Unhealthy oranges - 15/10/12

So the tale begins a couple of weekends ago, when I was in Kinsale with family. We happened to go into a chocolate shop called Koko, and someone nice bought me chocolate covered orange slices.
 As we were exchanging mooney for tasty chocolate, the man in the shop said 'I've just crystallised those oranges the other day, so they're nice and fresh'

And I ate the chocolate orange slices, and they were tasty, and I fancied some more, only I don't go to Kinsale very often.
So I thought, 'maybe I could crystallise some orange slices? Sure it's only sugar'
I found some useful instructions on this blog post on how to crystallise the oranges.
(The conversion I used gave 1.5 cups water to be 350ml, half a cup granulated sugar to be 95g. Those amounts are for one orange but you'd probably only want to do one orange at a time unless you owned a chocolate shop!)

And so I bought an orange, some tasty chocolate and some sugar and had a go.

The water & sugar took longer to come to the boil than I thought, and I probably should have used a flatter frying pan rather than a big saucepan to make it easier to turn the slices over, but here are some tasty sugary orange slices after they've cooled:

The house smells of oranges!

They are very sticky

 Then today (I crystallised the oranges yesterday) I melted some tasty Green & Black's Maya Gold (which already is orangey & spicy & tasty) and dipped the oranges in it, then dipped them in sugar to stop them being so sticky.

One tasty chocolate orange slice

Lots of tasty chocolate orange slices

 So here is how to make oranges unhealthy! Just add 100g sugar, 350ml water, and about 70g chocolate. Hopefully they're as tasty as I think they will be.

29/9/12 - Ravnicake

While my main hobbies are making cake and sewiing and girly things, Mr Marzipan (as I call the husband) is a big geek. One of his hobbies is playing Magic: the Gathering and last year he persuaded me to come to the prerelease event for the new set (they release four new sets of cards a year and a week before the release of each set there is a 'pre release' event where you can play ing a tournament building a deck using the new cards). Anyway a year later I'm addicted to playing Magic quite a lot. We were looking forward to the release of the new set 'Return to Ravnica' (Ravnica being the setting for a previous set of cards a few years ago). Anyway one day i was talking about how I like making cake and someone suggested I make a cake for the prerelease event. I'm not sure they were actually expecting me to make one!

Final cake

 The design was based on the art for one of the cards in the set, Tablet of the Guilds, which they were using for advertising prior to the release of the set. The main theme of Ravnica is that it is a city dominated by ten guilds which each use two of the five colours of mana for their magic. Five of the guilds are in this set, and the other five will be in the set which is released in the new year.
I decided to put the symbol for each of the five guilds around the edge of the cake, but how to make the symbols look good (I'm no good at freehand drawing with icing!)
I got the images for each of the five guilds from the website for this set , GuildsofRavnica.com and I used paint.net image editing software to turn the art into a black and white stencil image. I traced the outline of the symbols from the stencil onto the circles of sugarpaste icing with the end of a pin, and I used the outline to help me draw the symbols with writing icing.

Guild

Colour image

Black & white stencil

Final icing

Rakdos - black and red

Selesnya - green and white

Izzet - red and blue

Golgari - green and black

Azorius - blue and white

All final icing symbols

The cake itself was also important, as brian who organises the tournament can't eat gluten so I needed to make a gluten-free cake so that he could eat some too. My chocolate and tea leaf cake is gluten free, but I've made so many chocolate cakes lately I wanted to make a plain sponge as it would be easier to ice as well. I found a recipe for Orange and Almond cake which seemed tasty and not too complicated, so I decided to make that. I made the guild symbols while the oranges were boiling and the cake was baking, and then in the morning I made some buttercream to spread over the top of the cake.

Cake with buttercream swirled over the top

Final cake with symbols on it

Everyone said it was super tasty! The only problem was I couldn't cut it into more than 16 slices, and there were about 40 people there. Luckily by the end most people had already eaten lots of food in between rounds so I think the people that wanted some got some! The next challenge is to make one with less sugar in for the diabetic gamers...

ETA: Copyright information 
Magic: the Gathering® and Return to Ravnica™ are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA and other countries.
All guild symbols are copyright © 2012 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

16/9/12 - A cake with a name

A while ago my friends had a baby, and I made them a quilt as a present. Well now the baby is a bit bigger (she's still very small though!), they were having a baby-welcoming party (like a baby shower, but after the birth) Obviously they've already had their present, but I was asked to make a tasty cake so I made a cake with the baby's name on it. It's a chocolate cake similar to the birthday cake I made in August, but with raspberry jam instead of cherry for the sandwich-joining.
For some reason the cake rose very unevenly in the oven but i managed to fill in the dips with jam and chocolate icing. The small lumpy bits on the icing are where I didn't quite melt the chocolate in the ganache because my cream wasn't hot enough. Ah well.

The flowers are chocolate floodwork, similar to the floodwork flowers I made here but made out of melted white and milk chocolate instead of runny icing. The white chocolate for the outlining went a bit lumpy so some of the flowers were not very good - these are the best ones! The milk chocolate melted much better so filling the flowers was easier than the outlines. I kept the flowers in the fridge until I was ready to attach them to the cake, so they wouldn't melt.
The name is iced directly onto the cake, I practised a couple of times on greasproof paper to get the letters the right size and I made small marks in the icing with a skewer to keep the writing even (the marks were covered up by the writing)

Cakes for a birthday party - 11/8/12

 You may have noticed that I like baking with my friends. One of those friends is Esther, who has her own recipe blog at 'La Recette du Misther' (as long as you can read french!)
So for her birthday she decided to have an afternoon tea party, and asked me to bake a cake.

Well I looked through my recipe books, and couldn't decide which cake to make so I baked three:

Chocolate cherry cake, bara brith, lemon cheesecake

They're actually three cakes I haven't baked before! They're all Good Food magazine recipes so I can post links for you.
The chocolate cherry cake is a variation on the chocolate raspberry cake I made for a friend's birthday last year (here) - I just replaced the raspberries with cherries. (original recipe here)

E is for Esther!

The lemon cheesecake (recipe here) is quite similar to a vanilla cheesecake I made around christmas time, though that had chocolate digestives as a base instead of plain, and white chocolate grated into the cheesy bit instead of lemons. I accidentally bought two lemons and a lime instead of three lemons, so it's technically a lemon & lime cheesecake. I found citrus flavoured sprinkles in the shop and couldn't resist them to decorate it!

Tasty cheesecake!

 Finally the bara brith (recipe here).My previous attempts at bara brith involved yeast and went terribly wrong, but this one has self-raising flour instead so it's basically a more interesting tea loaf.

Lovely sugary bara brith

It has sugar crystals on top of it for added crunchy tooth rotting goodness!

So I made toomuch cake, there's lots left. Oh well!

Birthday Cake - 30/3/12

I haven't made many cakes lately as I've been mainly concentrating on sewing, but it seems that I forgot to write a post about the cake I made from my mum's birthday in March.

It was a chocolate cake (because my mum loves chocolate!)
I was going to try to make lots of flowers as she is a florist, but I ran out of time so I settled for the ring of buds and writing 'mum' in daisies.

In the end she got two cakes as she made herself a battenburg too! They were both tasty!

Christmas cake - December 2012

I really have been bad at blogging lately - I even forgot to post about how I adapted the top layer of our wedding cake for Christmas.

You may recognise me from a larger cake....

The hearts are the same, the ribbon is new!

All I did was change the ribbon and add a decoration to the top as I was quite busy before Christmas. The three months had made the cake mature nicely though, so it was very tasty!
Here's what it looked like before: