Adventures in fondant!

I'm sorry, blog, I've been neglecting you! I've got all these posts sitting waiting to be shared and instead I've been gallivanting off to exotic locations with work, like Hull, and Birmingham. Huge apologies, and to make it up, I will endeavour to post at least twice a week from now on. Maybe even more.

For now, we're going to travel back in time to August, and I'm going to inflict more adventures in baking on you.

It was my niece's birthday last month, and I've developed a reputation in my family as the official cake maker. Last year I made an ambitious thing that kind of worked out a little messy, and the year before that I made this awesomely wonky fairy castle, behold:



Anyway, this year I had a whole load of fondant left over from my friend's hen do (where she forced us into the slavery of making peppermint creams as her wedding favours) so I decided to see if I could make fondant fairies. I'm sort of into my fairies.

And this was the result!
Okay, even if I do say so myself, these are totally cute, right? I made three of them, and my sister made one. This one.
We decided he was probably going to eat us in our sleep. But he didn't!

Then I made a batch of Hummingbird vanilla cupcakes - 12 mini and 6 large - and decorated them appropriately.

I finally got the chance to use my edible glitter! And I experimented with strawberry food colouring! (which basically just tastes pink) And do the large cupcakes not look like toadstools? They totally do!
And then... I made all the cupcakes and fairies into an edible fairy village!
Happy birthday, niecelet! How are you already six?
(Please ignore my cleavage.)

She was super happy with it all. So happy, in fact, that she celebrated by decapitating one of the fairies. And eating the head.