Cake Serving Guide

I get so many requests from people who are insure what size of cake they need for events.  There are lots of cake serving guides out there which are all very different but I thought I'd post up the one I use.  The servings calculated here aren't huge afternoon tea size but the kind of size you'd give out as a taster at a wedding or birthday.

CAKE SIZE	FRUIT (ROUND)	FRUIT (SQUARE)	SPONGE (ROUND)	SPONGE (SQUARE)
6 INCH	22	28	11	14
8 INCH	40	54	20	27
9 INCH	54	70	27	35
10 INCH	68	90	34	45
12 INCH	100	134	50	67

Cake Travels - Barcelona

I turned 29 again *ahem* a few weeks ago and in celebration my Mum and I thought we'd take ourselves off to Barcelona for the weekend.  There was A LOT of this

(those glasses were almost as big as our heads.....serious)

plenty of this

How To...........make (almost!) perfect fondant stripes

Striped cakes seem to be the cake of the moment so thought I'd let you know how I go about getting (almost) perfect stripes on my fondant iced cakes. 

First off, creating the stripes.  You can do this by hand by rolling out some fondant, measuring and then cutting out stripes, however to get a really neat look its worth buying one of these handy little ribbon cutters such as this one by Wilton.  They look overly complicated but once you've got the hang of which spacers go where to get which size of ribbon they're super easy to use.  Just roll over the fondant and voila perfectly sized ribbons.

Now to add them to the cake.  Now you can be all mega technical about this if you like and measure round the cake working out where to place all the ribbons and how many you can fit on.  However if you're like me and prefer a speedier solution I find trial and error and trusting your eye works just as well.  Its easier to place four ribbons on the cake first (two opposite each other) to split the cake into quarters.  Place the four ribbons on the cake (with no water at this point) and have a good luck to see if they look even, if they don't move them around.  Once they look OK dab a bit of water on the back of each ribbon and gently place on the cake and press down.

Once you've got your four quarters sorted you can then fill in the gaps of each quarter.  This ensures you get the same amount of spacing between each ribbon and the same number of ribbons in each quarter.  Again just lay the ribbons on gently to start with to position them and once they look OK then stick onto the cake.

Here's one I made earlier.

And so the thirties begin.............

June 2012..........the dreaded time when I will turn 30 and enter that scary decade where we're all expected to settle down and become responsible. I've started thinking about this recently after noticing the start of all the 30th birthdays for all my old (being the operative word :) ) school and university friends.  The party invites are being received, birthday wishes being posted online and most importantly birthday cakes are being made!

I've made two 30th birthday cakes in the last couple of months and I'm sure there will be more as the year progresses.  The first was for my boyfriend Steve who turned 30 in August.  I've been teasing him about turning 30 for months (much to his annoyance) but when the big day came around I was actually quite nice and along with his family we threw him a big birthday party.  No birthday party is complete without a cake and for Steve I created this three tier vanilla sponge cake in red and white (Man Utd colours of course).

This was the first time I'd created such a big tiered cake but with the help of some sturdy dowelling rods I was quite happy with the way it turned out.