Saturday 7 May 2016

Sonic the Hedgehog - May 2016


I guess if Grandma makes cakes for others, then she'd better make a darned good one for the main man! The Grandson!!!!

This one had to be my best so far. I went with the list of usual suspects for what he was into at the moment. Expecting Iron Man, Spiderman, Star Wars etc, but no! It was to be Sonic the Hedgehog. Oh eck!

Right, I had three weeks notice! Off to eBay to my trusty cake topper professional! Oh boy they did me proud! The topper, stars and boxes were to arrive the day before his birthday, but two days before the party. I had faith, so I ordered!

Now, the outside had to be white to show up the decorations, so I had to have the inside blue!

Food colour pastes it had to be, based on my previous experiences.

The problem was this ... Our margerine and butter here in the UK is more yellow than our US cousins have, what to do? A Facebook friend suggested Trex


I'd read positive and negative reviews, but I had to have blue, using UK marge would have turned it green because of the yellow. You can find my recipie for Trex Butterless buttercream here

Because I was using Trex, it couldn't be your standard Victoria sponge mix, so I used a recipie from the Trex website for the sponge, see here .

It was hard to judge how much food colour paste I needed, but I gave it my best shot. I also wanted white butter cream. Same again with the Trex. 

I'd read only bad reviews about butter icing, right down to "Ick, it's called butter cream for a reason"

Ok, it was up to me to try. Trex has no flavour, so I made sure I flavoured the sponge (vanilla) and thought of caramel for the butter cream. You don't need as much flavour so I'd advise to be sparing and taste check the mix as you go. You also need to ensure you use 20% less Trex to icing sugar recipie, I also added a little milk to soften it up.

It worked!

The texture was light, fluffy and perfect.

The flavours were amazing.

My experience of using Trex has been so positive, I'm going to use it again. 
It's not greasy. 
Sure, it's flavourless but add your own! 
It's that simple.

My Grandson was amazed, he'd never seen a blue cake, and he loved it.

To me, that's all that mattered!



Wonky Mushroom Surprise - May 2016


Oh this one went so wrong and in so many ways for me, but it ended up looking good. The recipient loved it which is what it's all about.

Standard Victorian sponge mixes again, small base (stalk) cake and a basin cake.

When you look at it you will see that the "30" is not centre. This is because the cake was to have "wonked" to the left as you're looking at it here. Because I'd messed up on the internal dowels, as you can see, overnight it had moved and was now "wonking" forward and no longer to the left.

A learning curve! Next time, the dowels will be longer.

Also next time, I will allow more than just a few hours for the fondant to harden on the letters and roll out the fondant much thinner for spots.

Oh, and the surprise? The inner of the dome cake is stuffed with peanut M&Ms, which I think caused the problem with the dowels (yes, the recipient wanted peanut ones)

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