Autumn Inspired Mini Cakes Workshop

Continuing our Autumn theme, and our penchant for exquisite little sweet treats, we spent a wonderful day creating ‘Autumn Inspired Mini Cakes’.  I say ‘we’ not in a proverbial way but in a  ‘I actually made them too’ way. Yes, Lindy very kindly made me become a student on this course to futher enhance my sugarcraft skills. And cake friends don’t for one  minute think that just because one works for Lindy Smith it means that one is good at sugarcraft!! Lindy’s Mini Cake workshop is a superb course to experiment with styles incorporating leaves and flowers and embossing your sugarpaste. Lindy demonstrated various decorative styles to create exquisite ornate minicakes. Today she worked mainly with embossers, cutters and a few moulds.

Lindy, as always, spends a fair amount of time helping you achieve a professional ‘finish’ when covering your cakes in sugarpaste. It was a real challege today because it was so warm. Autumn inspired…summer heat!! As frustrating as it was, I personally found it quite useful to learn how to deal with sugarpaste on a humid and hot day. Spare a thought for our cake friends in much warmer climes! Lindy advised adding a little CMC to our paste. Whilst Lindy would normally use GumTragacanth to firm sugarpaste, today CMC was more appropriate. GumTragacanth is a natural gum obtained from the dried sap of several species of Middle Eastern legumes. The upside of using this is that it is natural, the downside is that it takes a few hours to activate.  CMC is the synthetic substitue for Gum Tragacanth. The beauty of using CMC in cake decorating is that it is more or less instant, so great for last minute requirements and class situations. No sugarcraft kit should be with out it. It helped enormously today. We also added CMC in larger quantities to our sugarpaste to create ‘modelling paste’ for our decorative work. This enables you to roll out your paste very thinly without it splitting, and also means your designs will hold their shape.

Jane, Sally & I, the ‘Lindy’s Cakes Workshop Team’, love Lindy’s workshops – it’s a great job. But it is just as much fun being the student for the day. We were able to have a go at many different techniques and devolop our own decorative style if we wanted to. All under the watchful eye of Lindy. Look at what we created above…I think we did really well!

Join us! Click here to view our workshop programme.

And finally here are Lindy’s glorious mini cakes…