Christmas gingerbread - 4/12/11

It's been a while since I posted! I have been making a few cakes, but not so many as I used to. I have a recipe for gingerbread houses, so I decided to try out the recipe to make some gingerbread shapes.

I made different shapes including angels, stars, trees and people

Some of the first batch burnt, so I turned the next batch halfway through

If you want to make them yourself, the recipe is from Good Food magazine (I used a quarter of the quantities given to make this many shapes)

I should probably ice them before I eat them all, but they're so tasty...

House cake for a house warming - 24/9/11

My friends moved to a new flat recently, so i made them a cake for their house warming party. I decided to make a chocolate cake because I already had all the ingredients (and also chocolate cake is tasty!) so I made a loaf cake because the recipe for that is quite simple. Then I cut the top of the cake where it had risen to make a steeper roof, and coated the cake with chocolate ganache.
The doors and windows are made out of fondant icing because I didn't think to get any white chocolate for them!

Front of the house

Back & side of the house

The chimney is a piece of cake and the roof has mini marshmallows along it.

The ganache is quite simple to make:
100ml double cream
150g dark chocolate, broken/chopped into small squares (or dark chocolate chips)

Chop up the chocolate and place in a bowl
Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan
Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and stir until it is smooth.
If the cream does not melt all the chocolate, you can melt the mixture over a pan of boiling water like normal chocolate, but the cream should be hot enough to melt it all on its own if you pour it over straight away.

The cake is a recipe for a two pound loaf tin, I made it in a tin 20cm by 10cm (8 inches by 4 inches). The ganache will cover a cake this big quite easily.

Wedding cake flower spray - 8/9/11

So, in my previous post, I described the individual flowers I put in my wedding cake spray.
Before I'd started making them, I'd done some sketches to work out what I needed and how big the flowers should be.
So once I'd made up the stems of flowers, I had to make a cake-shaped box to help me arrange the spray properly. This was made up of various boxes and a block of oasis to stick the flower pick into (I'd got two big posy picks as well as some smaller picks, so that I could have a set for the cake and a set to transport the flowers with).

Then to arrange the flowers. I had two single calla lilies, two stems of lisianthus with leaves, two stems of freesias and five stems of spray carnations with rose leaves.

In the end, I only needed three stems of carnations so the other two went on top of the cake, the spray going from the bottom layer up the sides.
The final spray looked like this:

Yes, that is an icing sugar box posing as a cake!

And here is a photo my friend took of the cake all assembled and ready for eating:

Tasty tasty cake!

You can probably see that the main posy is actually in three separate picks because the lisianthus stems were too big to fit in with the rest of the flowers. What you can't see is where the icing cracked on one side because the picks were too close to the edge of the cake...

This cake is two layers of fruit and one layer of madeira, each layer is on a thick board (the middle madeira layer is actually on two boards as it was shorter than the fruit cakes!), with ribbon around the edge of each cake & board. The lower cakes have dowels in to support the upper layers. The top layer has pink hearts inlaid into the sugarpaste as well as the flowers.

Wedding cake flowers - 29/8/11 to 5/9/11

Calla, showing the curve of the petal

In between baking the fruit and madeira cakes, I've been making sugar flowers. There are two lots.
First the favours which will be callas made out of sugarpaste, as in this post, but everyone is getting one each in the end as three hundred sugar callas is too many for me to make. I've done the sticks and the stamens for these (and I still haven't done a tutorial. Whoops.)
Then I decided what flowers I was going to put in the spray to go on the cake. These are made out of flower paste, which is less brittle than sugar paste (but also less tasty!). I decided on freesias, lisianthus, carnations, calla lilies and rose leaves as these will all be in the actual flowers as well.
I've been making these flowers for the past week, working for a few hours each day, and I finished making the individual flowers today. Then I need to make them up into stems, and then assemble the stems into a spray.

Individual freesia buds & flowers taped together into a spray

The tutorial I made for freesias is here, though I do now have a freesia cutter with three separate petals, and it's easier & quicker than the method I used in the tutorial. I did the biggest freesias using the original method as I needed bigger petals than the freesia cutter made.

The carnation tutorial I made is here, but instead of just folding a stamen I wrapped florists tape round a hooked wire to have a firmer base to start from. As I am making carnations which are white with pink tips, I also painted the edges of the petals with pink food colouring using a fine (no.1) paintbrush once the flowers had dried.

The callas I made on wires rather than wooden sticks so that I could shape the wires in the spray. I used three gauge 18 wires, taped together with flower tape all down the length. This also made the wires green as my gauge 18 wires are white! I found that the inside of a kitchen roll is good to rest them on while they dry, as they curve properly at the back of the flower. A large rolling pin would be equally good.

