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)

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.

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!

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

Another bigger cake, 26/3/11

I haven't done any cakes for a while as i've been busy with other things, but this cake is one I made a while ago (see this post) and froze. It had a day or so to defrost, then I marzipanned it and iced it:

Front view

Rear view showing the join in the ribbon

Experimenting with inlaying and non-purple colours and shapes for a change!
This is a six inch square fruit cake with marzipan and sugarpaste icing to decorate it and a ribbon round the sides.

Icing bigger cake - 5/3/11

I've iced one of the cakes which I baked the other day. Last night I covered it with marzipan.

Six inch square cake covered in marzipan.
This is a smoother base for the icing.

The calla lilies which I made a while ago have been repainted as well.

Before: the colour of the petals is not very bright.

After: Stems painted green, stamens yellow.
Petals gone over with purple to deepen the colour.

This morning I covered the marzipan with white sugarpaste and added other decorations.

Callas are supported by small blobs of sugarpaste. Star is inlaid into the surface.

Back of the cake has two hearts,
the sides have flowers and leaves.

Front of the cake has flower and hearts.
All the small decorations are attached on top of the white not inaid.

This cake is probably a bit too busy, but I was slightly overexcited as I have lots of new cutters and colours to play with!

Bigger cakes - 3/3/11

I've done quite a few smaller cakes now, so I need to start practising icing bigger cakes. I recently got this cake tin to make baking lots of different sized cakes easier.
I've begun with cakes six inches square (15cm) as I can make four of these at once.
Here's the mixture ready for baking:

Mixture ready for baking

 

Empty bowl! I had to make the mixture in two halves.

And, several hours later, the finished cakes:

Hopefully they taste as good as they look and smell!

One will be iced in the next few days, and the rest are in the freezer until I need them.