Peppa Pig cake tutorial

This post has been soooo long in the pipeline, so after six months I am finally getting round to it. For Noah's third birthday, back in September, I made him a Peppa Pig birthday cake. I did have a little look online to see if I could find any inspiraration, but I came to the conclusion that Peppa, delight that she is, is such a crude shape that really it should be reasonably easy to work it out myself.

So, here follows my step-by-step guide to making your own, very lovely, Peppa Pig cake. Probably for your toddler, maybe for yourself.

You will need:
A sponge cake recipe. I used the Genoese Sponge from River Cottage Cakes
A buttercream recipe. I used River Cottage for this too.
Raspberry jam.
Royal icing recipe. Yep, I used River Cottage!
Pink, red and black food colouring.
Icing sugar for fondant icing.
Loose base cake tin, or two, or three if you're lucky.


1. Using a loose cake tin base (I used 20cm), draw around twice and cut out two circles

2. Fold one of the circles in half and cut down fold

3. Finding a reference photo of Peppa, arrange one of the halves under the complete circle, and draw an outline of the snout and around the edge of the main circle on the snout piece.

4. Cut the unwanted paper from the snout piece. You can then place the snout next to the main round to see it taking shape.

5. Take the piece of paper you cut out of the snout where it fits into the main circle and fold in half. Referring to your Peppa photo, draw an ear shape on each half and cut out.

6. You've propably noticed by now that Peppa's head isn't a perfect round. Draw a slight curve below the nose to get the correct shape, and trim off.

7. You can now place your pieces together to check your shape, and draw on some features if you like, to make visualising the end product easier!

8. Prepare the surface for your finished cake to go on. You will want to work the icing on this surface as the cake cannot be moved once constructed. I used a white plastic Ikea chopping board, covered in foil.

9. Bake three sponge cakes all the same size. Because I have only one 20cm tin, I actually made the mixture three times and baked them one after another. If you have two tins, this stage will be much easier.

10. Taking the main face template, place it on one of the cake circles and cut out along the curve. Repeat this with a second cake.

11. Take the third cake circle and cut in half, then place the snout template, as shown, on one half, and carefully cut out. Repeat with the second half.

12. Begin to assemble the cake on your prepared board. Place the two main pieces on top of each other, then place the snout pieces correctly, also on top of each other.

13. Taking the remains of the snout cake, cut out the ears and arrange on the board.

14a. When you are happy with the placement and assembly, remove the top layer and make your buttercream. Plaster the top surface of the bottom layer with it...

14b. ...then cover this with raspberry jam and replace the top layer.

15. Make the royal icing, adding pink food colouring to make it the right colour, and spread over the whole surface of the cake using a pallette knife.

16. Make fondant icing with your icing sugar, quite thick, and using a piping bag or other piping tool, pipe on the eyes.

17. Put a small amount of the white fondant icing aside, and add the pink food colouring to the rest to make a darker pink than the royal icing. Use this to pipe the outline, cheek and nostrils onto Peppa's head.

18. Using the set aside icing, add red food colouring to use for the lips, and pipe on (excuse this dreadful photo - I do clean up the lip line!) Please refer to note at end of tutorial before adding food colouring to all of your icing.

19. Finally - take the black food colouring and blob directly onto the whites of the eyes to make the pupils.

Note:
I used a tube of black food colouring which made blobbing it on easy, but if you have a bottle, you may want to save some more of the white fondant icing, rather than adding red to all of it in the previous step, to make black fondant which can be piped on for the pupils. Also note that if you do put the black food colouring directly onto the cake, it will not dry, so be careful if you need to transport the cake, as I did, and need to cover it - it will smudge if touched.

Goodness, that took considerably longer than anticipated! I hope it's thorough enough for someone to follow. Here are some more gratuitous photos of the finished cake.

And here's the birthday boy blowing out his candles...

... just pretend not to notice the smudged eyes - I spoke from experience earlier!

Happy baking! I'd love to know if you attempt a Peppa cake too.

xxx Sam

Success and Failure

As usual, this post has been a long time in coming. The first yarn I spun on my, now nearly one-year-old, wheel, was some lovely Shetland which was a gift long ago from Helena. I spun it up quickly (for me), and decided that then was the time to try out my first own design, which was to be a little tank top, or vest, for Laurie.

On the niddy noddy!

It was to be knit in the round, with a plain stockinette back, 2x2 rib around the bottom, with a cable pattern on the front. I scanned Knitting for Dummies, which is still a constant point of reference even though I would now consider myself an experienced knitter, for some cables, and decided on a chain cable set centrally between two wave cables, to be edged with moss stitch. I began from the bottom and quickly got to the armholes, about which I was the most apprehensive, but I did some workings out (to cut a long story short) and was really happy with how they turned out.

