to attend their Wedding at the amazing Chateau Des Conde in Vallery, France.

Is this place amazing or what?! And we didn't just have a part of it.....we had the whole place to play in all weekend!!! I felt like a princess and I wasn't even the Bride.

(This is the 'check out MY Chateau' photo)

The Chateau is owned by Patrice Vansteenberghe a talented architect. The small turret like building to the top right in the aerial photo 'Le Pigeonnier' is the biggest dovecot in France with 2,844 pigeon holes.

Lucky pigeons.

It has been lovingly converted into the Honeymoon suite with the most amazing glass domed roof for gazing at the stars whilst lying in the most enormous circular bed.

(I only know this because me and some of the girls tested it out ;)

I loved this place from the minute we all arrived, so relaxed and informal. Natalie is such a gorgeous and naturally pretty girl, this came across in all of her choices and the way that she and Olly planned their big day. No airs and graces. The Chateau very much had this feel about it too. Endless long corridors with little doors leading to a multitude of rooms filled with quirky old French furniture, even an old hippo skull!

The morning of the Wedding the florists had arrived and filled the main room with simple cream roses and the most amazing smelling mint. Natalie even had mint in her Bridal bouquet.

Roses were hung from the ceiling in giant balls with lengths of ivy randomly hanging from swags of fabric. Just lovely.

Here they are taking their vows in the local church, a mere stones throw from the Chateau. Olly is a Major in the Royal Marines hence the smart uniform and Natalie's dress was simple and flattering in shape with a beautiful rose lace overlay and long veil.

She looked stunning.

Not only did they plan treats for themselves, but there was a surprise treat for the guests as we walked through the village and back to the Chateau from the Church.

 The Chateau surround sound system was blasting out a very grand piece of music from a film (I guessed might be Gladiator) and as we approached the main gateway we were greeted by....

A knight in full armour! (actually one of the guests had legged it back through the grounds after the ceremony) it took 13 minutes to put on apparently.

I couldn't help but give him a peck on the cheek as I passed :)

I'm the one in the blue dress!

And if you are ever stuck for a suitable place to pop your champagne glass there is always a hedge. I must admit I lost several empty glasses through this hedge, but that one is just between you and me ;)

Here I am mucking about in the grounds, I think I was starting to get a little drunk at this stage! All of these photos (except the cake ones) were taken by me, but Nat and Olly did have a professional on board, my lovely colleague Rebecca  at Catwalk Wedding. I managed to catch her from an upstairs window taking pictures of the Bride and Groom.

Oh and I must remember the cake!....I offered to make Nats cake when she told me a French man was going to do it for her. He had asked her 'what else other than raisins' should he put in her fruitcake.

I laughed out loud and said 'I know the french make the most amazing patisserie, but they cannot make a good old English fruitcake!'

 The cake was made in 3 parts, boxed up and taken to France in a guests car.

Natalie chose the lace and personalised cake topper and I assembled it all on arrival.

Simple and elegant.....tasty too with plenty of raisins, apricots, currants, prunes, sultanas, dates, almonds, oranges, lemons and BRANDY!

I could waffle about this wonderful Wedding for ages but I will finish of by saying,

'Les plus beaux jours de notre vie'

'The best days of our life'

Rachelx

One hot Saturday....

Wow it's been hot hot hot today. Makes a change from all that rain we've been having. Today I delivered a huge cake to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. It was one of my popular floral cakes and so I thought I'd tell the story of it's creation :)

The beginning of every cake journey has to start in the kitchen......and this cake was a whopper. Five tiers of chocolate mud cake and carrot cake. With a side cutting cake too. The cake needed to feed 300 guests so there was alot of baking to do.

Every cake is baked twice for extra height (by this I mean I bake 2 cakes!) , spliced, sliced, filled and levelled. Levelling a cake at this stage is sooooo important and as I tell all my students in class, take time to get this part right! I have a lovely yellow kitchen spirit level, a vital ingredient in cake construction. And a cake of this size needs to be level, or when it all gets stacked it could go horribly wrong.

When I do cakes with fresh flowers, unlike alot of cake makers, I do all the floristry myself.

I believe it is my job to leave the cake looking perfect and so I go to New Covent Garden myself to select the flowers.

I love getting up early on a summers morning to be greeted by the hustle and bustle of the market. Everything is so pretty and I inevitably come home with something I shouldn't! 

