Poor little neglected blog...

Ok so I really really suck at keeping this blog updated (As shown by my 2 year hiatus!). I thought I'd do a couple of posts just showing some of the cakes I've completed over the past couple of years.

Spiderman Cake

The following cake is one I made for a friend of a friend. Her son was turning 6 and was obsessed with Spiderman. I used the Best Recipes chocolate mud cake with a basic chocolate ganache. The kids at the party all loved the cake and apparently fought over getting to eat the spiders :)

Jaws Cake

The following cake was also for a friend of a friend. Her son was obsessed with Jaws although he wasn't allowed to watch it lol. I was really happy with how the shark head turned out, although I didn't think the rest of the cake was quite up to the standard I was hoping to achieve. The cake was my easy peasy 5 minute chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache.

Chocolate-Espresso Layer Cake

The following cake is a birthday cake I made for my father in-law. I decided to try a non-fondant cake, and used inspiration from this gorgeous vanilla bean latte cake from Sweetapolita. I used my easy peasy 5 minute chocolate cake but tried my hand at making my first Swiss Meringue Buttercream - espresso flavoured. I also made candied pecans, some of which I left larger for decoration, the rest I blended into a crunchy topping and added to each layer. This cake was by far my favorite cake yet, it tasted sooo good, and the candied pecans were amazing!

Lego Power-Miners Cake

For A's 4th birthday he requested a Lego Power Miners cake. In case you've never seen Lego Power Miners before (you can see a couple of examples of them on the cake below), they're incredibly complex and intricate and I had no idea how on earth to make one out of cake! So in the end I cheated and decided to make a mine out of cake and add the Power Miners onto it. Everything on the cake was edible EXCEPT the Power Miners :)

I used my normal chocolate cake recipe and made a caramel Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

Minecraft TNT Cake

For A's 5th birthday this year he requested a Minecraft cake. He loves playing Minecraft and blowing everything up with blocks of TNT so I thought I'd do a block of TNT for his cake. I used a terrific banana cake recipe layered with cream cheese frosting and covered in white chocolate ganache.

(Apologies for the crappy camera phone pics!)

60th Anniversary Cake

The last cake I made was for my husbands grandparents 60th wedding anniversary. I wanted to try my hand at brush embroidery for the first time. I don't have very steady hands at piping, but I was still happy with how the cake turned out. I used the Exclusively Foods white chocolate mud cake with raspberry swiss meringue buttercream and covered in white chocolate ganache.

 

Catching Up...

Ok so I've been a bit neglectful over the past few weeks. I actually completed my very first order for a complete stranger 2 weeks ago, the customer ordered a chocolate mudcake Spiderman themed cake for her sons 6th birthday. This is what I came up with:

This little spider hanging on for dear life was definitely my favorite lol!!

I haven't done a lot of piping in the past, the very first attempt I had made at piping was for the snowflakes on the Christmas cake:

I was definitely much better at it this time around, I think I had the icing consistency off when I was making the snowflakes. I also used a different recipe for the royal icing, rather than using Sweetopia's recipe as I did the first time around, I found this highly rated recipe on allrecipes.com which worked much better for me.
So the feedback I received for the Spiderman cake was really good, the customer was so excited when she saw it, and her son was really happy with it too, she sent me back an e-mail a week later:

"I would like to thank you for an amazing cake, Riley and the children loved it ( only problem they all wanted a spider :) ) The mud cake was amazing never had one quiet like that one . I’m sure you will get a few orders from my friends!"

So I had finished the cake the day before it was to be delivered and good thing too because I started feeling unwell the next morning and by that afternoon I had developed a full on flu!! My husband delivered the cake for me while I took some cold and flu tablets and crawled into bed.

Unfortunately the cold and flu tablets I was given by the doctor (I can't take regular cold and flu tablets at the moment as I'm currently still nursing) really messed with my head and I was having trouble judging distances and kept bumping into things all day. Later that night when I had Baby Z asleep in my arms I went to sit on a chair, misjudged where the chair was, clipped the edge of the chair with my right hip and fell heavily on my left hip.

Since I was holding Baby Z I wasn't able to put out my hand to break my fall like people normally would, and I fell in such an odd angle and fell so heavily. The pain was excruciating!! My husband and FIL helped me to lie down on the ground because I was starting to black out from the pain.

I laid there for about half an hour while we waited to see if the pain would recede, but it was just getting worse and my left leg was starting to tingle and go numb, there was an excruciating sharp pain just to the left of my groin that wasn't receding. Eventually we decided I must have done some serious damage (actually, I kept insisting on it from the beginning - I just had to convince my husband that it was serious!) and since I couldn't move my legs at all, couldn't sit up without excruciating pain we decided we had to call an ambulance to take me in to the hospital.

So the ambulance arrived, and my wonderful paramedics, Steve and Matt dosed me up on morphine and some other awesome drug in a green whistle thing (seriously, that stuff messed me up! haha), then got me loaded into the ambulance and followed my husband back to the hospital (We live sorta out in the sticks! They had enough trouble finding the place and thought it would be easier to simply follow my husband back in haha!).

So once I got admitted into the ER and was assigned our wonderful nurse, Jacob (who just happened to be the same male nurse we were assigned when we went to the ER a few months ago for my husbands asthma attack), and was given more morphine, they took some x-rays and announced that I had fractured my pelvis. Awesome.

So now I am stuck on bed rest for the next 4-6 weeks (6-8 weeks healing time all up), can only get around on crutches, and am in a large amount of pain and discomfort. Lovely.

Coincidentally, my mother actually fractured her pelvis when she was 7 months pregnant with me. Not only that, but she actually fractured her pelvis in the exact same place as I've fractured mine! At least they kept her in hospital for 2 weeks before sending her home, I was discharged the very next day!

The nurses at the hospital told me that it's actually quite surprising that I managed to fracture my pelvis simply by falling off a chair, normally that type of injury they only see in car accident victims!! Of all people to manage this sort of injury, it just had to be me...