DIY Wedding: Personalised M&M Favours and Placecards

 

Traditionally at weddings, guests are given little packets of sugared almonds. Apparently there's a reason for this: almonds are slightly bitter but with the sugary coating, they represent the hope that married life will be more sweet than bitter. It's also traditional to give five almonds exactly, as the number five can't be divided so symbolises a strong bond between the couple.

Having said that, I've been to enough weddings where the sugared almonds get left behind - I'm not sure how many people actually like eating them. We weren't on a tight budget for our wedding but I didn't want to spend money on things that we didn't feel were worthwhile, so we considered not giving out wedding favours at all.

We also considered charity wedding favours, as we wanted to support the Young Epilepsy charity and I knew that some charities sell kits where you can make placecards for the table and each one has a little pin badge, like the pink ribbon breast cancer logo. At the time Young Epilepsy only had plastic wristbands and we weren't sure if they would be suitable so we decided instead to make a donation to Young Epilepsy which we put on our gift list and wedding website, as this would raise awareness and we could give more money this way.

I decided that I wanted to combine the guest placecard  with a little gift or wedding favour, and for it to be homemade, at least partly. I came across a website where you could personalise M&Ms and they had a 25% discount and when I explained to my fiancé, he loved the idea.

We could get M&Ms in our wedding colours, printed with pretty much whatever we wanted. We wanted to go for a cow theme so decided to have a little clipart cow printed on half the M&Ms and our names printed on the other. They can't print on black so we had white and purple (as the bridesmaids dresses were purple) and then separately went to the M&M World shop in Leicester Square (easy enough as we both work in London) to buy a big bag of black M&Ms. They have sweets in every colour imaginable and you can mix your own combination and we couldn't find anywhere online selling just black ones so my fiancé went and did it himself.

I bought clear plastic 'pillow' gift boxes for about £12 for 100 on Ebay, so we weighed the M&Ms and worked out how many we could have in each packet, and spent an evening filling the packets. We used my die cutting machine to cut out gift tags from purple card and my mother-in-law, who does beautiful calligraphy, kindly agreed to write the name of each guest on the label. I then took some purple ribbon, which I already had in my craft cupboard, and tied it around each M&M packet, attached the name label and used a pair of scissors to curl the ends.

 

 We bought the M&Ms as a bulk bag of 1.5kg which cost £85 before the 25% discount; you can also buy a bulk bag of 1.5kg and 100 pillow boxes for £105 but I don't think they offered this at the time and in any case it was cheaper to get the boxes from Ebay.  You can also buy plastic hearts which are £119 along with the 1.5kg of M&Ms and we might have considered this had they been available at the time. 

I costed them out and we made each one for about £1 which is really good - if you look at websites selling wedding favours you can easily pay £2-£3 for nice ones, which doesn't sound a lot but when you multiply that by 75 guests - we ended up spending around £75 rather than £225 which is good!

 Each packet was left on the dining table on each place setting so guests knew which was their seat. I think some people ate the M&Ms at the table and other people took them home - I hope they liked them, I think these were a bit quirky and fit really well with the theme of our wedding - if you want to read more about it, click here!

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Making My Own Wedding Cake

Photo by Lisa Dawn Photography
Cake by the bride and her sister!

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

When my husband and I were planning our wedding, I told him I really wanted to make our wedding cake myself - to say he wasn't keen was an understatement. Even though I'd made my friend Ros' wedding cake last year and really enjoyed the experience, he was worried I would get too stressed and be taking on too much.

So I was wondering what to best do when my sister told me she'd like to make the cake as her gift to us - which I wasn't expecting at all - but that she was a bit nervous at taking on such a big cake. Which gave me the perfect opportunity to suggest we do it between us!

I knew from the start that the cake itself would be quite easy and quick to decorate as there was really only one design of cake we could have, as our last name is Cowe - pronounced cow - a cow print cake! It sounds silly but I think the cake overall looked really elegant, and as we only had a few other cow print touches (the whole wedding wasn't full-on cow print) it worked really well.

