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Sweet and savoury recipes, cake decorating tips and tutorials, and general food nerd fun.

Hi!  I’m Robert Harwood. I’m a home baker and cake decorating teacher from Perth Western Australia. My passion is developing recipes and finding ways to make things faster, better, easier, and more cost effective whereever possible

I made this website as a way to keep track of my experiments and recipes, and as an added bonus it might even be helpful to other home cooks and professionals.

Most of my bakes are late night experiments for close friends and family, but I constantly research, tinker, test and refine my recipes and techniques.

I do a lot of cake decorating and cooking demos and workshops, especially for local cake clubs and love writing tutorials and recipes for various sites and publications.

Please get in contact if you would like to enquire about booking me for a workshop or demo or would like to publish from this site.

Have a look around, There’s a few really good recipes with a massive amount more to come under the recipes page along with a scary amount of new articles and tutorials to be added. 

A few of my favourite recipes and tutorials

Modelling Chocolate Recipe



I experimented a lot to get a modelling chocolate recipe that performs well for me, is cheap to make and can be consistently and quickly made in large quantities to use on the same day.

Fondant Recipe


​​The fondant created with this recipe is soft and pliable, with just the right amount of stretch, it is perfect for sealing and decorating cakes. It’s fast and very cheap to make with no heating or cooking and simple ingredients.

Mexican Paste – Flower Paste Recipe


​Mexican paste is great for making fine flower petals. This is my favourite paste for making sugar flowers, it has a generous drying time, dries hard and is humidity resistant once dry. It’s fast to make, cheap, super reliable and lets me roll paper thin petals for flowers.

Macaron Recipe and Tips for Perfect Macarons


​I love making macarons. I have tried several different recipes and methods, this is my recipe and the tips I have picked up through a lot of research and testing.

Roast pork with Perfect Crackling

Easy pork loin roast with perfect crackling, my favourite method.  Ingredients: Pork loin roast, stock, spices. Method: Unwrap pork loin don’t bother patting it dry, slap it straight in a baking dish. Drop in about a tsp each of whole coriander seeds, allspice, star anise a few cloves, some cinnamon some Szechwan peppercorns, some dried …

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Caramel Mudcake with Caramel Ganache

Caramel mud cake recipe and stable salted caramel ganache recipe.
Delicious and reliable recipe

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Modelling Chocolate Micro Flower Tutorial

Tutorial for micro modelling chocolate flowers, these are a fast and effective way to add tiny, detailed decoration to cookies, cakes and figurines.

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Modelling Chocolate Unicorn Cake Topper Tutorial

Modelling Chocolate Unicorn cake topper tutorial. This is a simple but effective cake topper that can be made quickly with very basic tools. Step by step photos below  Download the Workshop PDF- click here: Unicorn workshopTemplate PDF: Template Here’s the whole process from start to finish to make it easy to follow along  

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Decorated Cookies Recipe and Tutorial

No Chill No Spread Sugar Cookie Recipe and Decorating Tutorial
Decorated biscuits look great as an accompaniment to a cake, but they can also be incorporated into the final design of the cake or better yet, used as a cake topper, or as the base for a name or greeting plaque, or to create structural elements as part of the overall design.

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Modelling Chocolate Micro Flower Tutorial

Micro modelling chocolate flowers Micro flowers are a handy additional decorating skill to have. They are great to use as an accent on a name plaque, or in a small cluster on decorated cakes and cupcakes, they are also an easy way to add more detail to chocolate and sugar sculptures. All the flowers shown …

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Royal Icing

Royal icing is incredibly versatile, easy to make, and can be adapted to use in several different ways by varying the amount of water or eggwhite added to it. There are lots of ways to make royal icing, I prefer one below, it uses powdered egg white which I find convenient and reliable. The best …

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The Melting Moments Recipe

Melting Moments – The Ultimate Indulgence. This is my update on the very best recipe for melting moments I have ever encountered. These biscuits have become near legend in offices I’ve worked in around Perth. I still get the odd forlorn message from ex-workmates letting me know they miss my biscuits…. When I cook them for …

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How to Make Piping Bags

Piping bags Fabric or plastic piping bags are great, but they take time to clean and they can be cumbersome to work with. Especially when working with multiple coloured royal icing, I find it a lot easier to work with handmade paper piping bags.  They only take a couple of seconds to make and they …

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How to Achieve Ultra Vibrant Coloured Macarons.

How to achieve ultra vibrant coloured macarons. Getting black or dark red macarons can be very difficult, they usually end up paler than desired. To get dark, vibrant colours, I’ve found it’s best to add a heaped tablespoon of gel paste colour to the sugar syrup before cooking it, that way it doesn’t affect the …

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Candy Icing Recipe – Pastillage Variation for Sugar Eggs

Candy Icing Pastillage Variation for Sugar Eggs Growing up my sister and I always got a sugar egg from my parents for Easter. Sugar eggs don’t seem to be as commonplace anymore, so I was thrilled when I learned how to make them at a local cake club meeting. I have learned a lot through meetings …

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Unicorn Cake Topper Workshops at the Perth Craft and Quilt Fair

I’m running 1 hour workshops at 3pm everyday from Wednesday 23rd of May to Sunday 27th of May at the Perth Craft and quilt fair at the Perth Convention Centre.  Make and take home your own chocolate unicorn cake topper and in the process learn how to work with modelling chocolate. Book at the Cake Decorators’ …

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