Due to the pulling in nature of cables, I gave whatlooked like quite a lot of length to the vest, which did result in it looking slightly peculiar by the time I arrived at the armholes, but I kept inserting my arms into the bottom and stretching it out to the sides to reassure myself! The moss stitch actually became an edging in itself as I began decreasing for the armholes; I had planned to add ribbed cuffs, but considered actually leaving the moss stitch as the edging. More on this later...

So, I completed one front shoulder, moved onto the other and completed that, but the further I got, the closer I got to the end of the yarn. I moved onto the back and finished one shoulder, with about six inches left with which to complete the remaining shoulder, both cuffs and the neck - an obvious impossibility! Oh dear.

The vest in its current state.

 You may also notice that I somehow failed to cross a cable, right in the very centre of the chain cable - what excellent placement for a mistake!

So, I shall have to wait for Wonderwool so I can purchase about 10 grams of Shetland and hope I can get this finished before Laurie's grown out of it (for the uninitiated, you cannot buy fibre in 10g increments - 50g is usually the minimum!) Joking aside though, I am reasonable pleased with this as a first quick design. I have so many swirling around in my head, as well as drawings, paintings and textile projects. By the time I am actually able to produce any of them, I will have sketchbooks full of ideas and won't know where to start. Oh actually, wait, I don't have time to record all these ideas anyway, so who am I kidding? I definitely feel the need to end this post with a LOL, so please laugh with me and leave a comment.

xxx Sam

Thank you Santa

Pretty much exactly a year ago, we went to Shropshire with my lovely old schoolfriends for a reunion Christmas weekend. This is a (kind of) annual event and part of the weekend entails a secret santa, which is the cause of much hilarity. The gift I received, however, was far from hilarious, but a perfectly thought out and utterly suitable present, and I was, suffice it to say, astonished, to open the wrapping to reveal a beautiful hank of Colinette OneZero yarn. Mmmmm... soft and creamy white with cleverly placed splashes of pinks and purples, spun in a sequence of tight, followed by a massive, fat slub, followed by tight again - beautiful!

The hank, however, languished in a box for the year before I decided what to do with it. I'm not really a one-skein project kinda person, preferring the torture of knitting a sweater which takes forever, with no other works in progress (WIPs) alongside. But I'd just got to the end of a very large amount of stocking stitch on my Laar, and I suddenly felt the urge to produce something quick, which I could see grow before my very eyes. I opened the box in which the skein was kept (I hardly ever open this box, so every time, I was surprised to see the yarn haha!) and realised I had the perfect yarn with which to produce said project!

I had a quick gloss through Ravelry and decided a cowl would be the ideal project to show off the gorgeousness of this yarn. In fact, I pretty much decided on the first cowl project I saw - the Drop Stitch Cowl by Abi Gregorio. I'm delighted with how this cowl has turned out, and even more with how long (or short) it took - only a couple of evenings.

Here it is in all its glory, followed by some shameless selfies (I find that term hilarious!). Well, the light was perfect...

The last one's a bit rubbish because of the shadow, but you can see the gorgeous thickness and robustness of the yarn, even though it is gorgeously soft. I've hardly taken it off since I finished it; I know it'll be fantastic as a wear-in-the-house garment when it gets colder.

So thank you Santa, whichever one you were (though I have my suspicions...) - you've enabled me to have a gorgeous new winter garment!

Ode to a Hat

Actually, I must come clean; there is no ode to follow I'm afraid to say. Just a lot of photos of my Kat hat from Kim Hargreaves lovely book, Precious, from which I also knitted Thea. Marno was having a mess around with the settings on his camera, hence the rather large number of photos of one of the smallest things it is possible to knit, but I loved how these turned out so thought I'd just go for the photo inundation. Here goes...

I'm not generally pleased with photos of myself, but I think the altered reality in these shots helps haha :)

I love how the first photo has a kind of halo around the hat, which is a pretty good representation of what Kid Classic is like - beautiful stitch definition, yet a lovely fuzzy halo over the surface. I've realised also, that if I want to spin yarns like this, its going to have to be long draw, and I don't have time to finish a huge great pile of Falkland (in the most beautiful pistashio colour) which is currently on my wheel, which I'm spinning short draw, to practise long draw. In fact, I can't remember how long ago it is now since I last sat at my wheel; a good few weeks. Very sad.

I am, however, progressing nicely with my Laar cardigan, which I'm knitting in Jillybean's Knot Another Granny Yarn in Staying Calm. I think the colour is called Staying Calm anyway - it's the colour of a calm sea in the early evening - beautiful. I bought it at Wonderwool a year and a half ago, totally on the spur of the moment; it was utterly irresistible. On the link, the top photo of it is more representative of the colour in real life.

So I am making a bit of progress with the making. Basically just trying to keep it going during these years when I can devote very little time to it. Like so many mummies out there.

Time to go and watch the Great British Bake Off!

xxx Sam