The thing about using fresh strawberries (or any fresh fruit for that matter) in cakes is that one is always at the mercy of the latest shipment that arrives from where ever it is that the local supermarkets or grocers at the wet market get their fruit.

The truth be told, I get just a little nervous whenever I receive orders for strawberry cakes because I never quite know what I’m going to find on the supermarket shelves. This is especially true in the period between the end of the US season and the beginning of the Australian / New Zealand season. There have been days when I almost cried tears of dismay at the awful state of the strawberries that were available - over-ripened ones that were already beginning to turn to mush, under-ripened ones that were 1/3 greenish white, monsterously huge ones and sad tiny ones (both kinds in the same punnet) - I’ve seen them all.

These days, I get my strawberies from the fruit stands at the local wet markets and they’ve been great so far. I believe it’s because the grocers are more fastidious when picking produce for their stalls. Now if only the supermarkets could afford the time to sort their produce…

The cheesecake pictured here is the 1st cheesecake order I’ve received. Many thanks to L for giving me room to experiment with a new recipe!

My client, C, had originally approached me about miniature sugar paste cakes. They were for a young lady celebrating her birthday at the Bukit Timah Saddle Club.

Since fondant, the humid weather and I don’t seem to agree with each other, I suggested a cake with a royal icing pony instead when C told me that a pony ride would be part of the day’s events.

I went ahead and designed a trial royal icing pony. I soon realised that it would not be an easy task getting the pony on to the cake without breaking it and the only thing I could think of was using fondant as a support as I’d done for the giraffe. I guess I couldn’t escape fondant after all!

As expected, the fondant was only semi-dry. Still, I think the chocolate cake turned out pretty cute. I only hope it survived long enough for the birthday girl to cut the cake!

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a really adorable royal icing giraffe in one of my mum’s old cake decorating books. I thought the idea was cute and that it’d be cool to make a long cake. Since my sister’s birthday was coming up, I had the perfect excuse!

The royal icing piping was a lot of fun and the giraffe was really cute, except for one major problem. I hadn’t thought of how I could remove the sugar art from the cellophane without breaking it. But just in case things didn’t work out, I made a little royal icing rooster as well, all the while hoping that the giraffe would stay intact. Sadly, the giraffe did break (into several pieces), but I thought I could still salvage it by assembling the pieces on a long piece of fondant.

Little did I realise that I’d just created another problem. The fondant stubbornly refused to dry, despite the hot weather. All it did was dry a little in the day, but turn into a soft mush in the evening. This I attributed to the awful humidity that we’ve been experiencing lately. In the end, I turned to air-conditioning for help. The fondant did dry somewhat, but only if I kept it in the air-conditioned room.

In the end, I managed to get sugar paste and royal icing on to the chocolate cake (sandwiched with raspberry jam and chocolate ganache), but this experience has further convinced me not to put fondant cakes up for sale. At least for now. As beautiful or adorable as the end results usually are, the drying process is just too annoying and is most definitely not worth running the air-conditioning for days on end.

* NOT FOR SALE *