For those of you who don't know, I am on hiatus aka, shipped my operations to Tokyo, Japan. No seriously, apologies in advance but I will not be taking any orders until August 2016.

This was another special birthday - my old man's 60th. 

And we had a BIG party (it's said that the organisers of the party never enjoy themselves. I can see where this statement comes from as the stress and the planning is quite a challenge. However, I'd like to think that I did enjoy myself).

I was so excited as we were having enough guests to warrant a dessert table. I've always wanted to do one but I also knew that it would just go to waste and usually guests will be too full to want to pick at the sweets. I'd decided long ago we were going all out - and on top of the gazillion other things I was overseeing, I did a small dessert table with a strawberry & ferrero tree, flowers, cake pops, chocolates, jelly shots, macarons and of course the CAKE!!!

An impressive 6 layers of chocolate cake soaked in kirsch with coconut, glace cherries and spiked ganache. It was so moist and yummy! We had a lot of cake leftover.... but everyone wanted to take some home! Yay, it didn't go to waste.

The day was hot too so I had to pick items that could stay out without melting or deteriorating. Not such an easy feat.

We also had a pig on the spit. It was delicious. The kids loved the balloons and the bubble machine (so did our crazy welsh corgi). So tiring but so worth it. Happy Birthday Dad!

Three tiers of red velvet and white chocolate mud cake at one stage I thought was going to melt and just make me cry (like the time Maxxie ate a corner of my huge chocolate cake that was for a customer the next day when he snuck into the house...).

My third collaboration with Chau who comes up with all these briliant ideas on how to save the cake. PHEW. She helped me with the toppers and all of those expensive white and light pink M&Ms you see cascading down the cake. I love the toppers - even more so because the bride is taller than the groom which I think is a pretty accurate representation! (Sorry Michael hahaha).

I was really happy with the way this reception venue cut the cake. It was very neat and plated very nicely with both flavours on every plate (this didn't happen at my cousin's wedding which was a sticking point for me). And the top tier has been wrapped up and saved for the freezer. I wonder how many couples actually end up eating it?

300 perfect macarons resulted. Don't ask me about the failures!

And of course, there's never enough work around so I have this BRILLIANT idea that I would handpaint with gold all of the white macarons. That just added another 4 hours, no big deal.

I always envisioned that packaging and wrapping boxes would be fun. It is, when you have about 10. When you have 150, it's kind of time consuming and tiring (like 5 hours of time consuming). But I was really happy and proud of the final result. They all looked so good and were so delicious. Pistachio (made from real nuts roasted, toasted and ground) and White Chocolate Raspberry Surprise (again, homemade raspberry jam from raspberries).

Would I willingly do this again? Probably not. Unless you're like a really really really really good friend. And you asked nicely. And preferably NOT in the middle of summer. Please, my stress levels are high enough already!

A cute little cake just before the official start of the Chinese Year of the Monkey! 

Another one where I had a stress attach over the humidity and heat throughout the week. I'd even remedied the ganache in preparation for this weather but it was still so soft! So it was 10 minutes in the fridge, 5 minutes, repeat until it was all piped. I had to give the fondant an extra 12 hours of rest to try and dry it out a bit more but it didn't seem to make a huge difference there either!

Summer, you and I have a love-hate relationship. I love you when I'm at the beach. But I want to kick and scream and ball my eyes out when I have cakes to make! The last few days have been 35+ and this is not cake baking and decorating weather.

Please be kind to me this weekend.

Sincerely,

Super stressed baker.