Rugby Shirt Birthday Cake - July 2016

Have you ever made a cake that seriously pushed the boundaries of both your ability and patience? Well, this one is mine!

It was the second of two cakes made at the same time. This one was for my brother-in-law's birthday. My sister wanted a Scarlet's (Llanelli) rugby shirt and even hired the tin for me. It was way too expensive to buy for just one cake.

I already knew that the mini blocks of red fondant I had were not going to be enough to cover it, so I had to buy more from the same supermarket so the co!our was the same. First supermarket - sold out! I had to travel about 20 miles to get some. Bought three more packs. They're only 250g a pack.

Supermarket coloured icing is so mass produced and such poor quality that it simply would not cut the mustard, so-to-speak. This was also the opinion of a professional. I struggled, and ended up crying my heart out with frustrstion because it kept cracking even though I'd kneeded it to warm it up.

Failure! Dramatic failure. I had to strip the whole cake and bin eight 250g packs of red, ready to roll fondant.

Enter my saving grace! The cakey bakey shop :-)

2kg of professional grade red fondant later, oodles of advice, including "it might take two of you to get the icing on it" and voilà ... 

A red rugby shirt.

Trim it with a little shirt detail and pipe around the edges and it came out just fine. I wasn't going to ice the board because I thought it would detract from the pretty good work I'd done on the main piece.

Because this cake had seriously dented my self esteem and tried my patience to breaking point, I was not about to mess it all up by trying to, freehand, cut the rugby team's logo out of icing! Not a chance!

Cakey bakey shop saviour advised an ediible printed one. I agreed and paid to have one printed for me. Had to wait until the next morning to collect, which didn't turn out exactly as planned. But they don't look too bad

The cake itself also fried my brain. The biggest one i had ever made and a shape that wasn't round or square. I ended up baking three layers and having to discard one because it was so out of shape, it was useless.  

So, inside it has two layers of yummy vanilla cake with vanilla butter cream, made with Trex, of course.

Biggest lessons today! Learn to say "No", if I can't, get all the help I can get and, don't buy supermarket fondant for big projects, unless it's white, because that seems to work ok

Chess Inspired Birthday Cake - July 2016

Inspired by chess 

This chess inspired cake was made for my uncle's 65th birthday. He is positively chess crazy and even teaches primary school children how to play.

Anyway, I didn't want a chess board, but wanted a chess board effect on a round cake. Inside are two flavours of cake ... Chocolate and 'plain' these were cut in such a way that, when cut for eating, it should also look like a chess board. I'll add a picture to this post when it's cut. [See bottom of post to see if it's updated].

For a chocolate flavour sponge, buy a good quality baking cocoa and exchange about 12.5% of the flour for the cocoa

Again, a learning curve.  To decorate, I cut 2cm squares and stuck them onto the cake after a base layer of fondant had been put on it.  

However!!!! Here's my learning bit!!!!

I lost my way with the squares, as you an see, so next time, I think I'm either going to stop at the edge of the round then start in a different direction on the sides. 

OR

Cut out the squares and stick them to the rolled out base layer and then cover the cake as normal. Watch this space :-)

I also added home made chess pieces. I used dark chocolate and white chocolate. But that wasn't so easy either. They kept melting when I was trimming them off lol.

Lesson learned? Yes, put them in freezer, then trim. Instead of just putting them in the fridge.

But they look OK.

Once again, I've learned the hard way. But if my errors help you, and me in the future, I don't mind sharing.

Update:

The inside of the cake worked out perfect 

I'm a happy bunny :-)

Cupcake Day - Post #2 - 16 June 2016

This was a day of fundraising with friends and neighbours. I was a little apprehensive because I'd be making loads of cupcakes for people to eat that had never tasted my cooking before

I made the fondant decorations by myself and left them to harden for a day or so

I made more than I needed, but this is good because you never know what might happen to them, they could break for instance. So always make more!

Of course, I made a giant Cupcake, weighing in at just over 2kg, including board and decorations. I also made a giant rose topper from fondant. Fondant is too soft for big work like this, but I found it hard to use sculpting icing. But it worked out great anyway.

The cutting of the cupcake

I had plans to make so many variations, lemon, chocolate orange, indulgently rich chocolate, but I stuck to the following to make it easier for me ...

Top left: Chocolate fudge

Top right: Turkish delight filled with milk chocolate chunks 

Bottom left: Mint chocolate chip, filled with dark chocolate chips

Bottom middle: The "classic" plain cupcake topped with plain icing

Bottom right: Red Velvet, topped with cheese icing

It was a quiet afair with just a few friends around. 

We all gave generously and everyone made me proud.

The day raised well over £100, including online JustGiving donations. 

Every penny counts.

Cupcake Day - Post #1

On the 16th June 2016, I'm holding a Cupcake Day for raise funds to the Alzheimer's Society. I hope to be trying out a variety of recipies for the day and will be posting them here.

It's open door between 11am and 8pm. Tea and coffee free, cupcakes and competitions are donations only

If you'd like to make a donation for my fundraiser, please click on my JustGiving page or donate in person on the day

As I have long hair, and I'm baking all the yummyness filled cupcakes myself, I thought "I need a chef's hat" and here it is. DIY of course!

Yes, I know it's not baked ... But it's homemade :-)

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)

Unicorn three tier cake - March 2016

This is the cake that all my practice was about. 

The use of fondant, icing the board, pre-made cake topper and matching flowers by a professional that sells on eBay.

The tiers were held in place by invisible dowels to stop it slipping as each layer was laid directly onto the one below.

The flowers: I was asked to cascade them down the one side, which looks amazing actually. Inside, I cut out circles from each layer and fitted into the other layer, this makes an interesting finish when the cake is cut.

I also needed to colour the sponge. I used gel colouring, which did not work out as well as I'd hoped. Pastes are the way forward. The next cake will have to be pastes.

Liquids will change the consistency of your mix, gels just don't cut it, so try pastes.