Colourful candy range at Kiwicakes

At Kiwicakes our candy range has had a huge makeover. With close to a tonne of candy being delivered. The photos below are just the tip of the ice berg. We've a huge range of single colour candy such as jelly beans, chocolate gems/drops, choc balls, shaped candies and more. perfect for cake decorating and drip cakes. Along with baby showers, candy buffets for weddings and party favours You can check it all out here

I'll leave you with just a small snapshot of what we have a vailable

 

Completley Mad Cupcake Buffet - from Kiwicakes test kitchen

Crazy themed celebrations at the preschool our two youngest children attend are not a surprise to us anymore. They sure keep learning fun! To mark April Fools day a Mad Hatters tea party was held in a beautifully decorated garden. The high tea was complete with china cups & saucers and of course marvellous cupcake creations. 

The kids cupcake station was a world of colour and fantasy with buttercream to swirl then a buffet of decorations, sprinkles and edible spray paint to choose from. Able parents were on hand to assist but we found that the preschoolers were super capable anyway! Kiwicakes donated some magical topping products for us to use.

The firm icing discs (being pointed to by a cute, chubby finger no less!) are made from coloured fondant hardened with tylose powder and rolled out with impression mats. Ais especially visible on the pink heart, and mini cutters were used to shape the discs. These were made the night before to give them time to firm up. 

The variation achieved was just beautiful and so fitting of Mad Hatter style! 

And finally here is my littlest monster Mitchell being assisted by our good friend Kimmie. Yay for edible fun!!

Happy Birthday Jenny - Part two

You may remember an earlier post for Jenny's birthday with details of her cake here. Today's post has the details of the rest of her birthday party food. I'd decided on a theme of pastels, which meant all of the food HAD to be pastel. This is super easy for sweets, but not quite so easy for savouries.

The cupcakes were baked using these stiletto high heel cupcake papers. I love these papers, I can get two dozen cupcakes on a flat baking sheet and bake them all at once.

Down inside a large 18'' bag, I placed 2x 12'' piping bags, each with the end cut off - one with green and one with white buttercream. Separating the colours inside two separate bags, rather than putting two colours of icing in to one bag stops the icing mixing together and getting muddy/dirty. They were piped with a twin tone swirl using the Wilton 1m tip.

I topped the cupcakes with baby pink Kiwicakes's own brand sugar pearls, as well as a little petunia made from baby pink Satin Ice fondant using this cutter & veiner set.

Frosted caramels, pastel meringues and floral cachous lollies looked great in our candy jars.

The meringues I served with whipped cream, to which I added some crushed freeze dried raspberries. Grandma Kiwicakes declared this her "new best favourite".

I used square pink dotty cupcake papers to hold mini pink shrimp cocktails. The mayonnaise I coloured pale pink by adding a little tomato sauce.

These carrot canapes are made by mixing cream cheese, freeze dried carrot powder, seasoning and pecans together (they were not quite as orange as the photo portrays). The lettuce leaf addition to the rose was cut out of iceberg lettuce using a rose leaf metal cutter (plastic doesn't work well on lettuce).

Jenny had a wonderful birthday here at Kiwicakes, we don't have long to wait until the next staff birthday, it's Grandma Kiwicakes in January. We've already started planning for her party.

Happy birthday Jenny!

Last Friday we had a birthday party for Jenny, the office manager here at Kiwicakes. Jenny is a highly valued member of staff, she's also been my best friend since high school - we've been through a lot together. Jenny is older and wiser than me by 8 days. We had a joint 21st birthday party, which seems like a million years ago. If someone had told us we'd be working together nearly 20 years later, I'm sure we would have laughed at them. Jenny & I were each others bridesmaids and provided support for each other after the birth of our children. Jenny is the reason Kiwicakes runs so efficiently and everyones orders get out on time. We're very lucky to have her.

I decided on a pastel theme because I knew Jenny liked the ombre rosette cakes. Whilst I would've adored to spend hours on a special cake, the reality was I had just a few hours to pull the entire cake and party food together, due to other commitments during the week. This blog post has the recipe and decorating ideas for Jenny's cake. A later blog post will detail her party food and candy buffet.

Jenny's cake was a white chocolate mud cake, which I hadn't made before. I looked around at a few recipes, but when I didn't find anything I liked 100% I adapted one to suit my needs. The cake was made using two 5 inch round cakes, torted and filled, to create three layers of filling.

The filling was white chocolate raspberry cream cheese icing. I used Whittakers White Raspberry chocolate.

