The Scrabble Cake

You have already seen the first part of my mum's birthday present which was the knitted version of her but this is the very exciting second part! A SCRABBLE CAKE!

My mum's absolute favourite game in the whole world is scrabble and even though I hate it (more because I get way too competitive than anything) I decided to put my hatred aside for one night and make her this cake. 

Even though it looks fairly complicated it was actually not that hard to bake. I baked a simple vanilla flat square cake using an easy recipe I found online. It took ages to bake because it was so big so I was standing by the oven sticking skewer after skewer in for most of the night! 

I also baked TONS of square shaped sugar cookies and actually used real scrabble tiles to cut round to make sure I got them the right size. I then wrote the letters on with black writing icing and I really wanted to put the little  butnumbers in the corners too but it was too fiddly! 

Then I died some ready made fondant icing green and covered the cake with it. This bit was so hard and I was terrified I would mess up! Then I used a ruler to mark out where the grid should go and although I didn't get it at all perfect I don't think it looks too bad! And I finished it by spelling out Happy Birthday Mummy - scrabble style!

Oh I also had LOADS of drips down the side (we can't all be perfect) so I covered the sides in caramel buttons (her fave)

She really liked it and we all had it for her birthday tea! She also got some macaroons from Laduree and I couldn't not put a picture up because they just looked so pretty! 

I hope you like my scrabble cake, it was very fun to make and although it took AGES I think it was worth it. I have a super duper exciting post coming up tomorrow so make sure you check back here!

Love Scarlett

x

February Photo-a-Day Challenge

Okay so I was looking through the photos on my phone and this is what I found. 70% were of Posy, 20% were of the things I have made or baked, and 10% were screen shots of my ipod so I could remember where I was in my audiobook. I think we can all agree this isn't exactly the coolest thing to find in your iPhoto. 

So I decided to start the February photo-a-day challenge. It was created by one of my favourite bloggers fat mum slim and she's making one for every month this year. 

I'm going to do it on my iPhone and then tweet and instagram my pictures with this hashtag. I'm so excited and hope I can keep it up. I'm also hoping to do a post at the end of each week with my pictures I took that week. A picture a day doesn't seem like that huge a thing but imagine having all those pictures at the end of the year to look back on. 

Anyway, it starts on Wednesday, so wish me luck!

Love Scarlett 

x

Get Set Bake!

Hello :) Okay, this is a really exciting post for me for a lot of reasons. 

1. It is all about this No-Bake Chocolate Fudge Cake Kit which has made literally the best cake I have ever tried in my life (and I've tried a LOT of cake)

2. The kit was made my one of my closest friends who has just started her own company (what! she's only 17!) 

The company is called Get Set Bake and was started by her and her sister. I've always known Annie was a great baker because she would always make cupcakes and other yummy things to bring into school and when I got sick she made me the most beautiful cupcakes ever! 

This is how Annie and her sister describe Get Set Bake: 

We’re two sisters who have a love of baking – and eating!  Since we were little, we have constantly kept our family munching on our various concoctions and experiments.  (Actually, when we were very little, much of what we came up with was pretty inedible!)  Our other two sisters, however, weren’t at all interested in what we were doing – they just enjoyed coming home to the smell of a rich chocolate cake baking in the oven, or a plate of warm oatflake and raisin cookies waiting for them on the table!

To even things out a bit, we started to put Baking Sets together.  That way, our sisters could make our cakes themselves, without the faff of buying the ingredients, wondering what size tin they needed, or having to follow a recipe.  Even our parents started to struggle to work out which sister had made which delicious tea-time treat!

Through word of mouth, we started to supply our Baking Sets to our friends and other members of the family.  Over time, our range has grown to include cupcakes, fruit cake, low-calorie and gluten-free products, as well as gorgeous party cake kits.  We’re happy to take orders for the finished article, for example we’ll often supply chocolate delicacies and cupcakes for weddings and parties (see our chocolate cherubs and chocolate toffee popcorn hearts!) but we’re also really keen to help everyone make their own.