The colours are just fantastic and such an inspiration. However todays cake is going to be elegant and cream. The lovely Ken from Robert Allen florists always takes my order a few days in advance and has my flowers ready and waiting when I arrive. Sometimes if he's lucky I take him some cakey offcuts ;)

Today I picked up cream Avalanche roses, white Hydrangea and cream Akito roses. All five of the cakes were iced in a cream fondant icing, then I hand piped a side design using a no. 3 nozzle for a nice raised effect.

Once the design was piped on, I wanted it to have a pearly sheen so I painted carefully over the top of the piping with a pearl lustre dust. This gives a lovely shimmery effect, as well as dusting over the whole cake with my favourite sparkle dust 'Snowflake' by sugarflair.

Finally, after all 5 cakes were piped and shimmered, I could apply the flowers. I like to do the big roses before I leave for the venue and then the rest when I get there. This helps to avoid any wilting....and today was pretty hot!

Abigail also chose to have little gold ball details and some bits of greenery. I chose a dainty eucalyptus for a slightly Grecian look.

Today  Abigail and Jaspers Wedding was at the Painted Hall, part of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. I have always set up my cakes in the Painted Hall after the ceremony, but this cake went into the Queen Mary's Undercroft.....

After unloading all the boxes and buckets of flowers I got to work with the assembly. This cake is going to be tall :)

This is the eucalyptus going in amongst the roses..... then cake by cake I created a huge tower.

I attempted a photograph from the top looking down, but my chair was not quite high enough.

And here is the finished result!

I hope it tasted nice and congratulations to Abigail and Jasper.

The Story of Abney and Teal....in cake!

This is the story of Abney and Teal, they live on an island in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a park, in the middle of the hustle and bustle of a big city. Sounds like a lovely way to live don't you think?

Each year I have a lovely client order a cake for their gorgeous little girl Zadie.

The great thing about my job is I get to research lots of lovely things whilst deciding on a cake design. And this week I fell in love with the little organic and earthy characters of Abney, Teal, Neep.....who I believe is a parsnip and the Poc Pocs, funny little wooden things !

This year Zadie is two and this is her favourite programme.

So we started baking.....a lovely vanilla and raspberry cake and covered it in lashings and lashings of delicious buttercream.

Then we smoothed it all off in preparation to be covered in fondant.

In the meantime.....whilst the fondant was drying I watched a bit of CeeBeebies and did some research. Then I constructed the elements to make these cool little characters. The really nice thing about this cake is that the colours of the animation are quite 'dirty' so it was a real challenge to mix the colours, yet still make the cake fun and rich in colour. What I wanted to avoid was bright primary colours, but emulate the organic look of the programme at the same time.

Making the little Poc Pocs was a challenge because I wanted to make them look like wood! (I think they are supposed to be carved from wood in the programme) Once all the bits and bobs were made I stuck them into the positions I wanted them to be on the cake. So I propped them up on an old polystyrene dummy. And used a big pot of sugarflair to stop Abney from falling over!

You might be wondering why Teal has no shoes, well I plan for her to have her feet dipped in the lake :)

To go with the cake I also did a batch of lovely vanilla and raspberry cupcakes, yum. I wanted them to have a simple design so made half of them in a daisy design and half with 'Eat Me' cake pics. I'm a bit of a creative, so made all the cake picks myself with some lovely paper I found in the craft shop. Then I crafted some mini bunting to string across the cake providing my idea went to plan. As you can see I printed Zadie's name across the flags. Sometimes I think it's nice not to blast 'Happy Birthday' over everything but to do it in a different way.

The daisies I made using a simple daisy plunger cutter. But I like my daisys to dry in an irregular fasion and so I made some formers from tin-foil. Sometimes the best equipment can be found at home in the cupboard!

Then I popped all the elements on top of the cupcakes with a big yummy whirl of vanilla buttercream. Gosh, I do things like this everyday and I still want to eat cake. Surely working with cake is supposed to put you off wanting to eat it all the time. Hmmmmm.

Cute but simple. The idea is that the main cake will be displayed on a pedestal cake stand and all the little cupcakes will sit around the base. Zadie is very lucky to get so many cakes for her birthday.

Finally to the big cake, I know you all want to know what happened next.......well I built the lovely lake and I built the island that Abney and Teal live on and I grew the grass and flowers in the park for the Poc Pocs to play in......

Then I put the lovely Abney and Teal in the positions I had planned for them and it all came together! Teal dipped her feet in the lake whilst Abney strung up the bunting. Not forgetting 'Neep' who watched over them both :)

At first I thought Neep was like the British Gas flame.....now I know he is a parsnip. And he has to be a 'He' as girls are too pretty to be parsnips.

The final cake. I totally enjoyed making this one and I hope you enjoyed reading the  story.

Rachelxx