My First Foray into Fondant

If you'd said 'Pip' and 'baking' in the same sentence 3 months ago I would've laughed! I have never pictured myself as a Mummy baker and I think what mostly put me off was my disaster of a cake I tried to make for our boy's 1st birthday party! Basically I did everything wrong that you could do wrong and I was turned off cake making for what I thought would be forever!

That is until I was inspired by all the incredible cake makers around the world (including my own sister in law) that I've had the pleasure of viewing of late through making all my party inspiration spotlight pages... so much so that I've been inspired to 'have another go'!!

Especially I must thank Tracy (Sweet Treacle) and Vanessa (Bella Cupcakes) for giving me the most inspiration of all!

So my first foray into cake making was 2 dozen spiderman cupcakes I decided to make for little man's last day of school! And of course me being me... I dug a hole for myself when deciding that I'd do chocolate toppers! I had oval chocolate moulds so I made red chocolate heads and decided I'd pipe black chocolate webbing and eyes on them!

Well now I know why it takes master chefs to create beautiful piped chocolate dessert designs cause piping chocolate is bloody hard!! Out of all 24 spiderman heads I think about 3 were semi ok ... enough to really recognise they were spiderman!! :) The rest were completely demented! Luckily kids don't really care 'bout demented spiderman heads and happily feasted on the treats. My son was so cute when he arrived at school with a big smile on his face holding the treats ready and willing to hand them out. Was a very sweet thing to see.

I think it was seeing my boys face that gave me the drive to keep going. I went to my local cake shop and decided fondant characters were my next try! Wish I'd done that first... it was like I was back in primary school making plasticine figures... I just loved it!

I made a whole batch of Gumby and friends fondant cupcake toppers for my brother's birthday. For as long as I can remember he's been a gumby fan so it was the perfect idea for cupcake toppers and cause they're an animated plasticine show it was really the perfect thing to make with fondant!!

So I had a ball and the cupcakes were a big hit with brother and especially with the little ones! They were running round the house on a sugar high all night!