Now, everyone knows I love to bake things myself but so as soon as I saw Annies website I just knew I HAD to order one. I ordered the no bake chocolate fudge cake because that is one of my favourite things to make and I wanted to see what the kit was like. And I was blown. away! Seriously! Not only is it the literally most incredible cake I have ever eaten, but the instructions, ingredients and package are all lovely!

It comes with chocolate buttons, marshmallows and maltesers and honeycomb as well as a very cute star shaped mould. 

All you need to supply is some cream. I do love to bake from my own recipes but this was so quick and easy to make and tasted incredible, compared to the hours I usually spend googling, shopping, preparing and greese-proof-paper-ing this was a very nice break! 

As well as the chocolate fudge cake kit, Get Set Bake has tons of other kits and Annie very sweetly sent me a cupcake kit which I can't wait to try out. I think that these kits would make the best presents for my friends who love baking and are bored of getting recipe book after recipe book. 

They would also be a great thing to do with kids and I'm pretty sure even my 10 year old brother would have known what to do!

Once the cake is done I put it in the freezer and then cut it up while we watched a movie. It was so yummy and whole cake has already gone! 

I know this is a new type of post for me to do but seriously check out Get Set Bake! I'm so proud of Annie and so excited to try out another one of her kits!

Happy Sunday!

Scarlett x

The Knitted Emma Freud (my mum)

So, as you will know if you follow my mum on twitter it was my mums 50th birthday this Wednesday. It was a very very exciting day for us because my mum is so amazing and we wanted to make it a really special day for her. I knew it was up to me to make a really great present so I decided to immortalise her forever in wool!

I've only knitted a person once before when I knitted Prince William for the royal wedding. I really loved the pattern for William which was from Fiona Gobles book Knit Your Own Royal Wedding. Sometimes I think my mum looks a bit like Kate Middleton (a teeeny bit) so I decided to adjust the Kate Middleton pattern to make it look more like my mum. 

I made the body the same, added LOADS of hair (my mum has huge hair) and tried to make the face look as similar as possible. I used blue wool for the middle of the eyes and a little red mouth.

My favourite dress my mum owns is this silver sequin one that she wore to the War Horse premier (doesn't she look lovely!) and it was my Dad's idea to sew sequins onto a white dress to make it look like this one.

I adjusted and shortened the pattern for Kate Middleton's dress and then sewed on loads of silver sequins.

Super excitingly my mum was awarded an OBE (my little brother says it means obviously best ever) and while I was wrapping the doll I found her OBE and pinned it onto the knitted Emma and wrapped it with the OBE attatched! It was really funny.

My Mum also ALWAYS wears a tiara (a look she copied from ME btw) so I made the doll a tiny tiara. 

When it was all done my mum loved it! And she's framed it in a box fram to put in her room. It's certainly not something I'm going to be doing for everyone because it took a lot of work but I'm so glad I could make it for my mum on her super special birthday. 

Happy Friday! 

Love Scarlett 

x

Cross Stitch Crazy

Hello :) So, I realised that recently I've been talking a lot about my recent cross stitching on Hello Giggles but I haven't really talked about it on here so I thought I would post some pictures and information about my cross stitch as it's obviously extremely important! 

I'd never really done cross stitch before a few weeks ago but at the moment I'm really enjoying it. I started with this one of a flower fairy which I got from a craft shop.

Then I made this one which I got the pattern from the cutest little online shop called The Sewing Seed.

And then I made up this one for my Hello Giggles piece.

And then I made this one also from the sewing seed. 

Happy Monday :)

Scarlett x

Cupcake in a Jar

Okay so when I saw these cupcakes in jars on My Cakies I literally fell in love! Our family has a slight obsession with jars (now there's a sentence I never thought I'd say) so I knew I absolutely HAD to have a go at making some.

Cupcakes in jars may sound crazy but in reality it's such a clever idea. It keeps away the crumbs, looks super cute and you can take one home for laters.

I know I've made it before but I made the salted caramel again but I thought I would stick with something I knew when trying out something new with the jars!

For the chocolate cake I used the primrose bakery chocolate cupcake recipe from my new primrose baker app (it's great but unfortunately my phone is now covered in golden syrup!). It was such a cool recipe because it used melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder which I've never seen before but it worked so well! There so crazy chocolaty and fudgey and just insane. 