Spray of lisianthus with heart-shaped leaves

As for the lisianthus (latin name is Eustoma), which look like this in real life, I found a rather complicated tutorial here, which I followed to make the stamens etc and then simplified. Instead of wiring each petal separately, I used a gauge 18 wire for the stem and then made the flower in a similar method to the first flowers I made (remember these?), wrapping the petals around the stem before glueing the final one. This worked for some of them, but for others I hadn't made a big enough lump for the ovary so i had to add extra sugarpaste to attach the petals to. This is working so far. The lisianthus are white with purple edging, so I painted the edges of each petal with purple food colouring once the flowers had dried. This helps to highlight each separate petal, though it takes a while as you have to keep it neat!


As a guide, this is what I have made and how long roughly each bit took:

Spray carnations with rose leaves

Freesias - 2 stems, on each stem 1 small bud, 2 bigger buds, 1 nearly open bud, 2 open flowers, 1 bigger flower. Altogether these took me about 4 hours over two days.
Leaves - 18 rose leaves (some big, some small), 16 heart-shaped lisianthus leaves. These took two or three hours.
Carnations - 10 individual flowers (to be made into 5 stems with two flowers on each). These took about two hours to make, and another two hours to paint the edges of the petals.
Callas - 2 individual calla lilies, these didn't take very long at all but I had to let the stamens dry overnight so probably two half-hour slots would make these.
Lisianthus - these took the longest, as I hadn't made these before. Making the stamens was quite fiddly (though it could probably be simplified to make it slightly less botanically accurate). I think these took at least 4 hours, with another hour to paint the edges of the petals.

Now I've updated with pictures of the flowers, you can have more of an idea of what I've done.

Baking wedding cake - august/sept 2011

I decided not to bake the cakes until I was in the correct country, so I didn't have to transport cakes as well as everything else. This did mean that I had to bring my cake tin (luckily it folds flat. See this post), my scales and several other things as well as all my icing things! I did manage to forget a mixing bowl though (fatal error), so I had to buy some cheap ones along with the ingredients.
The top and bottom layers are fruit, so I baked those a couple of weeks ago when I first got here. They are 6 and 10 inches square. The middle layer is 8 inches square madeira cake, and that was baked yesterday, so tomorrow I am going to add marzipan and then icing.
Apologies for the lack of pictures, I don't have a digital camera here so you'll just have to see pictures of the finished cake when it's done.

Cake on a plane - 1/8/11

I was going to a funeral, and I'm not very good at arranging flowers so I thought that I'd make a cake with a bunch of flowers on top. So I looked online for pictures of flowers that I could use as a base, and I found this page of colouring sheets. I then simplified the picture a bit more using paint.net, and drew over it to check I could do it properly:

Coloured in version

Final outline shape

I made two of the same design in case one got broken. The outlines I made the night before, and then filled in with more runny icing (the same method as the floodwork flowers I made a few months ago).

Outlines

Finished designs

The cake is fruit cake iced with marzipan and sugarpaste. I added a yellow ribbon around the base as well. This is it after icing:

It was an eight inch square cake on an eight inch board, so I put it in an eight inch box and took it on a plane to the funeral. It survived very well under the seat in front of me! The edges of the icing cracked a little where they were squashed by the box but mostly it was fine.
The decoration I took on the greaseproof paper as well, and that also survived. However when I tried to take the decoration off the paper, it cracked into many tiny pieces. I think despite my simplifying, it was still too complicated a design for this method. I probably should have iced it onto a plaque of icing so that it didn't need peeling off the paper, or just cut around the design on the paper!
Better luck next time.

Pizza cake - 13/7/11

It's been a while since I last made a cake, so yesterday I got together with my friend and we made a cake to look like a pizza. The idea came from Making Great Cakes, another cake book I seem to have acquired.
The cake itself is a 9" (23cm) round madeira cake, as I need to practice making sponge cakes as well as fruit. So we cut the top off and turned the cake upside down, then added some red buttercream for the tomato sauce:

lots of red food colouring everywhere

 Next was some cheese, this is yellow sugarpaste (fondant icing) grated with a cheese grater:

Then we added some sausage (red marbled with a bit of green, made into a roll and sliced) and some green leaves and green herbs for a garnish:

you could also do the herbs with dessicated coconut, but we didn't have any to hand

The beauty of this is that you could do whatever toppings you liked, as long as you could make them with icing. Also the positioning doesn't have to be perfect because it never is on a real pizza!

