peggy porschen

Yesterday was my Grandmother’s (Grandy’s) Birthday. She loves whites, yellows and greens and whenever we buy her bunches of flowers it’s always in these colour tones. I wanted to replicate the birthday bouquet we were going to give her as the theme for her birthday cake. To do this I …

It’s been a few weeks now since the Hampton Court Flower Show was on but I’ve been waiting to share this post until I made this cake. I had the best day at Hampton Court with my flower-loving friend Alexia, and while the weather wasn’t amazing, the displays sure were. We wandered through the show gardens, browsed the stalls and enjoyed a demonstration from top florist Simon Lycett. I went away feeling super inspired by all the incredible plants and flowers. Their textures and colours were fascinating but mostly I ended up looking at everything and wishing it was made out of sugar. Typical. While in the rose tent one particular flower grabbed my attention for …

This cake was for my lovely neighbour Gabriele’s 40th birthday party this weekend. She had the most gorgeous garden party with a seriously cool marquee, delicious food and plenty of dancing. I knew a cake that was pretty and elegant would be her style and so I drew inspiration from this black and ivory Peggy Porschen cake for the design. It was my first time making anemones (which I still have trouble pronouncing – why?!) and they turned out really well. I love how the monochrome makes …

I think I’m going to be approaching that age now where my friends are going to start asking for wedding cakes. To prepare for this I decided to do a two day wedding cake course at the Peggy Porschen Academy to make something like this. I’ve done a course there before which was brilliant, but this course went in to more detail and covered stacking, doweling and all the steps to producing a professional wedding cake. I loved that this time around we were able to bake everything and make the buttercreams ourselves. It was really helpful to be taught at every stage of the process. I struggled a bit with all the new techniques and tools and keeping up with the pace of the class, but our teacher Marianne was amazing. She kept us on track, allowed for some one on one teaching and answered all our questions. It was hard fitting it all in to two days, so the design was simplified and we only made two tiers. This was ok as the practice is the same; as long as we had the basics down, we could just apply them to more tiers in the future. During the course I attempted lots of new things, such as covering a cake board, making rose buds and creating a stripey band around the cake (which seemed impossible to cut straight,ugh). I learnt so much in such a short time and it showed me that I need to be more precise by paying attention to the little details and calculating everything properly, especially when tackling wedding cakes. The biggest thing I took away from the course was having so much more confidence in my abilities and being more sure of my approach to cakes in general.