Happy New Year

Hi there

It has been a wee while, Christmas has been and gone along with the New Year, how does that happen???

Well I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and a very safe and happy New Year!!!

This Christmas my sister Christina and her husband Glen and 3 of their 4 girls came down from Wellington and stayed with us for a week.  It was sooo nice spending time with them again.

Now my sister just loves christmas cake, so this year I thought I would try making one and icing it.  Well my first attempt was not so good, Mum's recipe said to cook on really low temperature for 8 hrs, but my oven is obviously way hotter than what the recipe was meant for as I took it out after only 7 hrs and it was already burnt on the outside!!! :( but it wasn't wasted, as we cut the outsides off and used the rest for some other treats which I will show you latter.

Hence cake number two was monitored very closely, temperature set even lower and cake taken out of oven after only 6 1/2 hrs, and was perfect (very delicious tooo).

So here are some pictures, Rach & I have joined up with a local cake decorating guild and got a one on one lesson on how to put the almond & white icing on.

I cheated around the sides and just used some ribbons I had in my scrapbooking stash.  The snowflakes are made out of the white icing using cutters and brushed with eadible glitter.  The reindeer are made from chocalate fondant and the snowman is made from white fondant so all eadible too.  Rach found pictures of these on the internet so we had an afternoon at her house making them.  It is quite fun although you do have to have a lot of time and patience.

So I was quite please with my first efforts, and it must have tasted yummy as the cake only lasted a week.  For part of my sister's christmas prezzy my DH made a lovely rimu tray and I filled it with lots of yummy goodies, one item being a smaller christmas cake (which I brought uniced, as I didn't have time to make a cake before our lesson) which I decorated with a red fondant bow.

You can just see in the above pic a bit of a sheen on the bow as I sprayed the cake with an pearl lustre cake spray.  My sister couldn't believe her eyes when she unwrapped her prezzy, a christmas cake just for her!!! (and Glen of course if he is lucky).

Check out Rach's blog and also here to see her amazing xmas cakes.

Thanks for looking, I hope you enjoyed it!

Cheers

Joanne