These creative ideas can turn even the humblest cake into something special, making for an inspired celebration!

Check out some of the designs in the gallery below, or view them in further detail in the Cake Decorations section of our online store.

Send Large Files or panic attacks

He’s a food photographer who is completely obsessed with anything food and drink related and anything in between. What’s not to love!

I found his blog whilst looking for great Halloween recipes.

These Candied Apples are so striking have such a depth of colour you would think you’d served up the dark heart of Medusa and the blood of a thousand virgins.

Matt has graciously allowed me to use his gorgeous photography and recipe below. Enjoy!!

Red & Black Candy Apples

8-10 medium sized apples
8-10 wooden twigs, twimmed
3 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 cup of water
several drops of cinnamon flavored oil
1/4 teaspoon of red food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of black food coloring

Clean and dry the apples. Try to remove as much of the wax as possible. If you purchase them from your local farmer’s market then chances are they have not been treated with the food grade wax that makes then shine. Remove any stems or leaves and insert a twig into the end of each apple. To facilitate easier twig entry you can carefully sharpen the end of the twig or use a candy stick to create a guide hole. Set apples aside.

Heat and stir sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan until sugar has dissolved. Boil until the syrup reaches 300 degrees on a candy thermometer. Don’t go over 310 degrees or your candy burns and then you’ll be sad.

Remove from heat and stir in flavored oil and food coloring.

Dip one apple completely in the syrup and swirl it so that it becomes coated with the melted sugar candy. Hold the apple above the saucepan to drain off excess. Place apple, with the stick facing up, onto a baking sheet that’s greased or lined with a silpat. Repeat the process with the remaining apples. If your syrup thickens or cools too much, simply reheat briefly before proceeding. Let the apples cool completely before serving.

A note about the black apples: Lighter colored apples (Granny Smith, Golden Delicious) work well in making the red appear bright and glassy; darker apples like red delicious help the black candy appear as dark as possible. Muy spooky!

Also, Adam made one batch with red food coloring and after he had a few red apples he reheated the candy mixture and added black food coloring. Adding black to red will make it darker. He repeated the dipping process. Black food coloring can be found online or at specialty baking stores.

So, as promised, I had a go at carving another pumpkin tonight – using one of the designs from the Pumpkin Lady herself.

I’m pretty delighted with the results – but see for yourself and you decide!

Take, for instance, the art of designing Halloween costumes for dogs..

Here’s my favourite of the bunch, Darth Vader dog:

This year, I thought I’d attempt my first pumpkin carving ever. I always imagined it would be quite difficult, as pumpkins are quite heavy and thick- skinned. So I downloaded a template which looked easy and not to much detail. I thought the skin would be really difficult to carve through and was so surprised at how easy it was!

I thought it would be fun to share my first attempt with everyone so you could either try this yourself or at least laugh at my efforts.

Step 1:

Choose a smooth, umblemished pumpkin.

Attach a pumpkin carving pattern, using cellotape. Here I have chosen a Halloween-themed pattern (obviously!) with two vampire bats.. Bwah hah hah!

Step 2:

Poke tiny holes through the pattern, using a skewer. I used a cork screw because it was there.

Don’t make large holes, you only need the holes as a guidline for when you start to cut into the pumpkin.

Step 3:

Remove the pattern from the pumpkin. Here you can see my pattern. If you have trouble seeing the pattern, you can rub some talcum powder into the holes and this will show up the pattern better.

Step 4:

Draw a shape for the removable top of the pumpkin. Cut out the shape but make sure you cut at an angle, so the pumpkin top won’t fall into the pumpkin once you’ve cut it.

Step 5:

Time to get squelchy! Get your hands in there and start pulling out all that pumpkin goop!

Scrape out the rest with a short-handled spoon. Better yet, get a pumpkin carving kit – the tools in these make the job a lot easier and safer.

Once that is done, you can start the really fun part, carving!

Step 6:

For my carving, I used a child’s kitchen knife. My nephews and nieces use these knives when we cook together. It’s safer because you can run the knife along your hand without cutting, yet still seems to cut things really well. I’m not really sure how that works but it’s really a great tool.

For larger shapes, cut out in smaller pieces.

Step 7: Whoops! Back to Step 5 for me!:

Ooops! Make sure you have de-gooped properly! I didn’t get out all those stringy bits and when I cut out my pattern, you could see lots of stringy pumpkin bits hanging out.

Step 7 (essential):

Pat the dog. Archie has grown tired of waiting for cuddles and has fallen asleep on the kitchen floor.

Step 8:

Wash out the pumpkin and dry with a paper towel.

Step 9:

Make your room smell great by sticking some cloves in the pumpkin-top and sprinkling some cinnamon onto it.

Step 10:

Add a candle and light! It looks amazing and smells so good!

If you would like to learn a lot more about the art of pumpkin carving, you can visit The Pumpkin Lady, who has lots of really helpful videos to get you started. She also sells creative patterns from really easy to advanced. I am going to try one of her patterns and will post it soon.

The bat-shaped pattern I used here was from e-How.

I hope you found this fun and helpful. If you were inspired to carve a pumpkin, I would love you to send me your photos, so I can post them on my blog.

Happy carving!

The snow will make it all seem even more magical.

This weekend at Temple Guiting, I am on Friday night supper duty and in my recipe search, I discovered this fab foodie-blog, Gastronomy Domine.

I have settled on chicken with cardamom and preserved lemons. It just looks warm and colourful, the kind of comfort food to eat in our wintry snowy weather!

I hope we all manage to make it safely out there, us Brits usually panic at the sight of a few snow flurries.