White Chocolate mud cake

Ingredients

2 1/4 C flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/3 C milk

125gr white chocolate

1tsp vanilla

175gr butter softened

1 1/2C Sugar

2 eggs

For the filling

250gr (1block) Whittakers raspberry white chocolate (you can use plain white chocolate also)

250gr cream cheese softened

125gr butter softened

2C icing sugar

2Tbsp lemon or lime juice

Preheat oven to 160C.

Heat milk until hot, but not boiling, stir in white chocolate until melted, stir in vanilla. Set aside to cool.  

In a bowl sift together flour, salt & baking powder.

In mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light & fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time, mixing well with each addition. Add flour mixture alternately with the milk mixture, mixing until just combined. 

Pour into two greased 5 inch diameter pans or one 8 inch diameter pan. I use Wilton Cake release to grease my pans, it ensures they never stick. I also use Wilton bake even strips to ensure the cake rise level & flat and need little or no levelling after they're baked.

Once baked and cooled I cut each cake in half and added a layer of filling. As the cake was taller than it was wide I knew it would not stack easily without dowelling (which I didn't want to do for this tiny cake). My solution was to place each torted and filled cake back in to its cake pan, which I had lined with glad wrap. I then spread a layer of filling on the top of one cake and inverted the other cake pan on top. I placed the two cake pan stack into the fridge, to allow the cake set up overnight. I removed it from the fridge the following morning and it held its shape beautifully (chilling chocolate mud cake overnight actually improves the flavour).

The rosettes on Jenny's ombre cake were created using a Wilton 1m tip and vanilla buttercream icing.

Buttercream icing recipe

1/2 cup crisco or sno creme vegetable shortening

1/2 cup butter softened

4C icing sugar - I find Chelsea icing sugar to be the best

1tsp clear vanilla

4-5 Tablespoons warm water.

In a mixer cream together butter and shortening until well mixed, the resulting mixture will be significantly whiter than butter. Add icing sugar 1 cup at a time, alternating with 1 Tbsp water. Add vanilla.

Take 1 cup of icing and colour it to your darkest pink. Once your first row of rosettes has been piped, you can take the remaining icing and add white icing to it, to make the next shade lighter for your rosettes. Repeating as many times as you need until your lightest shade is reached.

The little cake banner bunting can be found here 

Hairy Maclary is 30!

Hairy Maclary has been entertaining children all over the world for 30 years. To celebrate this, Oh Baby! magazine has created this wonderful birthday party. I was pleased to help with supplies for this wonderful party. (Currently if you buy this issue of Oh Baby! magazine at the supermarket, it comes with a free Hairy Maclary book).

I wish my kids were tiny again - they loved Hairy Maclary books and after seeing this photo shoot, I wish I could have a Hairy Maclary party too. I adore the dog bowl cake - what an awesome idea.

Our dog bone cookie cutter was used for the cookies, I love how they put different names on each bone. And our stainless steel ice cream cone holder looks awesome on the party table

Our dog bone cookie cutter was also used for the sandwiches and take home party favours.

(article copied with permission from Oh Baby!)

Fun Ten Pin Bowling party

This fun ten pin bowling party I organised for my daughter's tenth birthday (where did all those years go?).

My little boy immediately decided this is the party he wants when he turns 7 in July, so I'll have to think of a few things to change for his party. Bowling parties as a theme in NZ is not that common - so I started browsing ETSY and immediately fell in love with a print your own file, for bowling party supplies. It worked out far more economically than buying the items (especially as I'll be doing this party again)

The banner included with the printables also came with the word BOWL - but we had little room to hang the banner, as it was, so I thought the sign would look great on the table. The sticks are red retro paper straws from here.. I used these mini milk bottles as vases. And anchored them in the bottle with chocolate sixlets (which I also used again in the little red gumball machines). I also used these same bottles for the girls for lemonade.

We used a printable from Etsy to create little stickers for the bottom of Hersheys kisses

The sign was customised for Poppy's party and placed in an inexpensive black frame purchased from Warehouse stationery.

These little red M&M containers came from the supermarket and I added the water bottle labels printable to make them super cute.

I used an edible marker pen to draw the round dots, which represented the finger holes on my macarons to make them look like bowling balls.

The tiny little cookies had edible images on them, all bowling themed 

Everytime I throw a birthday party for my children, I always include popcorn cups, it is the very first thing to be eaten (every time!). The boxes are square le petit gateau cupcake papers.

The take home gifts for the party guests were Hershey's bars wrapped with a customised label and little red gumball machines filled with pearl lime green and pearl powder blue sixlets.

Poppy had told me months ago, she was going to design her own cake and she wanted to help make it. This is the sketch we started with. Together we discussed the cake sketch - as the top tier was only 4'' and the bottom tier 7'' (she only had 4 friends coming to her party) - we had to make a few design modifications.

This was our resulting cake, a joint effort for me & Poppy. She was really happy with how it came out.