Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

I found this 'old' video (almost 3 years ago) of Arantxa making more sugar roses, this time tiny rose buds! They are so simple yet they look great!

Video by Alessandra Zecchini, featuring Arantxa Zecchini Dowling  ©

butterflies A pot of love Farm animals This is very easy and gives you a perfect and professional finish: just use the same cookie cutter for the biscuits and for the icing! After baking your biscuits roll out your fondant icing and cut it with the same shapes. You can secure the fondant onto the biscuits by brushing them with a little jam or marmalade first.  Also we tried out a little Japanese cookie stamp set that Arantxa got for Xmas from Yosuke. This is great, you just need to place in the  hiragana  symbols and compose the word/sentence that you like. We started easy, with arigatou (thank you). Actually, the set instructions were for using the stamps before baking the biscuits, so we tried, but after baking the biscuits it was a little hard to read the words. Maybe next time we will need to press the stamp harder, or bake the biscuits a bit more, so that the words are legible, but it works fine on icing, since you do...

My daughter is making sugar roses. This was videoed by the Western Leader newspaper when they came over to our kitchen for an interview about our book, Party Food for Girls . I think that we need to make a better video where you can actually see the fingers 'working' and shaping the rose petals! And just the fingers (I wasn't even supposed to be in the video myself, I would have smiled more, if I knew!!); what do you think?

I saw some pretty   cupcakes with teapots  photographed by   Eva Blixman  on Torie Jayne's beautiful  Blog . I loved the idea, although the original ones seemed to have a bit too much topping for my taste: basically I love to look at overly decorated cupcakes, but I prefer to eat (and make) some which are a bit more 'shy'. When it comes to decoration I believe that less is more! I made some Italian butter cream for the frosting, and then I used some fondant, coloured with a little berry juice to get a soft pink. I shaped a teapot and tea cup, and with the leftover fondant some roses and flowers, all in light pink and white. Note that these were small cupcakes, so the teapot is quite small, barbie doll size :-).  Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini  ©

Next year will be the year of the Rabbit: a very important year for our family as my daughter is a rabbit! I made some little bunnies, the white one is made with fondant, and the cream bunny is made with marzipan. To show you the sizes I put a cherry next to them :-). I thought I did a pretty good job, and them my daughter showed me the rabbit she had made... What do you think? Isn't it cute!!! Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Here how I made a fondant frog on a lily pad, with natural colours (spirulina for green and berries for red). No words, just images, but feel free to ask questions :-) Photos (et all) by Alessandra Zecchini © Fin More flowers, tutorial with royal icing