The sun and the warmth have gone from Manchester this week. it is COLD and WINDY and rather unpleasant outdoors. And I like the outdoors. So thats saying something. So It is quite nice to have a little brightness in the world on those days when you feel like the spring will never come, and this weeks sunflower cupcakes brought just that. Bright, cheerful and they make me smile every time I look at them. With these cupcakes in the room, and the smell of fresh Earl Grey and Red Velvet Cupcakes just out of the oven, even on s drab day, there is metaphorical sunshine.
I do like sugarpaste as a medium, but as variety is the spice of life, sometimes its nice to do a non-sugarpaste cake for a change. Last night I delivered this large red velvet cake, which was covered with piped rose swirls and just decorated with some simple flowers. Simple, elegant, and I bet it tasted good! Frosted with fluffy vanilla buttercream, and filled with 3 fillings between the 4 layers. Chocolate ganache, strawberry swiss meringue buttercream, and vanilla fluffy buttercream. Can I stay for the party and have a piece of the cake? No? Darn 🙁 ok.
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Its funny how things happen in clusters sometimes. Like last week, which was the week of dinosaurs. No dinosaur cakes for months, then 3 dinosaur cakes in 1 week. Funny. So, I have now had a lot of practice at making dinosaurs. And I have decided that I like them. They can be made with a certain degree of 'artistic license'. They do not need to be exact replicas of certain breeds or have specially distinguishing features to make them look like a family pet or a famous animal. When you do a dinosaur cake for a child, it just needs to look like a dinosaur. And thats a vague description with a wide spectrum of possibilities. Awesome. Children do not normally mind that there are over 700 different species of dinosaur that have been identified to date, and that the ones I make probably are not anatomically correct to any one of those species, but rather a melee of features of dinosaur generalisation. They look cool, and I like them.
While we are on the subject of children's cakes, I had to wonder last week, while making a cake which had 2 of the characters from 'In the Night Garden', who comes up with these characters. They are odd, and look rather senseless to me. But hey, who am I to judge. I remember one of my favourite childhood tv shows starring a talking donkey that lived in a giant apple. You surely have to be on some kind of hallucinogenic substance to come up with this stuff.
I made an unusual cupcake box last week. I always find it fascinating when asked to bring together in one box of cupcakes, a lot of seemingly unrelated subjects. I have to wonder about the connections and meaning behind each element, which must be relevant to the customer and the receiver of the gift. Relevant to them but seemingly nonsense and mixed up to me. How things can change depending on one's perspective, and the background information which we possess. True in many aspects of life I think.
It is autumn here in the UK. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with autumn. I love it for its beauty. its colours, which awe me every time I get out into the woods. The colours which nature produces just in death and sleep, the human imagination could barely fathom. Such beauty in creation and in its yearly destruction. So as I ran around last week I unusually burdened myself with my phone so that I could take some photos. And I'm glad I did. They turned out rather well and will serve to remind me of the beauty once we are in the full grip of winter and the colour had been stripped from the land. It is amazing how such beauty can be a by product of death and sleep. The winter brings the start of the end for much of nature but in its dying days it sends up a last hurrah in the form of a pallet of colours to numerous to be counted, and too vivid to be appreciated by any lens as much as it is appreciated by the human eye.
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