My husband loves chocolate cake and also really likes fruit cake though I'm not as keen on fruit cake myself, so we decided to have each layer a different type of cake - fruit on the bottom, chocolate in the middle and lemon on the top.

We decided that for ease of transportation and being able to prepare the fruit cake in advance, my sister Clare would do the top and bottom of the cake and I would do the middle.

She'd just moved house and was renovating the new house so between an unfamiliar oven, and effectively a lot of building work going on, and a sister who kept asking whether she'd done the practice cake or not yet (to be fair she did leave it quite last-minute as she had so much else going on - unbeknown to me, she had also just discovered she was pregnant!) she did a brilliant job.

Clare decided to buy the fruit cake from an online shop and cover it with marzipan and decorate it herself, and then bake the top layer the day before the wedding and decorate that too.

I made a 9 inch chocolate cake for my middle layer using the same BBC Good Food recipe I'd done for Ros's cake as it worked so well, and once again the cake was beautifully moist and chocolatey. It came out of the oven perfectly, and I made a chocolate ganache buttercream which I spread round the sides and over the top, and then covered the cake with fondant.

This tilting turntable from Lakeland which my mum gave me for my birthday came in handy too:

I baked the cake first thing on the Thursday morning (getting up at about 6.30am) and left it to cool while I went out to collect the wedding dress, and decorated it in the afternoon. We then travelled from Surrey to Wiltshire on the Friday and had a wedding rehearsal and left the cake, along with various other things, at the venue, and got married on the Saturday afternoon. The cake lasted really well and was still really good when we ate some of the leftovers on the Sunday!

When I was thinking about the cow print decoration I knew I wanted the black patches to be different sizes and shapes but somehow still uniform - to not look like they had been cut out haphazardly and to have neat, sharp edges to make sure it looked professional.

I came across a 'make your own cookie cutter kit' from Lakeland which was absolutely perfect. It was reduced at the time from £9.99 to £4.99 and is currently £2.99; I bought two so I could send one to my sister. It was really easy to bend the metal strips into different cow print shapes and secure the ends with the tape provided, and the cookie cutters worked perfectly on the black fondant (I used Renshaw).

Each cake had a piece of ribbon around the bottom and another around the edge of the cake board in the exact same shade as our bridesmaid dresses; I got the ribbon from Fantastic Ribbons. We also had to purchase cake boards, cardboard boxes to store and transport the cake, and I bought this cake stand from Windsor as I wanted one where each tier of the cake would be separated, so you could see the cow print on the top.



We thought about having our names laser cut out of plastic as a cake topper - similar to the one Ros and James had, and we were going to order one over the internet until I decided I wanted something home made. We investigated whether we could make our own using my Silhouette die cutter but realised it would only cut thick card and not any kind of thin plastic, so decided instead that we would have a more traditional bride and groom cake topper - but with an untraditional twist: two cows!

I've made several animals from fondant before including a cow and a sheep so I knew I could easily make two cows to go on top. This link gives step-by-step instructions.

I gave the groom a purple tie to match the wedding colours and bought a Barbie wedding dress and gave the veil from it to the bride!

The cake was absolutely delicious, and we found that with a 12 inch bottom, 9 inch middle and 6 inch top cake we had plenty to feed 75 guests with some leftover, which we gave to the neighbours in our street.

 Here are some of the pictures our professional photographers, Lisa and Scott from Lisa Dawn Photography, took on our wedding day. I want to say a big thank you to my sister Clare again who has said "never again" when it comes to making a wedding cake, but I think she did a fantastic job and it meant a lot to me that my sister and I could make the cake together.









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Restaurant review: All Bar One, Bishopsgate, London

I wasn't particularly impressed with a lunch I had at All Bar One on Bishopsgate before I went off to get married. I went with half a dozen colleagues and we had a large table reserved for us near the bar. There was plenty of choice on the menu and I decided that because my wedding wasn't far away I was going to have a salad. I ordered the superfood salad, which is vegan but you can add halloumi, chicken or prawns for a few pounds extra so I had the prawns. The salad consists of mixed leaves, giant couscous, pomegranate and lentil tabbouleh, butternut squash and beetroot, with a pineapple, lemongrass and ginger dressing.

