Happy New Year!

I wish everyone of y´all 12 months of happiness, 52 weeks of fun and 365 days of good health.

(I know this phrase is longer, but in my oppinion this covers the most important :)

This dummy is made for an online contest at SCD. I did´tn really have the time for it, but the contest was announced like ½ year ago, and at the time i said i would participate, so i found the time somewhere after all. The theme was this pretty napkin:

Anyway, i expect it to land on one of the 4 first places... ´cause there are only 4 competitors! :)

Christmas Sweets

Just as last year - and the year before - our christmas sweets were done at the last second. No time for anything fancy, just a tiny amount of marzipan and nougat rolled in different shapes with sprinkles on.

Never mind, people are always too stuffed to enjoy them on christmas eve , and now we all have to go on a diet anyway!!

The cute mini cake-stands, a gift from my dad are from "Harlekin" at Tivoli. They were so kind to mail these by post :)

Christmas!

Finally Christmas is here :)

 

I´m wishing all of you all the joys of the season,

 

 and you and your family a Very Merry Christmas!

Waiting for christmas..

Whilst waiting for christmas i thought i´d post some christmas-stuff from the archives:

2009

 Pottery-mouse lovin´ candy canes.

2009
A mini-chocolate cake - serves 8-9 people. For indicating the size, the deer is 7 cm tall. Playing around with Rina :-)

2008

For Sofie´s class at School.

2007

A cute bird-house on an ugly cake :-)

2007

Mini cookie-houses

Peppermint Macaroons

150g egg whites - left at roomtemperature for 48 hours (No worries, as eggwhite has natural anti-bacterial properties) - 45g caster sugar - 190g ground almonds - 300g confectioners sugar - 30g finely chopped chocolate chips - a pinch of salt. - Aprox. 40 pieces (20 sandwich-macaroons)


Prepare bakingsheets: Mark circles using a 1 1/2-inch cookie cutter dipped in flour.


Sift confectioners sugar twice and mix with the finely ground almonds. Add the chopped chocolate an mix well.


Mix the eggwhite just foamy and add the caster sugar a little at a time on medium speed. On high speed, mix until the whites reaches a firm peak. With a spatula, fold in the dry ingredients until smooth. Tap the bowl a few times on the kithcen table, to make air-pockets burst. Put mixture in a piping bag.


Pipe the macaroons onto the prepared baking sheets. Leave them for 30-60 minutes for them to form a skin, check; If nothing sticks to your finger when touching, the macaroons are ready to bake.


Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degree celcious for about 12-15 minutes. It´s ok to put several baking sheets in the oven at the same time. When they´re done, slide the macaroons (still on the baking paper) off the baking sheets to cool off on the kitchentable.


Let the macaroons cool of completely before filling - after filling, refridgerate for 20 minutes so they´ll be nice and firm before serving.


Suitable fillings: Any buttercream or chocolate ganache. I used Wilton´s ready-to-use buttercream and added peppermint flavour.


Sprinkels: I chrushed a few christmas-canes and sprinkled on some of the macaroons, before they went into the oven, and that worked quite well.



TIP: Ladurée says to keep the macaroons stored for 2 days before eating, because that´s the time it takes to achieve a perfect balance between texture and flavour.... I´ll try that next time... :)

Vanilla Wreths

I bake vanilla wreaths´s every year for Christmas. A good collegue of mine gave me the recipe for....well many years ago. Nobody eats them on christmas eve, but they´re nice to have during december if people comes by for coffee, and a great give-away too:


500g flour - 375g butter - 250g sugar - 125g chopped almonds with or without the skin - 1 large egg - 1½ teaspoon vanillasugar.


Mix softened butter, flour, sugar and chopped almonds well. Add egg and vanillasugar and cool in fridge for 1 hour.
Run through a grinder with a star-plate, form rings and put on a baking-sheet, bake in oven for 200 degree celcius for 10-12 min. Cool off on a cooling rack.

Out of Rocking-horse Cookies....

In the absence of Rocking-horse cookies... I haven´t seen reindeers in this outfit before, but aren´t they cute? I almost like these better than the horses.
I love my reindeer-cutters:)

Carousel-Rocking-horse Cookies

I´ve often wondered how to decorate the cute rockinghorse cookies, besides the obvious way. This is why i never cut out too many of them. I came up with this idea, wich i LOVE! Sure, it takes some time, and when you run out of rockinghorse-cookies and are on a roll, then what to do?? I´ll show you later ;)


PS: All edible!

Winners are...

The names my daughter pulled out of my ol´ Bogart-hat are Susanne and S. Warming. I´ve send you both a message via friendconnect and hope to hear from you soon.

Congratulations, and i hope you´ll find as much inspiration in the book as i have.

Thank you all for following and hereby participating - this was fun! :)

Christmas Decoration.

The cake-stands etc. i have all over the place, turns out to be great for christmas decorations...

