All That Giltters ...

Is far more likely to be silver than gold in this house.

So yesterday Miss Mac turned 16.

WOW ...

All my babies are grown up ...

I could regale you with the story of her birth but to be honest, you probably don't want to hear it and again, to be honest, it was a simple, straight forward birth, no dramas.

My beautiful girl was born on her due date and the entire process took less than 3 hours from start to finish.

I remember the first time I looked at her.  She seemed to be enveloped in a cloud of glitter and no, I didn't have any drugs that could have accounted for that.  The air around her just shimmered with a silver haze and I still see that every time I look at her.

I told you about my plan for making her a shoe box cake for her Birthday.

Well, I gave it a lot of thought over the past few weeks and drew a lot of designs as well as trawling the net for ideas.

I'd already seen these on a friends FB and knew that I wanted to give them a go:

There is a tutorial and I will add the link at the end for anyone else who wants to try them.

But I also had this idea that I would make the shoebox for them to sit on.

I soon realised that a shoebox size cake would be huge and there was no way we would be able to eat it all unless we were throwing a massive party.

Well, Miss Mac doesn't want a huge party.  She wants a few friends over at the weekend for pizza and a sleepover but I still wanted to make the high heeled cup cakes.

SO ...

I decided to use a real shoe box.  Make a couple of the high heels to go on top and then fill the box with cupcakes!

My first idea was to make a box like a Louboutins shoe box, like this one:

That would just have involved finding a shoe box, covering it in brown paper and writing the logo on it.

SIMPLE!  Until ...

I went into The Works, one of my favourite shops for crafting supplies and I saw, self adhesive glitter paper - GENIUS!!!

I loved it!

So the design changed.  I was going to be an over the top GLITTER cake!

Covering the box wasn't as easy as I'd thought (things rarely are!) but with a little time and patience I got it done.

The only problem was that I wasn't able to drawn the logo directly on to the paper.

I bought some white card and carefully copied the logo.  You could trace it if you aren't confident at drawing.  I then used a sharpie to go over the logo and cut it out so I could stick it to the glitter paper.


When I placed the logo on the glitter paper I realised that the white card looked much too harsh and really didn't look very good so I got a silver pen and coloured in the white and it looked much better!

Unfortunately the glue caused the glitter paper to bubble a little so if I did it again I'd use a different faster drying glue rather than PVA but I decided it didn't matter too much.

I was going to add diamante trim to the L but I decided there was too much scope for messing that up so I just added a single pearl to the design.

I also wanted to write Happy Birthday and I had some silver self adhesive letters so I cut out some of the glitter paper, wrote the message and then stuck it on to the box.

I also wanted Miss Mac to be able to keep the box after if she wanted to so I stuck some of the glitter paper on to card to make a small cake board for the high heeled cup cakes which could sit on top and avoid getting icing on the box itself.

It's not as perfect as I'd like but not a bad effort.

To make the box I needed:

A shoe box
Self adhesive glitter paper
Silver letters
A black sharpie
A silver pen
White card
Tracing paper (if using) and a pencil
Glue to stick the logo on with
Self adhesive gems
Tissue paper to line the inside.

Then I made the cakes.

Usually when I do something like this I tell you at the end how much cheaper it was to make rather than buy but to be honest, I could probably have bought 3 cakes for the price of this one!

You need:

Basic cupcake ingredients (which I already had).
Something to make the soles and the heels.
Edible silver glitter
Silver dragees
Any other kind of decoration that takes your fancy.

The things I really struggled with were the soles of the shoes.  I bought some Langues Du Chat thinking that they would be perfect but when I opened the box they were far too small!

So I settled on some Madelaines which were perfect!

The heels were a nightmare too.  I knew exactly what I wanted but it seems that finding chocolate filled rolled wafers at any time other than Christmas is not easy!

Eventually, after trawling all the local supermarkets AND the small independent food shops I found the perfect chocolate filled wafers at Poundstretchers!!

I'm renowned for my lack of ability at icing and I think it might be partly down to the fact that I make my icing too slack.  I read up a bit on buttercream and the perfect way to make stiff icing is to have a 1:2 ratio of butter to icing sugar.  Beat the butter first until it's pale and creamy and then add the icing sugar a spoonful at a time beating in between.  When all the icing sugar is incorporated add a little milk to let the icing down and then add any colouring.  Seems to work!

My icing skills still leaves a lot to be desired but it's a huge improvement!

Fill the box with decorated cupcakes (that's edible glitter making them shine)

and place the shoes on top

Usually at this point when I've done a crafting post or something I'll tell you how cheap it was to make.

Not this time!!!

Ok, so I had all the stuff to make cupcakes but all the extra ingredients along with the stuff to make the box probably cost me ....

I'm mentally adding up here - been too scared to up until now!

Hmmm, about £15 so not as bad as I'd thought (that include the Langues Du Chat  mistake - about £3).

For those of you who are concerned by recent posts, don't worry - normal (for me) scatty, disorganised and ridiculous posting will resume shortly!

And, if you want to have a go yourself, check this out:

artist! http://youtu.be/hCfoLHlvNCQ 

Small update (to avoid me having to write yet another crafting post!)

I also went with the silver theme for Miss Mac's presents wrapping them in silver paper and cutting out some heart shaped tags and covering them with some of the silver self adhesive paper and adding contrasting ribbon:

Like this

I didn't want to just throw the tags away after as they were so pretty so, using some more of that silver wire and some of those teardrop beads I've used before I turned it into bunting to string across the blind in her bedroom (obviously the blind is ALSO silver ;-)

I think It's a pretty addition the the hearts and silver theme in her room