And maybe a Rose on top .......

So my lovely friend Jane asked me to make a 30th Birthday cake for one of her lovely friends.

The brief for the cake was coffee and creamy.  I haven't made a coffee cake before but I did some experimentation and and found a cake recipe that I flavored with several shots of coffee, and it tasted great.  I decided for the creamy part I would put a layer of Bailey's mousse through the middle.  I have never added a mousse layer to a cake before but again, good old google came through with the goods, and it all seemed very easy.  So, I thought, no problem I am all sorted: bake Thursday night, ice Friday and decorate Saturday morning.

That was until, those fateful words .....".. and maybe a rose on top...." were spoken.

I was doing a final confirmation about the details of the cake on Tuesday afternoon with Jane, and I casually asked if there was anything in particular that she might want on the cake for decoration.  The first response I got was : "chocolate covered coffee beans" but then .. "and maybe a Rose on top.....they are her favorite flower".  And how could I not make Jane's lovely friend a Rose - it is her 30th birthday!!

Small issue through ... a rose is not created in a day! I am sure that most people don't know how long it takes to make a petal paste rose, and I wouldn't expect you to, but let me tell you with drying time it can easily take a week, and much longer if the weather is against you!

So pulling out all the tricks of the trade I pulled together one rose for the top of my Chocolate and Coffee Ganache Covered Bailey's Mousse Cake ... hope it tastes as good as it sounds!

Sugar Paste Orchid Wedding Cake

The wedding was beautiful, and the bride looked amazing!

The Sugar Paste Orchids looked great on the cake, and most importantly the bride was happy.

Now excuse me while I crawl back into bed to recover.......

Sugar Paste Orchids

We are going to wedding tomorrow.  It is our lovely friends Vicki and Dan who have been together forever and are finally taking the plunge.  It is going to be a beautiful wedding!

I thankfully had nothing to do with baking the cake! However the lovely Vicki asked if I could make her some flowers to go on top.

Reality Bites

Reality has really been biting the big one in the last 10 days!

We have been home from our incredibly relaxing and completely indulgent cruise for 10 days, and I can tell you the readjustment has been tough!

Because it is a beautiful sunny Wednesday morning and I am just about to escape the incessant noise of compound saw's, hammer drills and some other very loud power tool that I am not even sure of the name of!  I will take pity on you and ease you into the reality around here by showing you the last part of our incredibly relaxing and completely indulgent holiday, before I show you the mess out my back door!

So enjoy the beauty of what I saw 10 days ago and I will be back to show you the progress and the mess, and a couple of cake jobs I have done in the last few days......

The Whitsunday Islands....

The last day cruising... 

Sydney just before dawn....

The best way to see Sydney, but not actually be here!

Renovation Revisited Part 2

So now that I have a better internet connection! to continue on......

All the clean fill and plumbing for the new laundry and bathroom was put in place.

And then packed in with a whacker-packer.  - this was very loud at 8am!

More wire mesh went on.

Then the very labour intensive job of carting all the concrete up a ramp system started.  It was hard work that morning, I really felt for my guys!

Look how lovely my new slab is!! 

Meanwhile, while all that was going on with the slab, the timber for the deck arrived. 

And we got the deck posts up and concreted in just before we left. 

You remember how I told you it was all hands on deck to get the place inhabitable? Well this is what it looked like just before we left.....

Clearly a whole lot more to be done!! but it is a start, and it is inhabitable!! 

Renovation Revisited Part 1

Our house renovation seems to go in fits and starts.  Some days I take 100 photos as so much is changing and the next – I have nothing to show.  In the two weeks leading up to our departure we were working like crazy to get the house ready for my lovely friend Michelle, who was saving our bacon by house sitting and looking after Archie our furchild.

As I patiently explained to my builder guys: “I can live with an extension cord coming out of the manhole in the bathroom that connects across the hallway, dinning room and kitchen floors so that my dishwasher works but I can’t ask anyone else too!!”   As such I was really putting on the pressure to have the house not only in general working order, but also clean, tidy and inhabitable for normal people who are not used to living in complete and utter mess ALL the time!

So this is what was happening in the lead up to our departure…. 

We (partially) installed a kitchen.  It is an Ikea kitchen that with the help of my lovely Mum and Dad we installed ourselves.  This is not something I personally would recommend to others; especially if you have an old house where all the angles and surfaces are not straight!!  

You have no idea how many doodahs and bits and bobs we have left over - I think we could build a whole kitchen with what we have left over from this one!

Outside things just started taking shape.  After weeks of discussions about footings with the engineer and builders we finally got the footings sorted for the new laundry and bathroom slab.

The pier holes for the deck were redone after all that rain we had; and while we were pouring the footings we concreted the piers.  

The bricky arrived!

And bricked up around all the new windows: 

And put the masonry walls on the new slab.

And built up the piers.

We even got to take out the old air conditioner that went through the old living room wall and patch it back up. You can't even tell where it had been from the outside!

APOLOGIES! As a result of the not so fabulous internet where we currently are I have to have to split this post in two .... but I will be back with photos of what it all looked like when we left a little over a week ago......