Rudolph :)

I made three of these cute cookies, on the pink one the colours flooded, the turquoise one cracked, (I didn´t eat them, i swear!) and this one is full of air-bubbles... Well, it´s still cute i think. :)
If i get a minute i´ll make some more.. Maybe.

My annual christmas ornament!

...in fact i think i might perhaps have bought more than one this year...


But i bet most of you recognize it immediately!?

The champ and master herself - immortalized in a christmas ornament! I wonder if she knows?

Candy-Cake

Christmas sure are an inspirational feast! I sometimes fear my head´ll explode with all the things i´d love to try creating in sugar. Who´d ever thought... :)

This time i made a dummy covered with Wiltons fondant and with little pieces of fondant christmas candy. The stripes on the cakes are painted with edible paint.

 

Cinnamon Cookies

Adding a teaspoon of cinnamon to this recipe and rolling the dough out very thinly, makes the crispiest cookies that tastes heavenly. You should try them :)

Gingerbread ornaments

I could´nt find my gingerbread boy and girl mini-cutter, so i piped these tiny ones instead and painted them with edible paint...

...and put them on these delicious devils chocolate cupcakes with peanutbutter frosting for my collegues at work :)

Recipe here.

Christmas cookies..

Cookies decorated with Royal Icing

Brownie-houses

I came across a photo of the cutest little brownie-houses, sprinkled with confectioners sugar somewhere on the internet, simply can´t remember where, but i had to try them out. These must go under my favorite category; Easy but with great effect!
The candy-canes are store-bought, but the little mint-sweets are made of fondant.
Recipe for the cake here.

Basic Sugar Cookies - Recipe

200g soft butter - 200g sugar - 1 large egg - 400g flour.


Add any flavour you like, vanilla, lemon/orange zest, cinnamon etc. Also you can replace 50 g of the flour with cocoa powder.


(I always add nothing or lots of vanilla :)


Add all ingredients - stir the egg gently before adding.


After kneaded together, wrap the dough in clingfilm and place in fridge for 1½ hour. This makes the dough more stable, so the cookies won´t lose shape too easy when cut out and moved onto the baking sheet.


Knead lightly and roll out the dough and cut out whatever shapes you want. Bake in the middle of the oven at 175-200 degrees for 12-15 minutes depending on the size of the cookies.


Always place similar sizes on the bakingsheets for the cookies to be baked evenly.


When out of the oven, place the cookies on a wire rack to allow them to cool of quick and get crispy.


TIP: (Not a necessity):
I roll out between 2 wooden dowels to get an even thickness on each cookie

I roll out on a large piece of baking paper, this way i dont have to use lots of flour to release them from the table after cutting out.


Enjoy :)

Milk and Cookies

-And a nice cup of coffee :) If only i had the heart to eat the cookies because they taste really good!

I love these small reindeers, bought at kagebutikken. I have thought of other ways to decorate them and the other day i got the greatest idea! -I can´t wait to show you:)

Winter´s definately here!

A wintery cake just for fun. We have snow everywhere now and it´s such a pretty sight.
I thought i had a solution for my daylight-problem - or lack of daylight - but no, i just got a lot of shadows on my pictures. It does make the embossing stand out though.


I need a studio! -And a couple of photo-courses...

Coming up....

Winter is approaching and with that, the lack of decent daylight to photograf cakes and many other interesting creations that i´m doing these days.
Today i´ve been preparing some christmas-cookies with a bunch of beautiful cake-ladies, now i just have to finish the last details and take photo´s of them. An achievement in it self - how to catch daylight, when it is dark in the morning when i go to work and dark in the afternoon when i get home....!


These are from 2007.

1000 Ideas for free. *Ended*

I was earlier on this year invited to contibute some of my work to a project called:1000 Ideas for Decorating Cupcakes, Cookies & Cakes Release date 01 November 2010 - 320 pages.

I´m quite thrilled to see my humble work amongst kings and queens of cakes! The book has a great layout (that matters!) and is put together really well. It´s a pure cornucopia of ideas and inspiration - and i´m fussy with cakes!

-Actually I´m so pleased with it, that i would like to give a free example away. - I´ll draw lots between my followers in mid-december as a thank-you-guys for following my humble efforts in cake decoration :)

This means that you don´t have to do anything at all, but wait for me to contact you - and recieve your free example of 320 pages of well-illustrated cake-joy!

Merry Christmas in advance! ;)

Stencilling

I love stencilling on cakes, but i hate working with it. I find it really hard to get razor sharp, and what to do if it gets all diffused? Pretty hard to re-do i gather. There are several ways to use stencils on cakes, i used edible pearl spray on the top of this dummy and on the cake board. On the border i held the stencil to the cake and painted with edible silver dust.
I think i´ll stay with stencilling on cookies with Royal Icing, that´s safer :-)

Final Halloween cake!

I know i made the impression that i was´nt making anymore Halloween-cakes, but this one slipped through the backdoor without me hardly noticing it! Sofie helped, she wrote the tombstones and provided her mum with coffee :)

For Parents' evening at my daughter´s school tonight, whilst the parents were talking, the pupils ate cake! :)