I was so busy talking to my friends that I didn't really pay much attention to the menu and enjoyed the salad, but it was only when I left and chatted to a friend who had ordered the same thing that we realised our salads had no butternut squash and no pomegranate - pretty much half the main ingredients! The squash would have made the salad much more filling too so it was quite strange and annoying both that and the pomegranate (one of the more expensive ingredients) had been left out and what I had was a pretty plain salad. It didn't seem worth going back to the bar after we had left and complaining as there wasn't much they could do, and I wasn't even sure if they would give us our money back as we hadn't complained at the time.

Then I spoke to another colleague and discovered her chicken and avocado salad had plenty of other ingredients in it but was missing the avocado too! The bar wasn't particularly busy that lunchtime so maybe one of the chefs was having an off day, but unfortunately it's put me off going back. The rest of my colleagues, who did get what they had ordered, did really enjoy their meals at least!

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Peaches and Cream Summer Sandcastle Cake

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

I bought a sandcastle cake mould from Lakeland two years ago and only used it once, when I made this pineapple and coconut sandcastle cake. The uncomfortably but beautifully hot weather we've had for the past week or so inspired me to dig it out again and to come up with another summery flavour for the cake. I decided not to decorate it as a lot of fondant or buttercream is not always a great idea in hot weather, and I wanted the natural colour of the cake to reflect the colour of the sandcastle.

I wanted the cake to be light and moist so decided to make it peaches and cream flavour. I used tinned peaches as I had some in the fridge to use up, and it meant I could use the peach juice from the can as well, but if you want to use fresh peaches I'd use three or four peeled and chopped, and for the liquid element, perhaps the Granini Peach Drink that's made using peach puree (available in Tesco and Waitrose) or peach-flavoured squash, made up quite strong.

Peaches and Cream Cake - an original recipe by Caroline Makes, for Caroline Makes.Net

You need:

Cake Release spray for greasing the mould

200g butter, softened

200g caster sugar

4 eggs

1 cup peach juice or squash

about 200g peaches, either tinned or fresh, peeled and sliced if necessary

275g self raising flour

 

 

I used the Lakeland sandcastle silicone mould for this cake, which doesn't seem to be available on their site any more - if you want to purchase one, keep an eye on Ebay, or you can use any shaped cake tin or mould.

Preheat the oven to 150C. Spray the sandcastle mould with Cake Release or similar.

In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer then mix in the eggs.

Add the peach juice and mix again. Finally add the sliced peaches and the flour and gently fold in.

 Stand the sandcastle mould in a large roasting tin and pour the cake mixture into the mould. Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour.

Allow to cool in the mould and then turn out onto a cooling rack.

 This was a beautifully light and moist cake; so moist in fact it started to break as I took it out of the mould before it was completely cooled, which will teach me to be more patient next time!

 

I'm sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK; her theme is garden party and this cake would make a great centrepiece.

 

I'm also sharing this with the Food Calendar linky on Charlotte's Lively Kitchen as it's summer holiday season!

 

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Homemade Triple Chocolate Ice Cream with Kitchenaid Ice Cream Maker

My husband loves ice cream at any time of year but especially in summer; if I buy a tub he has some for dessert every evening until it's gone. So I suspect he had an ulterior motive when he bought me an ice cream maker at Christmas - and was probably quite disappointed that I didn't get around to using it until July!

With a wedding to plan I was too busy and also trying to lose weight, and I don't really like to eat ice cream unless it's hot anyway. I'd promised him that I would use the ice cream maker after the wedding so got it out as soon as I came back from honeymoon - it was probably a
good thing I hadn't used it previously or
 I definitely wouldn't have lost any weight before the wedding!

