Kitchen Alchemy

More and more we’ve found ourselves turning to big cakes for fun, and with our son’s first birthday approaching, Mark and I decided to put our imagination to the test. It started back in March when our friend Noah turned one. We begged his Mum to let us make him a jungle cake – a four tier high chocolate cake with fondant shaped like a canopy of leaves on top, sugar tree trunks up the side and animals looking out through the tree branches. It was such an easy and fun cake to make, we knew immediately we could adapt the design to lots of different ideas. We had a chance to repeat the jungle cake shortly after for a friend’s fifth birthday – albeit it without dairy. We were delighted to find replacing the butter in both the cake and icing had no impact on flavour or shape-ability. We swapped out the fondant tree tops for a piped royal icing instead and voila, our cake began to evolve. For our boy’s birthday, we knew we wanted an under water theme. I envisaged a blue cake with mottle...

I've been talking about it for years and finally it's happened - Kitchen Alchemy's first cupcake classes took place in June this year. With the help of a very organised friend, 11 ladies attended at classes presented by yours truly to learn how to decorate cupcakes. Because time was of the essence, no baking was included. However, cupcake recipes were provided for vanilla cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes and raspberry almond gluten free cupcakes. Each recipe was extensively explained to ensure when attendees tried their hand at baking at home, they had every chance of success. Since many in the class were Mums whose kids were approaching a birthday, two of the designs demonstrated were kids cupcakes. A tiger in the grass for boys, and a butterfly design for girls. But I also demonstrated how to decorate my double dutch chocolate cupcake, now that chocolate snaps are available again. And we finished off with a simple white glaze on the gluten free cake, dcorated with silve...