Rustic semi-rustic cake with fresh flowers - June 2016

This week's wedding cake... a 3 tier rustic semi-naked cake with fresh cosmos, roses and lisianthus.  

Floral cascade cake with 90 and Jack Russell - Dec 2015

A 2 tier buttercream covered cake with lots of different coloured fondant flowers.

This one was a 90th birthday cake for a lovely lady who has a soft spot for Jack Russells so we added some toppers to reflect this.

NOTE:  These and many other toppers are available in my Etsy shop.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/KasserinaHome?ref=hdr_shop_menu

Simple Rainbow stacked cake with sprinkles - December 2015

Simple but effective!

Six layers of rainbow vanilla love, stacked high, covered with smoothed buttercream and showered with rainbow sprinkles... perfect.

Now, the only issue with this little lovely is that when you make a cake higher than it is wide, it tends to want a little lie down when you drive it around corners (especially when you've made it to taste this good).  

This cake had quite a way to go, so in order to make sure that the cake was safely transported I gave it a central bubble straw support to make sure that the layers didn't slide around on the buttercream.  

I also screwed a dowel into the cake drum and positioned the bubble straw and cake over it so nothing could shift during delivery.

I hadn't even got back from delivering the cake before the customer sent me this photo. It seems to have gone down well!

Hoo ha! 

Jack Skellington Halloween cake - Oct 15

A spooky Jack Skellington cake for a Halloween birthday. 

A 2 layer chocolate fudge cake. Yummy!  I used orange coloured vanilla buttercream between the layers, obviously. 

Once I'd done the usual buttercream covering as a crumb coat (see earlier posts), I covered it in black fondant.

Using a paper template as a guide, so I knew where things were going, I started building up the contours a bit with white fondant.

The shiny bits are trex to stick the fondant together with something that will disappear over time.

He was looking eerily like a black and white mistral at this point which was making me feel a bit weird...

I covered the whole thing with white fondant, cut out the eyes and slits for the mouth and stitching, exposing the black underneath, pressed the fondant over the contours, shaped with various modelling tools and dusted with black and green petal dust.

I airbrushed the fondant covered cake drum, put the cake on and continued to airbrush the base of the cake so it blended in with the board.  I added black and white striped ribbon to the sides of the cake drum. 

I deliberately dirtied up the white a bit with blossom tint and airbrushing; after all, he is a Tim Burton character, it wouldn't go for him to look too perfect and pristine.

Come see Kasserina at the Crawley wedding show on the 25th October.

One of the biggest of the year, I'm really looking forward to it!

The Crawley Wedding Fayre at K2

"The Crawley Wedding Fayre is one of the largest Wedding Fair Shows in the South East attracting exhibitors and brides-to-be from West Sussex, East Sussex, Kent, Surrey and South London.

This Sussex Wedding Fair is held in the large main arena of the K2 Leisure Centre in Crawley and features many wedding specialists, a bridal fashion catwalk show and wedding cars INSIDE the venue itself.

Don’t miss this bridal show for your one-stop wedding planning all under one roof!"

Go to http://crawleyweddingfayre.com for more details and free advance tickets

Giraffe birthday cake - October 2015

Small three layer 6" chocolate fudge birthday cake with a theme... 

think you can tell what that might be!

NOTE:  This and many other toppers are available in my Etsy shop.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/KasserinaHome?ref=hdr_shop_menu

White feathers wedding cake - October 2015

Wedding Fair time!

My first foray into wafer paper, but it was easier than expected and I quite like the effect. 

My original design involved neater looking, more deco feathers, but as I steamed them I found that I much preferred them with a looser effect (more natural), so I just kept going with that.

Wedding Fair Season has arrived.. or is it Fayre...?

Count me as confused about the spellings but, whether it's "fair" or "fayre", the Kasserina design studio is all aflutter about up and coming wedding fairs/fayres/shows.  

I can now confirm that you can catch me at the Quirky Boutique Wedding Fair, Brighton Centre, Kings Road, BN1 2GR on Sunday 4th October.  It's a great fair, centring on couples who are looking for a wedding that reflects them and their lives, so no paint by numbers wedding goods here.  

Go to http://www.bellesevents.co.uk/quirky-boutique-wedding-fair-in-brighton/ for more details.

You can also find me the following week at a brand new fair at Barnham Hall, West Sussex, PO22 0AY on Sunday 11th October.

It's all go finishing off the new designs, can't wait to start showing them off.  Hope to see some of you there, do say hi.

x

Bajan chevron and Pom-Pom baby shower cake - July 2015

Some old friends of mine, Hilda and Mitchell, are having a baby... very soon now.  

As Hilda and Mitch hail from Barbados, the colours of the party are based on the Bajan flag and organiser Joan's brief was chevrons and pom-poms.

Since early on the baby's been known as the Cocoa Bean, shortened to CB in all communication.  

Hilda's lovely friend Joan organised a baby shower from across the Atlantic, which was impressive.

At one point though, I really didn't think it was fated that I would get to the party.  I was stuck for hours between junctions when the M23 was shut down, had to go cross country to get around (had to navigate a couple of ditches and a gravel road on the way to the A24), diversions on the A24, very heavy traffic on the M25, severe delays on the M4 so went for the M40 only to find that was shut down for 3 junctions too.  Eventually got there just as the guest started to arrive rather than the very, very early arrival I'd planned for... thank god for my OCD contingency time scales!  

This was my first chevron cake and I used the Jessica Harris, waxed paper transfer method (see her craftsy class @ http://www.craftsy.com/class/clean-and-simple-cake-design/209?_ct=sbqii-sqjuweho-dum&_ctp=4&rceId=1437656063514~ohxnsua5).

The thing I would change for next time though is that I mixed Culpitt gold flower-paste with the cocoform. I wanted the yellow to be irredescent but didn't want to screw up the straight lines by painting it afterward.  That gold flower paste is so ridiculously hard to use and it made the cocoform much less stable so I had to make the chevron's thicker than I would have liked and it bugged me every time I looked at the cake.  

Congratulations H&M, 

CB, really looking forward to meeting you, 

Joan, it was lovely to meet you, 

Jason, Happy Birthday, 

Everyone else, it was great to see you 

xxxx