Wedding favour - 16/6/11

I decided to see if I could make some wedding favours which were sugar flowers, to show off my flower-making and also because I don't like sugared almonds, the traditional favour.
As the main flower at the wedding will be calla lilies, I made some and then tried to arrange them in a pretty way. They are doubling up as place names.

I was originally going to do just one flower each, but that didn't look very good so I made a little bunch of three. This does mean I'm going to have to make three times as many flowers, but never mind.
The stem is made out of half a wooden kebab stick painted with green food colouring. I made the flowers out of white paste and then painted them afterwards, but colouring first would probably give a better colour.
They are similar to the calla lilies I made before, but I bought a proper cutter so that I don't have to make the shape each time. The stamens are about an inch long and the petal is about 2 1/2 inches long by 1 1/2 inches wide. If you didn't want to buy a special cutter, you could use a similar sized leaf cutter and cut the stem end off.
I'll take photos when I make the next batch and do a tutorial.
(Cross-posted to Marzipan's Crafts)

Caramel upside down pear cake - 10/6/11

I made one of these a while ago, but it got eaten before I managed to take a picture of it! Quite a few friends asked for the recipe, so here it is. It's from The Really Useful Cookbook, which lives up to its name.

4 large ripe pears (not too ripe or they fall apart)
150g golden caster sugar
125g butter, softened
120g brown sugar
2 eggs
125g self raising flour
pinch of ground ginger
23cm (9 inch) round cake tin


1. Preheat to oven to 180°C (Gas 4). Grease the tin and line the base with baking paper.
2. Peel the pears and cut two of the into quarters and then eighths, giving you 16 slices. Cut the remaining pears into 1cm dice.
3. Place the golden caster sugar and 3 tablespoons of water in a saucepan and bring to the boil over a medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil gently without stirring until it forms a golden caramel. Carefully pur the caramel into the base of the tin, swirling it to cover the paper. Arrange the pear slices on the caramel.
4. Beat the butter and brown sugar together. Whisk the eggs and add to the mixture. Sift in the flour and ginger and fold in to the mixture. Stir in the diced pears.
5. Spoon into the tin and smooth the top. Bake for 45-50 mins. Test with a skewer.
6. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a serving plate.

I actually used dark brown sugar for the caramel as I didn't have any golden caster sugar. I've used white sugar before, I think the main difference that it makes is how dark the caramel is.
I use a springform cake tin (where the side detaches from the base) as I don't have another 9 inch tin. This makes it easier to get the cake out, but you need to line all of the tin not just the base, or the caramel will leak out!

Cake iced with home made icing - 3/6/11

So, after I'd made my icing from scratch, I attempted to decorate the cake with it. I had quite a lot of problems rolling out the icing, I'm not sure whether that was because it was different icing, or because I was trying to roll out a bigger piece (this cake is 8 inches square, and before I'd only done 6 inch square cakes). It was also a hot day which i think made the icing stickier.
In the end, with the aid of some margarine on the surface instead of icing sugar, it got rolled out and attached to the cake. I was using some of the flowers I'd made a while ago for decorations, as well as a wide ribbon around the sides.

There are a few crumbs in the icing, as the marzipan was only on the top of the cake not the sides.

It was supposed to be an anniversary cake for our visitors, although their anniversary is actually the 2nd of June not the 3rd. As I ran out of time to make new decorations, it ended up being a bit of a random cake. But it tastes good!

View from the front of the cake

Cake from the back. The ribbon is hiding the messy sides of the cake!

There is still about a quarter of the cake left in my kitchen. It tastes good but is quite crumbly when you cut it.

Marzipan makes marzipan (and icing) - 1/6/11

I've been meaning to make my own marzipan and icing when the blocks I'd bought ran out, so for this cake I found some recipes. So far I've made the marzipan and put that on the cake, with a recipe I found here. It works quite well with my cake recipe, as the cake asked for lemon zest, almonds, and vanilla and almond essence, and the marzipan wants lemon juice, more almonds, and vanilla and almond essence!
One of the best bits about making this marzipan was eating the bits that were left over. I think it's the lemon juice that makes it so nice.
I thought I'd made enough to cover my cake, but I couldn't roll it as thin as I've been rolling the shop marzipan as it fell apart, so I only covered the top of the cake.
Here's my marzipanned cake and the recipe:

You can see where I've used marzipan at the bottom of the cake to fill in the gaps

Ingredients
200g ground almonds
120g caster sugar
120g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
1 whole egg
1 tsp lemon juice
3 drops vanilla essence
2 drops almond essence

1. Sift the caster sugar & icing sugar together. Add the ground almonds and stir well.
2. Beat the eggs and add to the mixture, add the lemon juice, vanilla and almond essences. Mix well.
3. Knead on a board with icing sugar until smooth.

