The Cake and Bake Show

I recently bought a ticket to the Cake and Bake show held in London. The show had lots of exhibitors related to baking and cooking but I would say the majority of them were demonstrating products related to cake decorating.

I absolutely love the idea of cake decorating, I have attended courses, I buy wedding magazines and have a wedding app on my phone just to look at the cakes. Unfortunately although I love cake decorating I rarely practice it like I should. Cake decorating is something that takes lots of practice, like anything else you can have an aptitude for it, or an interest in it but you can only really excel when you practice. Unfortunately years ago, just after buying my first cake decorating book and when I was just getting excited about it someone said to me “I don’t think you would be any good at cake decorating, you aren’t very creative”

Now I know rationally, that person was an arsehole who had no confidence and had to bring me down in order to make himself feel good. But that comment still affects me, and that really sucks. It sucks that they took something that should be fun and made me feel bad about it. It’s something I am really going to try and work on.

Phew! Totally didn’t mean to go down that road! So I will now try and distract you with some cool pictures. The show was amazing, I got some awesome one-on-one time with some fantastic decorators, there was plenty of demonstrations and tutorials, all free! I ended up spending nine hours there! I later heard that tickets to the show (which were £15 pound) ended up being sold for £85 pound on eBay. It was very popular!

These bears were made by Debbie Brown to promote her new book. Aren’t they amazing? I have a couple of her books but didn’t purchase this one.

I ended up buying a book written by this amazing new(ish) cake decorator who has just written his first book. His name is Carlos Lischetti and his work is simply stunning. After signing his book for me I asked him if he could demonstrate some of his work. And he did! All for me! It was brilliant, he took some sugar paste, twirled it and suddenly this sugar became this sexy ballerina leg.

He is the owner of this work.

I went to a tutorial on making handmade roses for cupcakes. Without using a wire or petal cutters. Pretty special.

I also watched a tutorial that was run by Laura Edwards of Mamma Jamma Cakes. The cake she showed us how to carve was a Koi Carp. It wasn’t my style of cake but she had some great tips for cake carving and air brushing.

What an awesome day!