Chocolate Rainbow Drip Cake

Every year I view my Birthday as a chance to bake an over the top cake. They're never perfect, but I enjoy baking them and they're great learning experiences! This year I used my favourite chocolate cake recipe by Whisk Kid, and stacked the 4 layers with standard vanilla buttercream. I then iced the cake using six different shades of buttercream to produce a rainbow effect! So pleased with how this worked out. I made a Cadbury Dairy Milk ganache and spooned it on top to create the drip cake (I used 50/50 chocolate and cream, but I think it could have done with a bit longer to cool so they drips look less "watery").

I decorated the cake with smarties, twirls and flakes. I bought candy melts in red, blue and yellow and melted them together to create the rainbow chocolate shards (and the flower!) I was a bit disappointed with how the colours muddied somewhat when making orange, green and purple, but couldn't justify the cost of buying every colour individually! I also made the rainbow meringues to decorate the cake! To save mixing six different colours of meringue, I painted lines of food colouring gel down the inside of the piping bag before adding the white meringue. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out :) Oh, and it was yummy!!

Christmas 4 || Crochet Christmas Pudding

This is a bit of a mish mash of patterns and made up bits of crochet, but I like the finished piece!

I made the brown pudding following this pattern, which I also used for my robin! As I worked it, I randomly picked up a strand of a second shade of brown to add a speckled effect. This could obviously just be stitched afterwards, but I preferred to do it this way. The icing is a simple circle increase in sc, with hdc, dc and tr to create the random curves.

I used this pattern for the holly leaves, and I think they came out quite nicely! And for the berries I did 12 dc into a ring and then pulled it tight.