In my teens and early twenties, I drove many times up snowy, precarious mountains to Broken River Ski Field, near Christchurch, New Zealand.

Hopefully, the experience I gained then should prepare me for the driving conditions this weekend.

Fingers crossed!

Happy new year everybody!

We’re saying goodbye to 2008 with a spell of chilly cold weather and the crunching sound of frost beneath our feet.

Although I’m the first to enjoy a party, New Year’s Eve has always been a bitter-sweet celebration for me. It’s always a shock to think “Eeek! Another year gone!” and I believe I might be allergic to the sound of poorly sung choruses of “Auld Lang Syne”.

What is it with that weird handshake thing that happens when you sing “Auld Lang Syne” anyway? Who dreamt that one up and thought it was a good idea?

And then there is the knowledge that at midnight I will always find some snaggle-toothed lecherous 90-year-old puckering up to get a smooch from me… do I give off some kind of magnetic attraction to this kind of man?

Oh well, I suppose it’s only for one night – and being around friends and family is something never to turn your nose up at. And in the midst of a cold winter anything that can be done to have a celebration gets the thumbs-up from me.

If you’re depressed thinking that the holiday is almost over, and soon life will be back to normal with work and the regular nine-to-five then pick yourself up with something beautiful for your house and garden in the Fabiola & Sing Sing Winter Sale.

Our pre-Christmas party (thanks to everyone who showed up!) was a great success, and so we’re continuing the fun by continuing to offer all of our beautiful products at 15% off, but we can’t keep our prices at this level for ever!

Thank you to to all of you who have encouraged and supported us at Fabiola & Sing Sing, while we have grown into something to be proud of.

Many of you gave us wonderful feedback, especially regarding our website, while we ironed out the creases. It’s looking a little less crumpled and we are so excited that we decided to throw a party!

The Grand Opening of the Fabiola & Sing Sing website will take place in Oxford, UK, next Tuesday, 16th December 5-10pm.

Celebrate with us and enjoy a 15% discount on every item in our shop, as well as complimentary pink champagne and Christmas Caipirinha cocktails!

Email us if you would like to come and celebrate with us, and help us get through the champagne and cocktails!

Oh, and I nearly forgot. As a special early Christmas present to our faithful blog readers – you can take advantage of a 15% discount of all the products in the Fabiola & Sing Sing online store by using web code WEB1208 at the checkout. This special promotion is running until December 20th – so don’t delay!

Looking forward to seeing you! Merry Christmas!

So, the party is looming, and I have the perfect Christmas cocktail to invoke the warm sand without ignoring Christmas. It’s the Christmas Caipirinha!

(It took me forever to get over the Cosmopolitan, thanks Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, and kept on ordering them long after they had gone out of fashion. But, alas, the time had to come and I have moved on.)

Anyway, my fave-du-jour is the Caipirinha. So, I’m serving a winter version for this year’s festivities.

For one serving, mix as follows. Or make in large batches, without the ice and store in the refrigerator, ready to serve guests as they arrive. Add the ice to each tumbler, when you pour the pre-made cocktail mix.

• 50ml Sagatiba Pura Cachaça
• 2 lime wedges
• 5ml Sugar syrup
• 2 Blackberries
• 3 Raspberries
• 3 Blueberries
• A pinch of ground Allspice

Squeeze the lime wedges and drop into a tumbler
Add berries, sugar syrup and allspice. Mix and squish around.
Fill with ice cubes.
Add the Sagatiba Pura Cachaça.
Mix.

I will also be serving Champagne (of course!) and this year I decided that as I am invoking hot sand and sunkissed skin, I will be offering up Tsarine Brut Rosé NV Champagne.

It tastes of summer fruits and cream, and comes in a gorgeously stylish twisted-glass bottle.

Both Sagatiba Pura Cachaça and the Tsarine Brut Rosé NV Champagne are both available from your local Waitrose, but you can probably get them from other supermarkets or wine merchants if you don’t a branch close to you.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our American readers!

Yes, even though this blog is relatively new, and Fabiola & Sing Sing is mostly selling to customers based in the UK, we do have some readers from the other side of the pond.

So, if you’re visiting us from New Orleans or New York, Oklahoma or Oregon, California or Connecticut, howdy – and I hope you’re having a great Thanksgiving with your friends and family.

I spent part of my childhood in Long Island, New York, and fondly remember the fun our family had at this time of year, and that feeling of excitement at the preparation of the feast and the games that would follow.

So, if you’re reading this and at a loose end as to what to do with your kids this weekend, especially if the weather outside is cold and miserable, here’s an idea that was inspired by the graphic I’ve used to illustrate this blog post.

Make a Lego turkey!

Yes, get your children’s imaginations bubbling by giving them the challenge of creating animals or dinosaurs or even monsters out of Lego. It will make a change from the cars, buildings and space rockets they normally make out of the toy bricks.

And don’t worry if you don’t have Lego. You could get the little rascals to make their animals or space aliens out of cardboard, cutting them carefully out of an old cereal packet and colouring them in with felt tip pens.

I’ve often wished that Thanksgiving was also celebrated here in the UK. Maybe we should petition Gordon Brown to give us a Thanksgiving holiday in that long dark stretch between Bonfire night and Christmas Day? It would certainly make November a lot more fun.

PS. If you weren’t impressed with your Thanksgiving table centerpiece this year, how about doing something like this:

Kicking yourself for not doing it now, aren’t you? Well, don’t worry – there are still a few weeks until Christmas day, so get your lego out and start building for the big day.

Have you got your own ideas on something for the kids to do at Thanksgiving or during other holidays over the course of the year? Leave us a comment and tell us about it! And in the meantime, happy entertaining!