2012 is at the door

Whishing you all a fabulous new year with these clever words;

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. 
 ~Oprah Winfrey

Christmas Sweets

Licorice toffees, definately my favorite this year!

Recipe here (Danish)

 

In english: Licorice tofees, approx. 50 pcs:

½ l heavy cream - 250 g sugar - 125 g glucose - 2 tsp licorice powder

approx. 50 g of licorice powder to roll the pieces in

 

Boil all ingredients (except liquorice powder) into a caramel, golden and viscous. Stir in it periodically, but mostly in the end. The caramel is fully cooked when it has a good tan and begins to release from the pot base, approx. 20-35 minutes at even, good heat. Remove from the heat, add the licorice powder and stir well. Pour the caramel into a container, approximately. 18x 18 cm, which is lined with oiled cookie sheets on both the bottom and sides. Add an oiled cookie sheet on top.

Let the caramel cool at room temperature, preferably until the next day - alternatively five hours. Cut into 7x7 (or smaller), a total of 49-50 pieces. and roll in licorice powder.

Lime Vodka-soaked Cranberry marzipan bombs

Dark chocolate bark with salted almonds, also definately my favorite this year!

Recipe for salted almonds here (in danish)

Variation - paprikamandler: Tilsæt 1½ spsk delikatessepaprika sammen med saltet.

 

 

In english: A Snack for 6 persons:

3½ tblsp coarse salt - 2 dl boiling vand - 200 g almonds (3½ dl) - 10 g butter cut into pieces.

 

Dissolve the salt in the boiling water and add the almonds. Leave them covered for 15 minutes. Let the almonds drain in a sieve. Spread them on a plate lined with baking paper with butter. Bake the almonds in the middle of the oven - turn them over a few times when the butter is melted. Serve the salted almonds warm - or cold. - 20 min. in the oven at 150°.

- in addition, melt chocolate and pour over the cooled almonds, leave to set in a baking tin lined with bakingpaper and cool night over. Cut with a sharp knife.

Merry Christmas

No Christmas-stress here this year! 

-The gifts are placed in the oven, the roast and the goose is lying under the tree and the children are all wrapped up - now Christmas can come on with all it´s got!

Have a very merry christmas you all :)

Fast, sweet cookies

I love this recipe for being so suitable for many different purposes, i added cocoa and the taste surprised me pleasantly. With a generous dot of melted chocolate and freeze-dried fruits they also look delicious. Unfortunately these small treats are all now members of the group that didn´t make it through to christmas :-/

Cookie houses

I love making these little cookie houses, this is the third time i make them, and i try to make them different everytime. These are made efter a cute Christmas ornament i was given :)

 

Other houses here and here

Recipe here 

Christmas Tree

I had tons of left-over fondant in all kinds of colours, so when i was given three dummies, i knew just what to do with it. Somehow, everytime i mix my left-over fondant in all kinds of colours, it allways come out brown...

I tried to disguise the very brown cake/dummy with stripes of white fondant, but maybe i shouldn´t have watched a film on telly at the same time. One really has to be precise to get them straight! The sugar-canes marks that the cake is best viewed from this angle - and this angle only ;-)

I loved! making the tree. A styrofoam cone with piped royal icing-shells. It just doesn´t get any easier. It looked really pretty in white, but it needed colour to go with the rest of the cake, so it´s painted with Americolor´s Forest Green diluted in clear alcohol.

Worlds most expensive christmas bauble

Since I´m not nearly rich enough to get me one of these i had to make one myself :) It´s a fondant-covered styrofoam ball with royal icing scrolls, painted with Edable Art´s Lemon Gold, guilded with glitter, also from Edable Art; Disco Gold Hologram - the ultimate christmas glitter in my opinion.

The rocking horses are meant to look like old ivory antique-figurines, but I´m not sure i got away with it. Still like them though.

-This cake/dummy and another one i made is going to be on display at Sofisticake from next week.

Ninjago Cake

The Ninjago team fortress - I made two of these for a birthday-boy. They were fun to make, its chocolate cakes with a thin layer of chocolate buttercreme - no fancy filling this time as i had to make them a couple of days in advance because of a tight schedule.

Figurines were added at the birthday party, and the boys were actually playing on the cakes :)

Halloween Dessert

We had friends over for Halloween last night, and this was our dessert; Baked figs with brown sugar/cinnamon syrup, a rich vanilla icecream (Carte d´or) and chocolate mud-cake bats. A collegue of mine served baked figs for us last month, and i already made them twice since. They are so my kind of dessert; Super easy and extremely tasty!

Delicious!

Recipe: Wash and halve the figs - top with 1 teaspoon brown sugar (or more :-)- sprinkle with cinnamon - bake for 25 minutes at 180degrees. The sugar will soak through the figs and transform into a thick syrup.

 

For Trick or Treater´s coming round; Witch´s dead fingers.

Recipe adapted from Cakejournal

Smurfette

Smurfette-cake for our good friends daughters birthday.

A Vanillacake with strawberrymousse and chocolatecreme.

