There has been a wide array of cakes coming out of HHHQ the past few weeks, and this coming week is no exception! But after that there is a wedding cake onslaught and we can’t wait to get stuck in! We absolutely love working on wedding cakes. It’s a privilege to meet brides and grooms during the planning stages for their big day – we love to meet up with them, hear their story, try some samples and help them come up with the perfect cake to represent them on their special day. It means everything to us to get this right – the design has to portray their style and each tier has to be a flavour that they and their guests will love. We are a very small business and hope that that brings with it an extra personal and bespoke service, we really want to make cakes that are one of a kind.

We will be exhibiting at the Scottish Wedding Show at the SECC in Glasgow on 5th & 6th October and this focuses our minds on all things wedding. It’s great to work in an industry surrounded by such beautiful things – this goes for where we are located geographically in North Ayrshire too, not only a location with sea views to die for but lots of great wedding businesses too. In our wee town we have top of the range designer wedding dresses at Opus Couture (they have a sale coming up – definitely worth a look), popular hotel and wedding venue the Seamill Hydro,  flowers at The Flower Room, whose branches now spread to Largs and Glasgow and one-off handmade gifts at The Barony , flagship for the Craft Town of Scotland to name a few – other first class jewellers and photographers also work out of West Kilbride, and alternative venues such as beautiful Portencross Castle and Law Castle offer something for all tastes. How amazing it would be to have ceremony take place, at home or in an unusal venue - a place to find out what is possible is Amaranthus.

We will look forward to being at the SECC and seeing so many other suppliers and hopefully get a glimpse of beautiful dresses on the catwalk. There are awesome things to see - when else do you get the chance to wear an amazing dress, party in a venue you love and order a cake that is far more over the top than anything you would normally need! The Scottish Wedding Show will be able to show lots of options that are out there and we can’t wait to meet brides, grooms and their friends and families. We recently also had an opportunity to go along to look at the Glasgow Wedding Collective’s hand-picked wedding fair at the Lighthouse in Glasgow city centre. Not only is it an outstanding venue for a city wedding but the suppliers on show there were really fantastic, we were so impressed with the standard of beautiful products and services, 
definitely worth a look there too. There are lots of great wedding blogs and pinterest boards out there - one of the ones we love is Wedloop.

Just a couple of weeks to go before we can really get cracking on some new designs to show in October, we can’t wait! #YUMMY!

Lots of the orders that come in are challenging and interesting to make, but if you asked us what our favourites are we’d have to say we love stylish wedding cakes and sculpted 3D animal cakes best of all!

We love animals anyway so to create the celebratory cake version is often difficult but always really rewarding. Animals can be so beautiful themselves that we think it’s more important to try and capture a little of their personalities rather than doing a ‘cute’ caricatured version.  We love it when a customer can give us a little background and some pics of their special pets and we can take it from there, or sometimes it’s a more general brief, but hopefully the outcome is a unique surprise for the recipient.

It helps a little if they’re for a chocolate lover, chocolate is so much easier to sculpt with and create a strong structure, white chocolate can be quite good too but it’s a bit of a no-go area for very airy sponges. Smaller details can work well in sugarpaste, and heavy gravity defying areas can be helped with supports and sometimes polystyrene or rice crispies ! And delicious chocolate and cream is a decadent ‘cement’ to pull the whole structure together.

Some people say they can’t bear to cut into the cake…but seriously, dig in! At the end of the day it’s a cake, and a yummy one not to be wasted! They don’t feel anything, honest :D

So much time is spent on the design and finish of the cakes it’s easy to forget the thought and experience that has gone into making them yummy inside too! We have got used to taking it for granted but it really is so important to us, essentially the most important part is in the eating. We were at a wedding fair recently and a man came over to the taster table and shrugged and said he didn’t care what it tasted like as long as it looks amazing! We were horrified!!  Obviously it has to look beautiful but we really aim for the inside to surpass expectations too.

Sometimes the old faithfuls are hard to beat – superlight vanilla sponge with fresh jam and cream; brownie-esque indulgent chocolate cake; zesty lemon with mega-zing and this summer’s favourite of white chocolate and raspberry are all real party pieces. It’s also good to cut into something a little more unexpected – black bottom (dark choc & cheesecake); black forest; sticky date; peanut butter & chocolate and lemon & poppyseed are all twists on great combinations. Selling cakes for 3 years at the local Farmers’ Market was a great opportunity to try out loads of different flavours – for more ideas see the info page – and new ideas are always welcome too! #YUMMY!!!

We really love making sculpted cakes in the cake kitchen. There's always plenty
of research to be done and logistical questions to think about - this week is as
much of a challenge as we've ever had. The beautiful Fife yachts are coming to
our area http://www.fiferegatta.com/ and we are
making a cake to be auctioned off during the event at the gorgeous Portavadie
Marina http://portavadiemarina.com/. It's really
important to us to get the structure as accurate as we can and we make life a
bit more difficult for ourselves by using soft and moist cake - a block of dry
madeira would make things alot easier! But it's so important to have it as yummy
as any other cake so extra time is spent strengthening the structure with
chocolate. We have also enlisted some help with the inedible section of the cake
- in this case the masts and rigging have been made out of wood and cloth for
the sails.

We also have a few other occasions going on this week, including a beautiful and classy wedding cake for a couple coming from Germany for their wedding at the Seamill Hydro http://www.seamillhydro.co.uk/. Hopefully some fab weather for their wedding by the sea and views that are hard to beat.
This is our first stab at a blog - any suggestions at what folks would like to hear about, please get in touch. And in the meantime we will continue to bring some news from the kitchen!