That's it! I thought marzipan was much more complicated than that. Marzipan from the shop is cooked so it doesn't have raw egg in it, or you can get recipes which use liquid glucose or glycerine instead.
The amounts I've given should cover an eight inch square cake, I actually made half that amount as usually I don't use much marzipan.
Now for the sugarpaste (ready to roll/fondant icing).
I used the recipe from Beginner's Guide to Cake Decorating (available on Google Books here.) It's also quite simple. I used the egg white which was left over from making the marzipan, but again, if you don't want to use raw egg you can get dried egg white which you make up with water, or liquid egg white from the chiller section of the supermarket. There are also alternative recipes which use gelatine and glycerine instead of egg white.
The mix is quite crumbly and not sticking together at forst, but enough mixing and/or kneading and it comes out quite smooth. Here's mine wrapped in cling film:

Not a very interesting picture!

Next I'll ice the cake and see how my icing compares to the shop-bought stuff.

Alternative fruit cake, 31/5/11

I was away last week, and I bought a magazine to read on the train called Cake Craft & Decoration. Mostly it has cake projects to make that concentrate on modelling figures or flowers and things, but it also has some recipes in it, so I've made one of them - a Glacé Fruits and Nuts cake. it's supposed to be a lighter alternative to a normal fruit cake. Also it has lots of interesting dried fruits in it - cherries, angelica, crustallised ginger, pineapple, apricots and mixed peel. So it should be very colourful!

The fruits and nuts all chopped up together

It did take quite a while to chop up all the interesting fruits though, not to mention the almonds. Note to self: next time a recipe says 'blanched almonds' and wants you to chop them all up, just buy chopped ones!

The mixture all together

In the multi-sized cake tin

It's eight inches square, so I can practice bigger cakes as so far all the ones I've iced have been six inches or less.
After two and half hours in the oven:

 It could probably do with coming out a little earlier next time, but i was distracted by cooking dinner!

Floodwork flower cake - 14/5/11

So today the cake was ready for the flowers I made the other day to be attached! Quite a few of the flowers had broken in their box or as I was arranging them but hopefully as I get better at making them I'll break less.

Front view

Back view

Each side has one flower and two leaves on it, and the top has two flowers on it. You might notice that the flowers I made with thinner petals don't appear on this cake - this is because the petals are too thin and nearly all of these flowers have broken. The best design for these flowers seems to be a more uninterrupted shape like the ones with bigger petals. The leaves have also survived well.

Close up of one side

The floodwork has given me a liking for piping, so I also did some writing with icing left over from sticking the runouts to the cake. I practiced first on some baking paper to make sure that the letters would be the right size to fit on the cake. The words 'Le Chéile' are Irish for 'Together' - it is the name of the group I made the cake for.

Practice piece on baking paper

Writing on the cake, copying the lettering from the paper

______________________________

I had to put quite a lot of icing in the bag so that I could write neatly, so I used it up by making some more flower outlines for more runouts.

The outlines before being filled with colours

Floodwork flowers and leaves, and some cookies - 10/5/11

I've finally got around to doing some more decorations rather than just making tasty cake and eating it!
These are some flower and leaf decorations made by a technique called flooding or runout. Basically you draw some shapes on a piece of paper, cover that with baking or greaseproof paper (somethinig non-stick that you can still see the lines through), draw over the outline with stiff icing, then water it down and colour it to fill in the outlines. Colouring in in icing form, in fact. Sounds simple, but actually more difficult than it sounds if you misread the recipe as i did and put too much liquid into the icing! The end result looks pretty good though:

Flowers and leaves on a sheet of baking paper

The same shapes in different colours

Here's a quick recipe, and some things I would have found useful to know:
Recipe from Beginner's Guide to Cake Decorating.
Ingredients:
1 egg white
250g (9oz) icing sugar, sifted
3 tsp lemon juice (TEASPOONS not tablespoons)
food colourings

Equipment:
template drawn on paper (you can make up your own, or find one somewhere. I drew mine on the computer and printed it out so they were all alike)
baking paper
paper piping bags (if you don't know how to make them, there's a video tutorial here. Don't cut the tips off yet though.)
1mm piping tip
cocktail stick