Wouldn´t it have looked adorable, if i had remembered to put little toadstools on, like i planned!?

Of course blue inside.

 I don´t think i like these coloured cakes, but the kids sure did :)

Popcake winner is...

Bianca from Bianca's Kageverden, Congratulations! :)

I hope you'll find great inspiration in the book. I saw on your blog that you have a birthday coming up - hurry up and send me your adress at piamarianne@kageriet.net maybe it will arrive just in time! :)

About the Popcakes... I haven't found the time yet - the garden needs closure before winter comes amongst many other things, but i know the design i want to use eventually :)

Hand painted Cupcake disks

Still painting... This time on disks for Poppy seed-citrus cupcakes

(try saing that fast 3 times :) -with Wiltons ready-made frosting.

I added zest from 2 limes and 1 lemon plus 1 table spoon poppy-

seeds to a plain vanilla cupcake-recipe.

The motives i made are more simple than they look; my kind of craft! :)



Tutorial here


***Don´t forget the POP-cake give-away - there´s still time to enter***

Tutorial: Handpainted flower disks

Tools: Brushes no 1 or 2, white and brown edible colour,

clear alcohol for thinning the colour, a spatula to move the

disks around if necessary, plus a plate to mix the colour on.

1. step: Draw the outline with the tip of the brush in an upright position

2. step: Adjust the outline and start filling out with the white colour.

Make sure to use a very thin layer, or else it won´t dry up.

Mixing the colours. By adding a drop of clear alcohol

after mixing, the colours become more fluid.

3. step: Adding the branches. Because i don´t mix the

brown colour completely, i have several shades to use

wich makes them look more vivid. I use the tip of the

brush to "dot" lille leaves

4. step: "Dot" a half-circle center for the flower.

Best to let the white flower dry completely as the

colours tend to blend a bit.

Cupcakes with handpainted flower disks here

Note:

The fondant-disks are aprox. 4mm thick and have been drying for a couple of days on both sides.

Still they became a little soft when put on the frosting. Next time i´ll try using flowerpaste, it might be better.

Painting course at Sofisticake

I was thrilled to attend a course at Sofisticake with Malene, who is an educated Royal Copenhagen painter. I hope there´ll be a part II, III and more, because it was extremely interesting and she´s a great teacher.

We practiced basic stroking-techniques - really difficult although it looked so simple when she demonstrated.

 Most important - the course gave me lots of inspiration to carry on at home. These are painted with Wiltons white icing colour.

 

Taking a break from stroking...

-And taking it a bit further - just to see if i could. This is an image of Mads Stage (hence the initials on the heart), painted on the cookie with a picture lying beside me. This attempt is good enough for me - Note to self; Never say you can´t.

I tried out roses too...

There´s room for improvement, but i did surprise myself with these ones and

i´m looking forward to refine my efforts. I´ll definately get on with practising!
First step will be shopping for better brushes and lots of coloured dusts.

Hope you like them :)

Tutorial: Cakebites

I always manage to need just that size of cupcake cases i don´t have in my rather large collection. Maybe it´s common knowledge, but a while ago i found out that by using the same cutter i want for my cakebites, i can fit the cupcake case just the size i like.

Just like this!

Thought i´d share, because it´s a great help for me and now i don´t

have to buy all these irregular cupcake case sizes that don´t really fit anyway.

This is for my mother-in-laws birthday tomorrow :) A regular chocolate-cake, spiced up just a bit. I baked a large round cake, torted it and cut out round pieces. Between two round pieces of cake, i put a dot of apricot glaze. Mostly for moisture, and to highlight the chocolate-taste. On top, i also put a dot of apricot-glaze, a few blue-berries and some peanutbutter creme.

And then a collar of dark chocolate creme. Voila!

Nice and easy, and i´m thinking it´ll taste great tomorrow :)

POPcake give-away *Ended*

The cupcake-craze is definately followed by a POPcake-craze in cake-world/blog-land. I haven´t tryed them out yet, because covering with melted chocolate/candy/fondant is not my thing, but since i claim that anything is possible with sugar, and one should never underestimate the power of beginners luck, of course i´ll give it a go. So it´s on the list!

But as for now i have a copy of this fantastic POPcake-book to give away to one of my followers. The book explains very well how to make POPcake´s from A to Z, and there are many great designs in it too.

To enter, all you have to do is leave a quick comment so i know if you´re interested. (Of course you´re interested, but maybe you have a copy already :-)

Deadline is 20th of september. -By then i hope i´ve found time to make some POP´s!

Katie Alice inspired

Inspired by some of Katie Alice´s beautiful designs. I used in-lays technique on the two bottom dummies, (stamped out dots, flowers and leafs and replaced with other colours after covering "cakes" with fondant) it could be quite a challenge to use on real cakes, they certainly would have to be well cooled and firm, preferably without filling.

Colours are; Americolor Turquoise, Ivory, Avocado and dusty rose. Painted details: SK´s Bulrush

Black and White Cuteness

So this is Black and White Cuteness - A pile of panda´s :)

 

I like how this turned out. Hope you like it too :)

Tutorial