Planet Cake, Sally Alps and fondant rolling

 Last November I did my first actual cake decorating course (I have always been totally self taught). It was fantastic and sorted out all sorts of lingering questions I had had about fondant decorating, which I had never been confident to use. I went to Sally Alps of Alps & Amici in Launceston and the course was Christmas Cupcake Decorating. Sally learned her art from the famous Paris of Sydney's Planet Cake. I have since got hold of the new book Planet Cake Cupcakes which is a great buy and very informative.

My eureka moments from the day were:

It is PERFECTLY OK to use commercial or 'ready-to-roll' (RTR) fondant, in fact most great decorators use it! Yay, now I don't have to feel guilty for not making my own fondant icing.

There are a few different types of fondant icing available and you can get it in the supermarket or at places that sell cake decorating supplies. They vary in stiffness and taste so you need to experiment with what works for you. In Coles you can buy Orchard White Icing in a cardboard box from the flour/sugar aisle, this is RTR fondant.I always wondered whether it was or not.

The best colourings are paste or gel colours. The liquid ones that are everywhere get really messy when you try to knead them in because they're too wet. The gel ones are a bit harder to get (go to a cake decorating place) but they give a very intense rich colour and don't make the fondant so sticky. They cost about $5 per colour and it is so worth buying a range of colours so that you can be a bit varied.

Cover the top of the cupcake with a layer of ganache that you can hot-knife so that it is totally smooth - this gives you a beautiful flat surface to work with and means your rolled-out fondant can be quite thin and still be smooth.

Comb good toyshops for kids' modelling tools and rolling pins... this is the perfect scale to use for cupcake sized decorating.


And keep collecting pastry cutters of all shapes and sizes because you can form the basics of lots of cute designs by using the cutters - for instance look at the snowman above which is made from different sized circles.

In the beginning...

... I was a small girl with a sweet tooth and a cookbook which contained a recipe for fairy cakes. The recipe told you how to mix flour and sugar and eggs together and scrape this mixture into patty cans.

It also said: "Ask Mummy to set the oven to Gas Mark 8."
... and so I did, and she did, and my first batch of cupcakes appeared all hot and fresh from the oven.

Then it said somewhat scarily "Be careful not to eat them when they're still hot, or you may get hiccups."
... I have still never figured out if this is true.

From then on I loved making cakes and I still do. I'm a pretty lazy cook, I only do stuff that I'm interested in, and the only thing I am consistently interested in is baked treats. So that is the focus of this blog in which I'm going to try to document my experiments with cakes, pastries and biscuits. I like to read and see what other cooks are doing or have tried to do, and I often turn to the interwebs to solve cooking problems so hopefully I can help others to do that too!