Becky Bakeswell ® is now a Registered Trademark!

Wow!!!!!!!! After months of waiting, and various people telling me to get it done, exciting times are ahead for 'Becky Bakeswell' as my much loved business name is now a Registered Trademark! Best get on with some celebratory baking! 

Neighbourhood Batch

Just wanted to give a shout out and some friendly publicity for a great new business idea - Neighbourhood Batch! Neighbourhood Batch is a gem of a small business that's recently opened as a service operating in the London area where people can order from a variety of cakes/cookies/sweet treats and small, independent bakers can sell their goods through the site for an agreed price (taking into account the small fee that the Batch team charge to cover delivery costs). The Neighbourhood Batch team pick up the goodies from the sellers and deliver them to the happy people who have placed their orders! 

At the moment, Neighbourhood Batch is only operating in the London area, but if there are any readers out there who live in the London area, you should have a nosy on the site. Friendly Dan at the Neighbourhood Batch told me that he hopes to expand further afield if there's enough interest. 

This seems to be a good service which supports local bakers and helps to deliver cake happiness to all, so support Dan and the Batch team by checking out the site and the twitter page!

http://www.neighbourhoodbatch.co.uk/

http://twitter.com/hoodbatch

Becky Bakeswell x 

Royal Icing Celebration Cakes - Update

It has been a while since I updated the blog about my cake decorating course - I received my result and my certificate in the post last week and I'm happy to say that I received a Merit! The final cake I had to decorate on the course was a square celebration cake, which I chose to decorate as a Christening/Baby Naming Ceremony cake. As my sister-in-law to be was pregnant, I decided to decorate the cake for the baby. A few days before the cake was completed, she had a baby boy named Ellis and this is the finished design, decorated in honour of him. 

One of the cakes that was not an assessed component of the course was a royal iced Christmas cake. As this cake was not being assessed, I gave it its coat of royal icing, but didn't get round to completing it. It has been bugging me, so I decided to finish it off. I decided I wanted the cake to have a homespun, slightly kitsch feel to it, so I used my gingerbread man run-out decoration as the central part of my design. I made tiny holly leaf run-outs and candy canes, which would be the decoration for the sides of the cake.

One of the challenges of the design was to pipe the 'Merry Christmas' greeting in script style handwriting using red icing. I decided to pipe the greeting in white icing first and then over-pipe this in red, to minimize the effects of any mistakes. The 's' scroll and shell borders 'frame' the cake and the green over-piping on the shell border pulls the scheme together, unifying the various red and green aspects of the design. The finishing touch is red grosgrain ribbon with tiny white stitch borders - perfect for the homespun feel I was aiming for. I might use a number 2 tube in future for the 'Merry Christmas' greeting as the tube can get quite easily blocked and ruin the fluency of the script needed for a perfect finish.

Loved decorating the cakes though and I'm looking forward to doing similar designs for celebration cake orders!

Becky Bakeswell