The ice cream maker is easily attached onto the Kitchenaid but making the ice cream does take some forward planning. You have to put the bowl from the ice cream maker in the freezer for at least 15 hours and for the recipe I used, make something in a saucepan, make something else in a bowl, combine the two and return to the saucepan then put in the fridge for at least 8 hours. After that you put it in the ice cream maker - you don't actually put it in the freezer, as beating the mixture in the pre-frozen bowl with the Kitchenaid makes a soft scoop ice cream, and you then store it in the freezer where it will become more solid. But each stage and the chilling time in between means this is pretty much a three-day job - unless you always keep the ice cream maker bowl in the freezer in which case it's then two days.

After all that I was hoping the ice cream would be worth it, and it was - my husband, who is something of a connoisseur of chocolate ice cream, said it was absolutely amazing. It also makes a good quantity - almost 2 litres - so if you do go to all this effort it will last a while.

This is the recipe for the triple chocolate ice cream which I adapted to use an equal mixture of single cream and milk as you can't buy 'half and half' in the UK, and instead of a chopped 50g bar of milk chocolate at the end I used a handful of Hershey's mini kisses (which you can't buy in the UK either but I had bought some when I was in America). You might be able to adapt the recipe for your own ice cream maker or even to freeze the mixture and churn it by hand but this recipe is specifically written for a Kitchenaid.

You need:
450ml whipping cream
30g plain chocolate, chopped (the recipe specified 'extra dark')
30g milk chocolate, chopped (the recipe specified 'dark')
225ml single cream
225ml full fat milk (instead of the single cream and milk the recipe specified 450ml half and half)
230g sugar
40g cocoa powder
8 egg yolks
4 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
handful of Hershey's mini kisses or 50g milk chocolate, chopped

 

In a small saucepan heat 120ml of the whipping cream, the plain chocolate and the 30g milk chocolate until the chocolate has melted, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat and set aside.

In another pan, heat the half-and-half or equivalent over a medium heat until not quite simmering, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Using the metal whisk on the Kitchenaid, whisk the egg yolks and gradually add the sugar and the cocoa powder. Gradually pour in the chocolate mixture and the half-and-half mixture, until well combined.

Return this mixture to a saucepan and heat over a medium heat, stirring frequently until the mixture is just simmering. Do not allow it to boil.

Transfer to a large mixing bowl and stir in the remaining whipping cream, vanilla and salt. Cover and chill in the fridge for at least 8 hours.

When you're ready to make the ice cream, take the bowl out of the freezer and attach to the Kitchenaid according to the instructions. Turn it on to the slowest speed and carefully pour the ice
cream mixture into the bowl.

 

 Leave it running at the slowest speed for 15 minutes, adding the chocolate chips for the last two minutes; this will give you soft scoop ice cream that you can eat straight away. The rest of the ice cream can be frozen in an airtight container and served at a harder consistency later.

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Afternoon Tea Greetings Card

I made this as a birthday card but it would work for any kind of greeting or even as an invitation to afternoon tea.

 

I had a set of 6x6 printed papers with different tea and cake motifs; on this one, the background pictures are quite large which limits what else I can put on the card as it would make the design too busy. I have some tea cup stickers I got from Paperchase that I have used several times before, and decided this would work in the centre of the card, mounted on a pink die-cut shape to create a distinction from the background.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 30 2016

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

I might not be home for that many meals this week and expect a few last minute changes to the meal plan so here goes!


Monday - working late on a project so will probably grab something on the way home, my husband might go to his mum's

Tuesday - always have a meeting til 6.30 on a Tuesday now which means I will never get home before 8 and need something quick for dinner but also something my husband will eat. He can have a frozen pizza and I'll have some leftover pasta bake from Sunday.

Wednesday - Potentially today or Friday visiting a member of my husband's family in hospital so we will grab some food on the way home

Thursday - probably an early lunch/brunch (maybe a bacon sandwich as it's easy) then away for the rest of the day at a funeral (unrelated to the family member above)

Saturday - home alone, my husband is at Silverstone with his dad.
Lunch: mackerel in mustard sauce on toast
Dinner: the spicy seafood chorizo paella from Inspiralized I was going to cook last week but didn't for me, gammon and chips for him if he's home in time

 Sunday
Lunch: with friends
Dinner: chicken/ cauliflower tikka I was going to make last week but didn't, unless it's really hot and we want to barbecue

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