I’m determined to find my blogging mojo after a couple of years of just being far too busy. So I thought I would start out with a plan to blog every time I bake.

I made a Chocolate and Caramel cake to assist Gary in his birthday celebrations and to top up his calorie intake before his next 3 and a half hour bike ride.

Any cake for Gary has to include chocolate as a main ingredient, so after some research I came across this Chocolate and Caramel Later Cake on the BBC Good Food website.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out as it’s quite impressive when you cut through it and can see the 4 different colours. The cake is quite dense and rich and can easily feed more than 12 people as the recipe suggests.

My sister turned 32 earlier in October and she asked me to make her birthday cake. But of course it couldn’t be any ordinary birthday cake, she requested a Hello Kitty Cake with Keroppi cupcakes.

This took a fair bit of research and design from my point of view but I came up with a couple of ideas including pink macaroons. The pink macaroons were later binned as I couldn’t get the colour right at all even though they tasted great.

Anyway, I decided to go with red velvet sponge for both the cake and cupcakes. I made the main Hello Kitty sponge about two weeks before my sister’s birthday and froze it so that it (in theory) would be easier to ice and decorate. Freezing it paid off and I will definitely do it again if I have to make any similar cakes in the future.

Hello Kitty took me about 3 hours to decorate including fixing the neck where I practically garotted her and the Keroppi cupcakes took me about 4 hours to make and decorate with some help from my sister and a bottle of wine.

The m&ms made life a little interesting. You can buy them online but the minimum order fee was £65. I would have been eating m&ms forever with that quantity. So I decided to visit the m&ms store in Leicester Square. Just a word of warning, it is 4 floors of tourist heaven (hell) with a Red m&m being chased around the store by children when I popped in! Also be prepared for the vast array of colours available to buy. I just wanted pink m&ms and was confronted with at least 6 different shades!

So here it is, all the hard work was really worth it and my sister was really chuffed:

The first one was Gary’s twin girls who turned 7 earlier in the week, so I have recently been scouring the web looking for birthday cake ideas. I came across The Pink Whisk‘s blog sometime ago and after look through I came across her How to post on Puffle Cupcakes. Great idea I thought as the twins absolutely love Club Penguin.

It took me two solid evenings to decorate 15 Puffles and make the scenery and compared to the Pink Whisk’s instructions I cheated alot.

But I was pretty pleased with the result:

Erin and Piper really loved their birthday cake so all the hard work was worth it.

After dinner and plenty of cake was consumed, Erin, Piper and Deaghlan decided to partake in a spot of indoor snorkelling as you do!!

Indoor Snorkelling