• Lightly beat the egg with a wooden spoon. GRADUALLY, add the icing sugar and beat until it is a smooth paste. Add 2 tsp lemon juice slowly until the mixture has a stiff piping consistency. Fill a piping bag fitted with a 1mm tip (a couple of teaspoons of icing should be plenty to make as many as I did) and cover the rest of the icing with cling film on its surface so it doesn't dry out.
• Pipe over the outlines and leave them to dry. I taped the paper to the table so it didn't slip about.
• When you have enough outlines, gradually add more lemon juice to the icing until it is easy to spread smoothly. If you want to colour the icing, divide it into smaller bowls or cups and add the colouring, mixing with a teaspoon or cocktail stick. Don't forget to cover the surface of the icing with cling film when you're not using it to keep the air out.
• Fill a paper piping bag with the thinner icing before cutting off the tip, only cutting off a small amount of the tip so that the opening is 2mm or so across (you can always cut off more later if you need to). Gently flood the outlines with the coloured icing. I put a couple of drops of icing in and spread it gradually with a cocktail stick, but this is mainly because my icing was too runny to pipe properly.
• Leave them to dry overnight and remove carefully once completely dry with a palette knife or by peeling the paper backwards from the shapes.
• They should keep for up to a week if stored in an airtight container. I layered them on kitchen paper so that they could be kept safe.

And I used up my egg yolk by making tasty choc chip cookies. The recipe is from Cooking:a Commonsense Guide, but I don't have the metric equivalents as I generally bake in imperial measurements.

 5oz butter
1 1/2 oz brown sugar
3oz caster sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla essence
5oz self raising flour
3oz chocolate chips

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg yolk and vanilla, then the flour. Mix to a dough. Add most of the choc chips. Make into small balls of about a teaspoonful each and place them on a baking sheet with lots of space between them. Push the remaining choc chips into the tops of the cookies. Bake at 180 C for 10-15 minutes.

Chocolate raspberry torte - 28/4/11

Another chocolate cake, baked for a friend's birthday. This is another recipe from Good Food magazine (here), though I used less of the raspberry filling than they suggested.
The main problem with this cake is that it wants two cakes baked in 9inch tins, and I only have one tin. I simply baked the cakes one at a time, but trying to line a hot tin with baking paper led to a slightly odd shaped cake! Fortunately these things are easily covered up with icing. Perhaps next time I should just cook it as one cake, and slice in half afterwards, though this would make a different texture as the cake is supposed to be still gooey on the inside after baking.

Un-iced chocolate cake - 4/4/11

Today I was meeting some friends for lunch, and they asked me to bring pudding. So I made chocolate cake. This was a new recipe which I had found in Good Food Magazine, available here. It is very gooey and lovely. It uses ground almonds instead of flour so it's even gluten free! The recipe says it takes twenty minutes to prepare but it took me more like 40 minutes. I forgot to take any pictures before we ate most of it but here are some of what is left.

A quarter of it left.

You can see the gooey centre.

It was baked in a 9 inch diameter round springform tin, and dusted with icing sugar on the top.

Step by step: carnation - 1/4/11

Following from my freesia step by step, here's how I made a spray carnation. Again, it's based on the method in Sugarcraft Flowers by Claire Webb.

Carnation

You need:
Sugarpaste (fondant icing) or flower paste
Colouring - the colour you want the flowers to be, and green
Small blossom/flower cutter approx 2cm diameter
Cocktail stick or wooden kebab skewer
Edible glue
Artificial stamens or thin wire approx. 5cm long
Small knife (a craft knife would be good)
Small paintbrush
To attach the flower to a stem you will need:
Thicker wire for the stem
Florists tape or ribbon approx 7mm wide
You may also find pliers useful to bend the thick wire, and tweezers to move the petals into place.

Flower
1. Roll a piece of sugarpaste (either the colour of the flower or white to colour later) and cut out three flower shapes with a cutter. Fold a stamen in half and set aside. Cut slightly down between each petal to divide them more.
2. Using the cocktail stick, roll out one flower shape thinner and frill the edges if you like. Mark a hole in the centre.  Apply edible glue to half of the centre leaving the petals free to be shaped later.
3. Slide the flower onto the stamen and fold in half. apply more glue and fold in half again. You may find tweezers useful to separate the small petals and shape the flower head slightly.
4. Roll out another flower shape as above and mark a hole in the centre. Apply edible glue to the centre for this flower and slide up to attach to the first.
5. Repeat step 4 for the final flower, making sure that the petals go between each other to give the right flower shape. Support it while it dries.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Assembly
Use the fold in the stamen to thread onto a piece of wire with a hook in the end. Twist this around to secure and wrap florists tape or ribbon around the wire to hold it firm. You could also add a calyx to the bottom of the flower before assembly to make it more realistic, or paint it on. Each flower should be on a separate small stem which combine to make the spray.