Ready, steady..GO!

Hi Folks,

Well, I have finally pulled out the proverbial finger and have got the BellaBees Cupcakes Website up and running. It has certainly been a long time in the making, and I am grateful to everyone who has been to the Facebook page and shared it with their friends.

I hope you find some inspiration on here, as I share the fun I have making my cakes and cupcakes. When my son, Ashley, celebrated his 5th birthday at the local traffic school, I made him an EPIC traffic light cake, which, to this day, he still talks about fondly! Gotta love kids.

For my first official blog post, I'm sharing the process involved in preparing his cake.

Step 1: In honour of the traffic light colours, I prepared three white chocolate mud cakes, in red, orange and green. These were then sandwiched together with my buttercream frosting. I also used a DIY board because this was one very heavy cake!

Step 2 involved ganaching the cake to get it as smooth as possible. This was the first time that I had ever done this, I will admit, and I was pretty pleased with the effort! I must credit the Planet Cake books as an invaluable resource here. It is a fab skill to have, along with hot-knifing, that has changed the way I construct and finish my cakes prior to decorating with fondant.

Speaking of fondant...here is the result of applying the black fondant to the ganached cake.

All that was left to do was create the traffic lights and apply the birthday boy's name to the cake.

I painted the light covers with edible silver paint for authenticity, and used a flag cookie cutter to hand-paint chequered flags to bookend the '5'.

And the Birthday Boy's verdict?

"Epic, Mummy!"