I know what you’re thinking. Royal baby? But no, as exciting as that was, I’m waiting for another little baby to be born. My Pilates teacher Ellie is due in a month or so and I wanted to make her something now as she will be off for a while after she has had the baby. I’m also off on holiday for a week and I don’t want to miss her. As she doesn’t know what she is having I went for …

Most of you probably think I’m a little nuts for hanging out by an oven today. Yep it’s hot and yes this fact has probably been mentioned in every conversation I’ve had for the past two weeks since it’s been hot. But actually I don’t want to talk about how my skin feels like it’s on fire all day, or how I looked like I’d been for a swim after my Pilates class this week, I want to talk about cookies. These cookies actually. Some might think that chocolate dipped strawberries are a Valentine’s related thing or a let me welcome you to my hotel thing, but in my house chocolate dipped strawberries are a regular feature. My mum makes the best ones using …

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.

When our lovely friend Jane asked me to make a cake for her 30th birthday I was so excited. She is the sweetest person who is so much fun to be around. She is also an incredible violinist so of course wanted to make this the main theme of the cake. I made violin biscuits using this cutter and the Biscuiteers recipe. I decorated them in both …