For the middle layer I made Hannah Obee's salted caramel as I did before which worked perfectly again.

Then I added another layer of crushed up chocolate cupcakes (YUM!)

And on the top I put salted caramel frosting which was such an ordeal to make! I tried to make butter cream icing and then pour in some of my caramel and it worked perfectly at first but then it went seriously wrong and watery and weird! Luckily Teen Granny's mummy (Teen Great Granny? Teen Mummy?) was there to save the poor icing with cream cheese and a lot of whisking and it came out PERFECT. 

I topped them off with some Maltesers...

And then popped on the lid!

So I was very very pleased with the way these turned out and everyone's eating them now (they were for my parents dinner party) so I don't know how they went down yet! I think they would make the cutest going home gifts because there very portable.

Teen Great Granny was doing some cooking at the same time and making some vair fancy onion and cheese puff pastry pizza type things. She also made a HAYUGE ham which she cooked in Cherry Coke. She's an awful baker but a truly amazing cook. Maybe I could get her to do a guest cooking post one day...

Anyway I hope this will inspire you to do some baking this weekend, unfortunately after the bake I've been alone all night with Pose watching Community while my parents dine downstairs :(

Happy Weekend!

Love Scarlett, Posy and The cast of Community

xxx

p.s. I wrote this post on Friday which was the night I made these and I can confirm that I have since found out that they were very yummy and went down very well! 

My Best 6 Apps for Crafting!

From someone who spends FAR too much time on her phone/computer and FAR too much time knitting, here are my top 6 crafting apps! 

Happy Weekend :) x

The Click on This List

1. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. - I was lucky enough to be able to see an early screening of this AMAZING movie. I know I put the trailer on a previous list but now I've seen the movie I just have to talk about it again, and when it comes out I'm going to talk about it AGAIN. It's just amazing! It's beautiful, funny, moving and just generally so good. Start getting excited...

2. Hand Knitted Tutu. If there are two things I love most in the world they are tutus and knitting. So when I found this hand knitted tutu you can only imagine my reaction...

3. A Beautiful Mess Art Journal E-Course - I'm working on my art GCSE at the moment and this E-Course has been amazing! For anyone working on scrapbooks or sketchbooks it's just the most lovely, long and beautiful course.

4. This Picture.

5. These Book Shelves. - We've all heard of book shelves but this is the first time I've seen shelves made of actual books! 

6. Words cannot describe how much I LOVE this video.

7. And this wedding...

9. War Horse - Okay yes I may be slightly biast towards this movie but oh my god it's so good! I cried so much I thought I was just going to turn into a big pile or tears. If you haven't seen it yet please go see it because it's really good! 

10. Recipe of the Week - Salted Caramel Frosting.

Valentines Day Twit-Knit

Agh okay I apologize this post is SO late! You may have also noticed (if your in twit-knit) that I haven't been on twitter recently. It's been all so busy recently and then I've been ill for the past week and most of the time I'll be so ready to blog or tweet but then as my fingers hit the keyboard something in me flips and all I want to do is run a mile! I don't know if it's just me who has this crazy love/hate twitter relationship but I'm sorry for letting the club down a bit recently.

Anywayz, lots of people have been talking about Valentines Day recently (surprise surprise) and even for those Twit-Knit club members who are single I think this will be a fun project because remember that Valentines is for telling EVERYONE how much you love them and not just your boyfriend/girlfriend. I for one am going to be celebrating with Posy. Yes, I know that sounds crazy. No, I don't care!

So I've been trawling through the internet and have made a little shortlist of all my favourite loved up knitting and crochet patterns to inspire you on your Valentines Twit-Knit adventure! Just click on the picture and it will take you to the pattern or info about how to buy the pattern.

Some of these patterns look so hard and are mostly just for show but remember if these look out of your comfort zone you can make anything you like just using more valentines-day colours. A pink scarf? A red blanket? Anything counts!

If you don't know what Twit-Knit is yet you can read about it here, and if you want to join just start tweeting your progress and tweet me here!

Happy Valentines :)
Love Scarlett.