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.