Cakes and cookies

I really enjoy baking, as the results are probably the most appreciated of anything I make! Most of the time, however, the cakes aren’t the most interesting things in the world to photograph. Since acquiring two sons though, birthday cakes are required. I did chicken out the first couple of times and bought cakes (horror of horrors!), but in the last couple of years I’ve done my best to make them with their favourite characters in mind. So here are a couple of pictures of (fairly) recent efforts.

This was an Incredibles birthday cake, made for my elder son for his 4th birthday (as you can probably tell!). I made a pattern by copying the logo from some other piece of merchandising we had bought, and then cut it out of coloured icing. The characters round the edge were sold as a set, and he was very happy to have these to play with after the party was over and the cake had been eaten!

This was my elder son’s 5th birthday cake, as he was (and still is) going through an obsessive Batman phase. I was quite proud of this one, as I had to do everything from scratch, including cutting out the bat-sign freehand, and creating Batman’s face. As anyone who knew me at school could tell you, that was quite an achievement, given that I can’t draw to save my life! I had to take quite a mathematical approach to it, trying to figure out angles and distances etc. He thought it was fab, anyway!

Finally, for now, this was my younger son’s 2nd birthday cake. While it wasn’t quite so complicated as the other cakes to create (I managed to find Postman Pat and Jess candles in Tesco and so only had to make the van) I was still quite pleased with the outcome.

I dread to think what the two of them will come up with next year for their cakes – just as long as there are lots of nice, regular shapes I should be fine! Unfortunately for me, both their birthdays fall in April, so that becomes my main sugarcraft month!

Halloween 2006

As it’s half term this week, my older boy and I spent the afternoon on the 31st October making and decorating cookies. Here’s some of the results:

January 2007

I’m going through a houseproud/stepford wife phase at the moment, and have started baking once more! I do bake fairly regularly the rest of the time, but when I’m in a phase like this I tend to feel the need to obsessively bake at a rate that even all my friends and family can’t eat quickly enough! These are some of my latest efforts, made for my sister in law when she visited us for lunch.

They all went down very well, and together with the extras I made, all vanished into tummies in a very short time!

**EDITED JANUARY 2010

I’ve not updated this page for some time, and I was going to remove it as I’m focussing more on yarny crafts at the moment. I decided otherwise as I thought it would be good to remind myself that I can do all of this stuff as well if I want to!