In The Pink

This week I was asked to make a wedding cake that was a little bit different from the style of cake I normally make.  The couple had asked for me to incorporate rose flavour and to have fresh fruit on top of a layered sponge cake.  I suggested a vanilla sponge cake, with each layer drizzled with a rose syrup and filled with rose meringue buttercream and fresh raspberries.  Here's how it turned out:

 
To elevate the decoration on top I added some handmade sugar roses and blossoms and some butterflies which I cut from modelling paste and carefully threaded onto wires and left to dry overnight.  I was really pleased with how they looked against the fresh fruit.

  

And pink seems to be a bit of a theme at the moment.  Here's an 18th birthday cake I made for a girl who has a passion for handbags and loves pink.  Her mum suggested the tree design and so I found the perfect sugarpaste cutting tool which makes 6 different handbags and I ordered it as soon as I'd confirmed the booking.  Unfortunately it didn't arrive in time and I had to cut all the shapes by hand.  Just as I finished adding the final handbag the post arrived with the cutter in it - typical!

 

And for some homemade treats, I've been experimenting with pink grapefruit recipes after picking up some lovely pink grapefruits when I saw them on special offer.  With them I made two batches of marmalade - one three fruit marmalade which paired the grapefruit with orange and lemon, and one of pure pink grapefruit which was my favourite - it's got a jewel-like garnet pink colour and a beautiful flavour.  

There was one last grapefruit left in the bowl this morning and I decided to try making a grapefruit curd with some leftover egg yolks I had in the fridge.  I was hoping for a lovely pale pink colour to the curd but the orange of the egg yolks seems to have taken centre stage. 

If you really wanted to you could add a couple of drops of pink food colouring, but the flavour is what really counts and it's lovely and delicate and makes a pleasant change from lemon curd.  Now all I have to do is make some scones to go with it!