ice-cream anyone?

Just a few of the cakes I made recently for a school coffee morning. Tried out a new idea I stole from someone elses photos. Used the 'fluffy frosting' icing again. Wanted to make different 'flavour' ice cream styles. Dyed strawberry ones pink and put in chopped up strawberry pieces. The mint choc chip ones had bits of matchmakers in but I overdid the peppermint essence and green dye so the mixture was too runny to pipe. Still not convinced by this icing though personally I think I prefer the taste to butter icing. Problem with butter icing is I never make it thick enough to pipe, maybe I should work on that!

when is a cake not a cake?

A few weeks back (yes have been lazy in posting) I had a 'creative cupcake' session with a friend. It was inspired by the Hello Cupcake books. These books are fascinating to just look at let alone trying to reproduce some of their ideas. Their imitation savoury meals are particularly interesting though I am not sure the appearance actually encourage you to eat them. Like a number of other books I have looked at, it works on the premise of taking everyday items (generally confectionary!) and using them to create unusual decorations. Of course this meant a lot of time was spent gathering together all potential decorations from the kitchen and also purchasing a few more. Below are just some of the decorations we used.
I also tried a new type of icing involving egg whites, melted sugar and some other bits that I can't remember. As the picture shows it is quite good at holding it's shape and is excellent for piping. It dries into a slightly meringue like exterior. Beware! I am still scraping bits of sugar off of appliances in the kitchen!

Can you guess what it is yet?!

(not sure any of these will be repeated and they would need a lot of practise to get things rights but it was a fun stress free afternoon)