This year’s festive season will kick off with a great line-up of celebrities at a new Christmas boutique event woman&home Christmas LIVE. Names including Welsh actress, comedian, writer and producer Ruth Jones; tv fashion presenter, author and style advisor Susannah Constantine, and stylist and fashion presenter Mark Heyes will delight visitors with appearances, demonstrations and presentations on 19 November 2022 at etc. Venues County Hall, London.

In partnership with No7, woman&home Christmas LIVE will be bursting with inspiration, ideas and seasonal creative demonstrations alongside festive food and drink tastings, complimentary beauty treatments, and festive fashion looks and crafts.

The Main Stage will overflow with the renowned line-up of guests bringing their own dose of Christmas fashion, beauty and celebrity.

The Beauty Lounge will be open to all visitors for beauty treatments and a range of treats throughout the day, including a Pro Derm Scan from No7, Soap & Glory Christmas gifting kit, and facial yoga from Sarah Carr, courtesy of Liz Earle.

Christmas Studio Live will present beauty tips and tricks from experts, from skin preparation to the perfect party lip.  Mouth-watering festive showstoppers created by the event’s food and drink specialists will include sumptuous festive platters delivered by grazing table expert Grape & Fig, which will showcase the specially created woman&home festive cheese board.

The Demonstration Lounge will inspire visitors with bountiful ‘tablescapes’ and decadent Christmas trees created by The White Company, which will demonstrate how to set the perfect festive table with crisp linen and decorate this season’s trees with sparkling baubles.

In addition, Lockdown Liquor & Co will help take the stress out of Christmas entertaining with demonstrations, tricks of the trade and delicious tastings of this season’s cocktails made from the best quality ingredients, from espresso martinis to Cuban toddies.

The woman&home Christmas market will provide an opportunity to buy beautiful and indulgent gifts for friends, family and personally, with carefully curated brands and products on show.

A high-value goodie bag containing a range of beauty products, including full-size Elemis pro-collagen cleansing balm and Molton Brown liquid hand wash, will be presented to visitors on arrival.  Standard tickets cost £99.00 (goodie bag worth £120.00) and Deluxe tickets cost £185.00 (goodie bag worth £275.00)

Visit https://www.womanandhomechristmas.com for further details and to book tickets.

Elizabeth’s  Cake Emporium is absolutely thrilled to announce that a few months ago, we were commissioned by Searcys to create a modern version of the wedding cake for Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Maud of Wales. 

The Process When we were approached to design and create this cake, we dug into the archives and found a sketch and feature in Tatler magazine about the royal wedding cake which provided us with a great reference image.

The royal wedding was such a big occasion that it brought the company’s founder, John Searcy, out of retirement in 1896. Now, Elizabeth’s Cake Emporium has recreated the cake for the company’s 175th celebration by adding a modern twist.

The original cake was a two-tier cake on a raised pedestal surrounded by sugar angels and lions, with cherubs holding the basket topper aloft. The cake was also adorned with sugar roses, other sugar flowers, sugar leaves, sugar berries and sugar fruit. It also featured the royal crests of Britain and Denmark.

The first step in our creative process was the cake design. We knew we wanted a grand wedding cake fit for a princess so we opted for a 7-tier cake with the bottom two tiers entirely covered with sugar flowers, sugar cherubs we created special moulds for, sugar fruit and sugar leaves. 

For the rest of the streamlined tiers, we kept the intricate latticework design on the cake, trimming the bottom and top edges of each tier with gold piping. We also used certain sugar flowers for their symbolic meaning such as daisies for innocence, purity and humility, and of course, the rose national flower of England,  with its long tradition within English symbolism.

The creation of this royal wedding cake took over 200 hours of solid work at Elizabeth’s Cake Emporium, where we hand-made over 5,000 individual sugar flowers, petal by petal, the sugar leaves, the cherubs and the sugar fruit.

We also sourced different cherub moulds and also created larger custom moulds, sculpting the shapes before casting them using food-safe silicone.

The Result

The result was a stunning 4-foot-tall wedding cake nearly 3 feet wide topped with a basket shape filled with sugar flowers and sugar fruit. John created everything out of sugar and I did the same, from the intricate quilted basketweave design to the sugar flowers, fruit and sugar cherubs.

In keeping with most extravagant weddings at the time, the cake flavour was a fruit cake, Dundee cake, although the cake is available in other flavour preferences.

The cake will travel across Searcy’s restaurants throughout the summer starting on 17 May which is National Baking Day. Diners will be able to have a sample at venues including 116 Pall Mall, The Pump Room in Bath, St Pancras Brasserie, and Searcys at the Gherkin.

A Little More About Princess Maud’s Wedding

Princess Maud wed Prince Carl of Denmark in a Private Chapel at Buckingham Palace on July 22nd 1896. Guests at the wedding included Queen Victoria, the grandmother of the bride, the Prince and Princess of Wales, her parents, and the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark. Carl and Maud were offered the crown of Norway in 1905 and accepted after a referendum showing popular support for their rule. They became King Haakon VII and Queen Maud on November 18th 1905.

The cake wasn’t the only thing considered extravagant at the wedding. The bride, the daughter of the future King Edward VII (Prince Edward at the time), wore an extravagantly designed wedding dress. Made from white satin, the dress was adorned with chiffon flowers at the skirt hem and had a long train bordered with orange blossoms. It’s believed the waist was embroidered with silver and diamonds and the bride’s veil measured 6.4 m (21 feet) in length.

The Princess Maud Wedding cake can be made to order for any wedding celebrations by contacting us at info@elizabethscakeemporium.com or by calling 07958069116
Visit www.elizabethscakeemporium.com to see more of our incredible cakes.