In November we went old-school WI and put our pinnies on for a fantastic sugarcraft demonstration with Mandy Hurd.

Mandy was an excellent demonstrator and we highly recommend her to other WI’s in the area. Incredibly, this was the first time that she’d done a talk on her sugarcraft, although she is an experienced needlecraft demonstrator which obviously helped.

Here we are looking very serious – Fliss says it’s “because we were trying to remember the butter to icing sugar ratios!” (it’s one butter to two icing sugar apparently).

Mandy talked us through some of the ingredients, tools and techniques of cake decorating and packed in a huge amount of information.

And she did all of that…

…whilst ably decorating several buns and constructing this delightful little snowman.

Mandy made everything look quite simple, although as we found out when we all had a go, there’s plenty of skill involved.

Some of us got stickier than others. Karen added too much colouring to her sugarpaste and had green hands for days!

But several people found they had a knack for it. Here are Alison’s lovely creations.

Not sure who made this very festive little trio but aren’t they cute.

But our president, Kirsty decided that decorating cakes wasn’t her forte and refused to even photograph hers. “I brought the rest of my undecorated buns back home and we ate some with lemon curd spread on top. Think that’s about my level of cake decorating.”

There’s always time for a cuppa at the WI…

…but we were all so busy with our decorating that we completely forgot to do a Calendar Girls ‘bigger buns’ photo-op – an opportunity sadly missed, I’m sure you’ll all agree. Although don’t worry, even if we had remembered, no one was going to take their clothes off in Hebden Bridge in the middle of November!
 

What people thought

Karen: I loved it – great evening!

Alison: What a lovely evening with Mandy and I was quite proud of my creations at the end …. they have been eaten for supper!

Rebecca: It was brilliant. She should do more talks – she was excellent!

Vanessa: It all made me quite giddy. What a great night!