Baking photoshoot

My friend is on a photography course and the theme for his project is National Baking Week and so I volunteered myself to bake some cupcakes and let him take photos of them.
I haven't seen the photos he took yet but here are a few I managed to take on my rubbishy camera...

Steel drum cakes

A simple vanilla sponge cake with a strawberry jam and vanilla buttercream filling, carved into steel drums, decorated using sugarpaste and royal icing piping.

Contemporary Flower Cookies

And so I had caught the cookie making bug and had to make some more! I decided on Chloe Coker's contemporary flower cookies. Rather than flooding with royal icing you cover these ones with sugarpaste... so some of you might think hmm they won't take as long to do as the teapot cookies did...Wrong! The piping is so detailed on them that they did still take a while to do. But again, with Chloe's designs you get a great looking cookie at the end.

And these placed in an Emma Bridgewater tin on some tissue paper make for a great birthday present!

Teapot Cookies

I bought the book Super Cute Cookies by Chloe Coker and couldn't wait to bake some of her delicious looking cookies.

I had a teapot cutter already so decided to try out the recipe for the vanilla cookies in a teapot shape. I had never flooded with royal icing before and was quite excited to try the technique. The instructions in the book were easy to follow and the lovely graphics helped with the decorating. The only thing it doesn't warn you about is how long it takes! Having not tried these techniques before it obviously took longer anyway but because the teapots had several colours it took even longer!

BUT the end result was lovely! The cute cherry design was easy enough to pipe once you had all the colours ready and looks really effective. And they tasted good too!