Summertime, and the living is dairy-free

I've gone dairy-free for a month (trying to solve the problem of having asthma), which means a month of no cupcakes for me: boo.

In the meantime, it being summer and all that, I'm eating lots of fruit which is healthy, and lots of home made ice 'cream', which is not quite so healthy, loaded as it is with coconut milk and sugar and mmmmm, yum!


Summer in a breakfast bowl: homemade granola, nectarines, banana and home-grown strawberries.


Home-grown peas: Super-tasty, but we're only getting about this many a day. More of a taster than a proper portion.


One day's crop of strawberries...


...and the next (we're getting a bowl-full like this each day, and we can't eat them fast enough!)


With all those strawberries, I made some dairy-free ice cream:

Strawberries, coconut milk, sugar and a dash of balsamic vinegar.

It's really tasty, but a bit icy. I need an ice cream maker! Remembering to whip it by hand every 30minutes is ok, but doesn't give very smooth results.


Much more successful is the mango ice cream:

Our fruit bowl which was looking very exotic with a mango, some limes and some coconuts (left over from the school fair's coconut shy), so I decided that the only way to use all of these fruits up was to make ice 'cream'.

The coconuts weren't the best, so I used the mango, a tin of sweetened Alphonso mango pulp, some brown sugar, lime juice and 2 tins of coconut milk.

YUM! I could have drunk the whole mixture as a smoothie, it was so delicious. The ice cream is delicious too though, and even though I still used the stir-it-by-hand-every-30-m​inutes method, it wasn't half as icy as the strawberry ice cream.

Horses+Smileys+Ice Creams = A Happy Birthday!

What more could a girl want for her birthday than some horses, ice creams and smiley faces?

I'm used to taking brand new commissions for each order, but this time Joanne, who was ordering cakes for her daughter's birthday, looked at my flyer and chose some of my 'previous hits'. It was fun to revisit some old designs - especially the horses, which were some of the first cakes designs I ever made. And even the Smileys were easier to make second time around.

Vanilla bean cakes with vanilla buttercream and Fondant icing decorations.







those are real Flake pieces





...all add up to a colourful mixture of cakes.

A morning’s worth of experiments

April 2010. I had a fun morning baking and trying out some of the ideas I had for designs, with my sister. Some worked, some didn’t… here are some of the more successful ones, and a shot of the very messy kitchen table.