The most fabulously sweet spring has come! Enjoy the 35 legendary sweets created by Spanish designers. " Fable Spring " is the first Spanish collaboration to design cakes & cookies inspired by fables and legends celebrating the spring entry.

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For my contribution I designed the logo of the collaboration, wrote the fable that you can read later and designed the cake that you can see in the pics. Decorated with wafer paper, gold leaf, royal icing, sugar paste, modelling chocolate and fondant. The whole decoration is completely eatable. I hope that you like.

Alan and the tulip’s garden (bad translated, if I have more time I’ll do it better… :)

A lot of time ago, in the Netherlands, an albinic child was born and they were called him Alan. When still it was small his father died and his mother met obliged to be employed as maid at the palace of the Duke of the region, where this one was cultivating tulips.

Weigh that the tulips come from Asia, after being adopted by the Turks as flower of worship, they were introduced in Al-Andalus by the Muslims. And it was there where the Dutches knew the flower and decided to cultivate it. This untied a real fever for the tulips. And the duke, who started by being a humble merchant, could take advantage of the summit of the market of tulips kneading this way a great fortune.

To Alan it was charmed with walking along the field and classifying the flowers under rapid notes of drawing. It was attentive with the details and it was not important for him to happen hours observing the tulips to find shades that were marking the difference between varieties. The Duke understood immediately the passion of the boy for the subtleties of the culture of the tulip, so it taught him to mix bulbs to obtain new species and all the secrets of his culture.

Alan had fallen in love with Ana, the daughter of the miller, since it saw her for the first time entering the lands of the duke his car to take the flour. But she had not seen, hidden him between the white flowers of the garden. He was shy and insecure, since from small other children had criticized him for his color of skin, so it had got used to hiding.

Ana was visiting often the palace of the Duke accompanying his father. It took the dark hair as the coal, and the brown skin of being employed at the field. It was happening his days ploughing, watering and gathering the wheat to do flour while he was feeling to languish. Alan was accustomed to see her to happen hidden after the lattice of the fence of the garden.

With his system of classification of new species Alan managed to cultivate varieties so beautiful that reached a value equivalent to his weight in gold on the market and multiplied the earnings of the Duke. It filled his gardens of tulips of a pure white as the snow. So the Duke decided to prepare a holiday of birthday for him when it reached the adult age to be grateful for his good work to him. Being the center of the holiday it was easy to achieve Ana’s attentions. From this moment, Alan was trying to court her, but she was not valuing him too much for that he was thinking that to his side it would never change his unhapp life, because of it one day said to him: " If you manage to cultivate a tulip as black as my hairs I will marry you. "

The black tulip was a very wished chimera, however much many cultivators were pledging they were not achieving species. So it was looking like an impossible task. An entire year happened and when the spring came Alan saw that the tulips that it had created were mottled in black and white, but they were not serving Ana. The following spring managed to create tulips with petals that were looking like the skin of an albino tiger, but they were not sufficient for her. Another year more and it met a beautiful variety of flecked tulips but Ana returned to rejecting saying: " – none is so black as my hairs. "

In these years Ana, who was a bit more young woman than Alan, had grown transforming in a beauty. Detail that had not gone unnoticed to the duke. His relation with her was increasingly nearby, and though it had not just pleased her, he thought that it would live more comfortable in Palace with servants that the whole day fills of flour.

Alan had happened several years obsessed in spite of finding the black tulip. It was waiting every spring with illusion and his arrival always was a great disappointment, so it was sad. It was happening the days strolling around for the garden in a desperate search. Until one morning, I conceal between a group of tulips, he found one black as the night without moon, darker than the coal of the boilers and so beautifully as the hairs of his dear one. It could not contain his emotion, so the bulb dug up more rapidly that it could and ran to removing it to his Ana, who was grinding grain to do flour.

On having come to the mill, Alan wanted to surprise her. So it placed rightly behind where she was throwing the grain in order that she was coming to the wheel of the mill. Ana on having seen the tulip remained disconcerted. Exactly he had just consented in marrying the Duke. So not to fulfill his word, in all that it had it between his hands, it threw it like for accident to the wheel of the mill staying the completely undone flower. Like Alan’s heart, which decided to go and to make a trip for the world.

Ana and the Duke married, but she was so unhappy that she was trying to fill with caprices the emptiness that he was feeling on having had wasted the opportunity to love. So much it was like that, that was reducing enormously the wealths of the Duke. For this reason, on the following year the Duke invested all the money that she still had buying more lands and extending his cultures to be able to support his demanding wife. But the market of tulips had reached his culminating point, the bubble burst and nobody bid for his tulips. So the Duke lost all his fortune and died of a heart attack on having found out. She remained alone and had to sell at a loss the lands that the Duke had left him in inheritance to pay all the debts, so it had to return to the mill.
Alan crossed the world with his passbook of drawing and was happy drawing all the flowers that it saw in his walks along the field. The moral of this history is that this well that you fight for what you wish, but if you it do not obtain search another exit and he enjoys the way, párate to observing the flowers and the happiness will come for if alone.

Daniel Diéguez