How to make your own custom chocolate bars, to make your cakes really pop

 Making your own custom chocolate bars is quick, easy and fun! And they will really set your cakes apart from store bought chocolate bars.
The examples above use chocolate moulds from Kiwicakes . You can either use pre-coloured candy melts OR colour your own white chocolate using candy colour oil based colours or powder colour. (You cannot use gel paste or liquid food colouring, as this will cause your chocolate to seize and make it unsuable)

You can mould them with or without sprinkles. As a single colour or marbled. The choice is yours.

A finished bar weighs less than 100g, making them quite economic to make.

Bars like this are often referred to as "bark" this is the Wilton Happy Birthday Mould, you can find them in other seasonal designs (which are not always bar shaped - but do consider other shapes). Simply melt your coloured chocolate, spoon in to mould, tap on the bench for a good ten taps, to ensure any bubbles trapped are popped. Then lightly sprinkle over your sprinkle medley and allow to cool. They will release easily once set

To create the marble colour simply place your dominant colour in the mould first, then add small blobs of other colours, and stir gently (I use a lollipop stick to do this).Do NOT use your candy colour to do the marbling, as once removed from the mould, the swirls of colour can come off on your hands.

If you're after a traditional bar shape. And you want sprinkles on the side that would normally have the lines where you break the bar apart, take care to look at the example below.

You cannot add just a little sprinkles to the mould, if you do, you will get the result as shown in my photo. as the melted chocolate allows the sprinkles to move around.

You need to pack them right in there and fill it right up.

The bars can be bagged and given as a gift, just like thy are. When placing on a cake, I find they look best at differing heights. You can simply break off a piece of one bar, to make it shorter. It is important when placing on the cake, to cut a narrow aperture for the bar to be pushed in to. If oyu push down in to solid cake, you risk breaking the bar. 

These little bars make an affordable take home gift, from your party, and can be made to match the birthday cake.

Custom sprinkle medleys now available at kiwicakes

 Three months ago I started on the lengthy process to offer Custom sprinkle medleys at Kiwicakes. AND NOW THE SERVICE IS HERE

It’s been a lot of work, the ingredients document was like writing a small novel. And I am so thankful for the wonderful Hayley who created the awesome custom medley photos (I don’t envy her laying all of those sprinkles out in straight lines).

We’ve sourced extra wonderful sprinkles from around the world, to extend our already awesome sprinkle selection. And a complete overhaul of our kitchen shelves was needed to create space, for each colour.

Some wonderful Kiwicakers agreed to be my custom medley testers, so I could try to iron out any wrinkles in the service, their medleys have been mixed and delivered.

I can’t wait to get mixing for you! Click herehttp://www.kiwicakes.co.nz/711-sprinkle-medleys to find out more about the service 

SPCA Cupcake Day 2017

Kiwicakes made the local newspaper. In support of SPCA Cupcake Day. We are donating $2 from every animal themed sprinkle medley until August 14th 2017

SPCA Cupcake Day 2017

I recently took a trip to the Whangarei SPCA to deliver some cupcakes and chocolate VW cars to Andrea (manager fo SPCA Whangare at right) and the staff/volunteers who work so tirelessly. I felt they deserved a treat.

The cupcakes were decorated with our 4 new sprinkle medleys which have been created in support of SPCA cupcake day 2017.

$2 from the sale of every pack of these 4 animal themed cupcake medleys will go to SPCA Cupcake Day. You can grab a pack here If oyu love the cupcake papers, you'll find these here too 

Christmas drip cake from Kiwicakes

Recently I received a gift of a lovely Kiwicakes Christmas topper from the uber talented Stacey at Design@409 Which of course meant I needed to make a cake for it right away.

I settled on this drip cake design, which uses the Kiwicakes Christmas sprinkle medley  The cake is covered in white Bakels truffle, to which I added Rainbow Dust whitener to make it truly white. The drip is Bakels Chocolate Truffle, which is super easy to apply to a chilled cake

I used Rainbow Dust metallic paints to colour my macarons. I used mine in my airbrush, if you don't have one of these, you can paint or sponge on the colours. There's 22 shades of paint in the range. This was such a fun cake to make.