Pink Pops| How to make Popcakes

You may or may not have seen the posts about my Mum’s wedding in September. In that post you'll have seen pictures of the above Pop Cakes. My mum and I are both huge lovers of cake; any sort will do! So when I found the above book in TKMaxx I had to buy it. When flicking through the pages we came up with the idea of making pink Popcakes for her wedding as a gift for her guests.

At the time it seemed like a great idea; who wouldn’t love cute little pink cakes! However come 10.30pm the night before the wedding when we were still decorating the Popcakes, we were soon regretting it! Despite how stressful this idea became, the end result was amazing. The wedding guests were fascinated, and in awe when they discovered that my Mum had made them herself. So I thought I would show you how we did it.

Step 1- Firstly, a cake needs to be made. We used the recipe given in the book for a simple chocolate sponge cake. For the 100 popcakes that we made we had to bake 6 chocolate cakes and leave them to cool.

Step 2- To make the cake balls, the cakes were blitzed into crumbs then mixed with cream cheese, and icing sugar. This makes the cakes into a moist mouldable texture, that is quite similar to a ganache. We also added bashed up Crunchie to our mixture to add something special to half of the popcakes. We then moulded the mixture into 100 little balls, mounted them on sticks and popped them into the freezer for 15 minutes to allow them to solidify.

Step 3- The fun part; decorating! We ended up with 3 different looks for our popcakes. One was just pink icing with a pink icing rose on the top. The second was pink icing dipped into pink sugar.The third look was meant to resemble a flower, and involved pink and white swirls (as you can see above). The joy with popcakes is that you can be so creative with them, any colour, shape or design. I have seen little teacups and tea pots, dinosaurs, people, and food items such as hotdogs and slices of cake.

So that’s a short and sweet explanation on how we made our popcakes. It took a lot of time to make 100 of them, and it was a lot of hard work, but the final product was delicious and a big success with all the wedding guests. I think they are an excellent idea for wedding favours or even for Christmas presents!

So what do you think? Have you seen or tried popcakes before? Would you make any for Christmas presents or for your wedding or party?

Weddings Days

Many of you will know after reading my blog that this past weekend has been the weekend of my Mum and her partner’s wedding. It was an amazing fun filled two day event, even if it was a little tiring. We are currently all sat around my mum and her new husbands house, eating Dominos in our PJ’s and looking through all the pictures, so I thought I would share some with you.

Friday night was an informal gathering and a chance for both sides of the family to meet and mingle. There was a lot of chatting, laughing and drinking going on, and with the help of my game of ‘Crazy Little Game Called Love’, a lot of scheming. The game is one I have come across through the hours I spend reading wedding blogs… I a woman obsessed. The game involves taking pictures of famous celebrity and royal bride and grooms and superimposing your own bride and grooms face in place of the famous star. The pictures turned out great, and were very humorous. The game itself brought out everyone’s competitive side especially when a drinks voucher was revealed as the prize, overall it proved a great ice breaker for everyone.

If the game itself didn’t break the ice, the sight of my Grandma having her head shaved by my mother, definitely did. My family has unfortunately been affected by breast cancer both now and in the past, so to help raise money for a cause both very close the our hearts and central to the wedding she decided she wanted to raise money by having her head shaved. No one was told beforehand, so it proved to be quite a shock to many, however she raised around £400 for charity, deeming it very successful. Everyone again did not know that Grandma has a beautiful wig that she wore for the Wedding day, so there was no bald bridesmaids running around, well at least not at the ceremony, it soon came off when the dancing started.

I only have a small selection of pictures of the ceremony, as I was too busy enjoying the day/carrying champagne and flowers around to take pictures, but you can see that pink was a strong theme in the wedding, as it is my mums favourite colour, and relates to the breast cancer charity. From the third picture you will see that shoes also played a big part, my mum wore hot pink stilettos on under her dress, and each bridesmaid had a different pair of sparkly shoes.

Many of the lovely guests who attended commented that it was the little details that made the day so spectacular, many of which were handmade by my mum and her willing helpers. Above are a selection of these little details along with the pictures I took while getting ready… seemingly the only free time I had.

*The hotel* *The view from my room* *Champers and cake for breakfast* *Hair clips* *OOTD-bridesmaid edition* *Curly bridesmaid hair* *Wedding favours* *Wedding Breakfast* *Assiette of deserts* *Wedding cake and flowers* Pink Wedding Popcakes* Curly hair 15 hours later*

I plan on posting another couple of wedding related posts, one with more of the wedding pictures, so you can gain a greater idea of the day. The other on the popcakes we baked and decorated for the guests. So keep checking back if you like cake or beautiful photographs.

Have any of you been to a wedding recently? What made the day extra special and stand out for you?