Cakes Galore!

Evening,

As I mentioned, I spent a looooong time yesterday making cakes. Why? Because we organised a cake sale to supplement our fundraising for this:

Yup, I ran 5km for Race For Life (which raises money for Cancer Research UK) on Saturday. I decided to do it on a whim about 3 weeks back, and started my 'training' two weeks before the race. I was pretty pleased with a time of 32 minutes :)

My work has a scheme where you can apply for matched funding if 3 or more employees take part. One person took part in the race with me (and kept me going), and another in a different department completed her race two weeks before. So we decided that between us we'd organise a cake sale.

I made a cupcake mix using this recipe from iVillage. I made 12 large (normal sized) cupcakes, and 16 mini cupcakes using mini silicone moulds. I've never used silicone moulds before but I was rather impressed. I picked them up from a Poundshop, and even if I never use them again I got my worth out of them!

I substituted strawberry flavouring for vanilla as I didn't have any, and used some leftover chocolate icing from a chocolate cupcake kit (see below).

My boyfriend was over and decorated these chocolate cupcakes themselves. They looked (and tasted) yummy. These were the first cakes to sell out when they went on sale! 

There was loads of the icing left over, and it was a fairly runny consistency so I decided it would be a lot easier to just dip the mini cupcakes into the icing rather than trying to spoon it everywhere. It also makes them really smooth. My boyfriend thought I'd accidentally dropped the first one though :) The strawberry flavour wasn't very noticeable, so the chocolate/strawberry combination worked.

These were the 'large' cupcakes made using the same cupcake mix. I made up some icing and used one tiny drop of red food colouring. The whole thing went a perfect shade of pink so I decided not to tempt fate and to leave it as it was!

(The Race For Life encourages women running to take part wearing something pink - which makes for an awesome sight when there are 2500 women in pink running around a park.)

I also made some jammy fair cakes using a victoria sponge mix and some seedless raspberry jam. I iced those with white icing but didn't take any pictures of them. I need to figure out a way of stopping the jam from sinking and pooling in the bottom of the cases...

I decided to stamp some labels for the cakes so that people would know what was what. The jammy fairy cakes and normal cakes looked pretty similar as the pale pink icing wasn't too in-your-face pink.

I used a Papermania stamp from a Birthday themed pack I picked up in Hobby Craft for £2 in a bargain bin. I saw the same stamps on sale in WHSmith on Sunday for £7.99! That's probably what reminded me of this particular stamp and gave me the labels idea. I was going to cut each one out like this but my hand started cramping and I decided it was too fiddly.

So I stamped about 10 on some pale pink paper I already had and trimmed them to size.

I'm really annoyed I didn't take any pictures, but photography isn't allowed at work. Should have sneaked one on my phone though...

My running partner brought in a cool, chirpy multi-coloured polka dot tablecloth and loved the labels idea. She has pretty funky handwriting too, so she wrote the labels and we stuck them to the plates/tupperware the cakes were in.

Altogether we had a multitude of cupcakes, jam tarts, an iced banana & sultana bread loaf, coconut macaroons, 'dream cakes' (caramel shortbread) and chocolate brownies. We laid out the cakes at 10am, and by 5pm the coffee mug we put out for the donations was full! Looking forward to counting it tomorrow :)

xx

Watercolours

Morning,

I didn't sleep much last night. Just didn't feel tired, so I tried to lull myself to sleep by watching an episode of Caprica while stamping. I recently bought some Derwent water colour pencils for a new challenge, and found out too late that Versa colour Black doesn't like getting wet. So I bought myself some Staz On ink which is a solvent ink that can be used on plastics, metals, ceramics etc.



I tend to buy card magazines for the gifts, so I can go for several months without buying any and then buy about 5 in the space of 2-3 weeks. I picked up some Bumble the Bear stamps that came free with a recent issue of Papercraft Inspirations. They are a decent size for colouring in, so I thought I'd spend a little while stamping each image out to see them better, and colour in a few if I wasn't feeling tired.

I also started a new project but it won't be finished for another few days :)





Not sure about this one, but I was just trying out different ways of using watercolours as I've never used them before.



The balloons and candle was part of a separate pack of rubber stamps I picked up in the sale in Hobbycraft for £1.99. The stamps have a birthday theme and I was a bit low on decent sized Birthday stamps (as freebies from magazines tend to be on the small side).

What have you been up to this weekend?

xx

Grandmother's Birthday Card

I hadn't posted this earlier because for a little while I was dithering over whether this was too girly to use as a Valentine's day card. The dilemma was solved by making another Valentine's day card using a Let's Make Cards magazine idea and deciding that I preferred that in the end :)





The little stamp on the back is an Inkadinkadoo 'Handmade with love' sentiment.

xx

The Kiss

Just realised that while I referenced the kiss in the previous post I haven't actually posted it here yet!

So, just for you :)



Not the best quality picture, I forgot to take one before I posted it to the boyfriend so had to take it hurriedly while at the his house so that I could post it here :)

xx