Apple Crumble

Here's what I did with the left over apple from my apple & honey cupcakes for SPCA Cupcake Day. Apple crumble with custard - the perfect mid week treat.

Before I continue on, thank you to all those generous friends & work colleagues who bought cupcakes off me to help raise money for the SPCA. With their support, I raised $175 for the SPCA. Those animals are going to love them so much!

Onto another story about the SPCA Cupcake Day fondant animals I made. A friend of mine kindly gave the fondant animals from her cupcakes she bought to her colleague to put on her daughter's birthday cake. It took a good minute for me to work out that those fondant animals on the cake were made by me. I initially thought "OMG, did I just create the exact same animals as someone else?". Time to start popping those fish oil capsules.  I'm happy that my animals were used more than once.

SPCA Cupcake Day

I did not post this last night because it was far too late at night and I was exhausted from making fondant animals all weekend. I knew procrastination would catch up with me! I was a little lucky when a friend popped by to return some cutters she had borrowed and ended up helping me cut bits and pieces out to assemble Miss Chickie.

There was an unfortunate accident of a bunny rabbit losing it's head and was relieved that I had actually packed an 'emergency repair' kit into my bag today.

These little cuties sold out in about 45 minutes of me sitting down at my desk at work and I had to turn some people away. I wish I had made more as I hate turning people away but I only have so much time in a day to make these little animals.

Another Addition To The Family

Mr & Mrs Piggie

Procrastination must be my other name, given that it's taken me this long to create another animal for my SPCA cupcake day collection.

Only 2 more to make and the 'family' is complete, although I can't quite decide which other 2 animals to make. I've already decided that I'll only be making 36 cupcakes for the SPCA cupcake day this year, these little cuties are quite time consuming to make.

If you would like to get your hands on one of these (or a few) of the cupcakes which I will be making for the SPCA cupcake day please e-mail me [claudia at prettytemptations.co.nz]. Cupcakes will be $5 each and all the proceeds will be going directly to the SPCA.

Any suggestions anyone for the last 2 animals?!?

Lemon Curd Cake

For those who have been listening go on about a lemon curd cake I've been meaning to make, well, here it is now.

This is the second cake I made - the first attempt was not so successful and I gave the recipe another go.

This recipe is time consuming to make. I made the lemon curd from scratch and made a lemon Italian meringue buttercream to go with it. Very very lemony but I liked it - I'm not sure what  my guinea piggies think of it. One of the 3 guinea piggies has had multiple slices, so I take it as a "Pass".

Home Sweet Home...

I got a little side tracked over the weekend and did not finish my intended project of making animals for the SPCA cupcake day. *smack my hand*

I ended up baking cupcakes - coffee for mum and a mixture of red velvet & caramel for T&C. Mum rang at 3 pm to say she needed some cupcakes urgently for a birthday do she was invited to so I frantically went about baking and icing a dozen cupcakes by 5 pm.

Terence & Christy had asked me a while back to bake some cupcakes for their neighbours - I finally did it with some bad luck with flowers falling apart when I was packing them into boxes... :( but everything worked out fine in the end!

Now, back to my previous project - fondant animals.

Meet Miss Chicky & Ellie

I was reminded that the SPCA Cupcake Day is drawing closer and I freaked out. I 'had' a plan to try making some fondant animals to go with the cupcakes before the day itself but I'm not sure what happened to that plan!!

Tonight was supposed to be for baking some vanilla or caramel cupcakes but I left it all for creating Miss Chicky and and Ellie. If I have some time tomorrow night - which I doubt I will, then I will try making some other friends for Miss Chicky and Ellie.