I am getting more and more requests for cakes, and I hate to turn an order down so I am going to work on honing my cake decorating skills.

To that end, I am going to do beta tests with decorating instead of recipes. I will pick a theme for a cake and announce it here, and on the same principles as the recipe testing you will be able to order a decorated cake and pay only for the ingredients.

To begin with these will be a one tier chocolate cake (because it is dense enough to hold the icing) but I will be trying multi-tier cakes and 3D novelty cakes in time as well.

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The first one I want to try is a “Best In Show” doggy themed cake! It will be ready for collection from my house by next Friday morning- 2 March 2012 (the usual terms and conditions apply) and you can have it for a mere R250!

If you would like the cake- faults, imperfections and foibles included since I’m teaching myself- leave a comment here and I will send you further information.

This is a delectably delicious chocolate cake, filled and iced with chocolate ganache (which I must admit to eating the remainder of when I finished decorating the cake), and then covered in bright blue sugarpaste.

It was then decorated with pink sugarpaste ribbons and bows, and topped with a handmade sugarpaste ballerina bear.

This sugarpaste covered chocolate cake (filled and iced with chocolate ganache) with handmade sugarpaste bears and stars on top is my inbterpretation of a “Tatty Bear” theme.

I didn’t photograph her properly from the back so you can’t see her raincoat’s hood

she’s holding a baby powder container and draped in a white towel

The chocolate cupcakes for this baby shower were baked in silver paper cups, iced with pink vanilla butter icing and white vanilla butter icing, sprinkled with a little edible glitter and topped with layered sugarpaste hearts and flowers in pink and white.

I made another dragon cake! This one is green and was ordered by Collette for Nicholas’  4^th birthday!

The dragon’s body is a chocolate mud cake layered with chocolate ganache, the neck and tail are a type of cake pop mixture of mud cake and ganache, and his head is made of rice krispy treats. I used some of the left over cake pop mixture to shape the body part of the cake a little rounder.

Once the cake had settled, I covered it in chocolate ganache and then hot knifed it to smooth it over in preparation for the sugarpaste covering and decorating.

And here he is finished (its a mobi picture, I’ll post more later).

And here are some photos from my camera!

The recipe book describes this cake as a “Frankenstenian” melding of a cobbler, a Brown Betty pudding, and a Streussel, so I was intrigued!

Its a chocolate batter with chopped apple in it topped with roasted sugar tossed peanuts!! If you’re a fan of cake without icing, this little monster may be perfect for you.

Here it is after it came out of its baking tin!

And here it is cut so you can see the apple on the inside! Its quite dense so the apple doesn’t all sink to the bottom of the tin while its baking.

Seize the Chocolate beta tested it for me so you can pop over and see what she thought. When she collected it we had a cup of coffee and a slice of cake each… You know, to test the quality! She even froze it and thawed it successfully!