Here's some I made earlier: the year so far in cakes

I do actually make cake more often than I write about them, because I am bad at remembering to write up my cakes. So here's a few I've made and forgotten to write about.
Start with the Christmas Cake. Okay that was really last year but I did forget to write about it!
Here in Ireland there is a bank holiday at the end of October, and I wanted to make my Christmas cake early so it could mature a bit so I decided to make it then.
The maturing didn't really work because I forgot to feed the cake but anyway I decorated it and we ate quite a lot of it (though not much got eaten on Christmas day on account of us eating too much dinner!)
Here it is:

Cake!

Closer look at the top

I decided to do a blue cake with bells and stars on it. Some of the silver dust went everywhere and the blue colouring stay on my hands for a few days but you get the general idea.

It took a while to get through the Christmas cake and all the mince pies so I didn't do much more baking till the end of January, when there was another Magic tournament to make cake for - the Gatecrash Prerelease. This cake was quite similar to the one I made in September for Return to Ravnica, except that the guild symbols were different. I don't have a picture of the finished cake, but here's one of the guild symbols all together:

 And some close ups of each guild symbol:

Boros - Red and White

Orzhov - White and Black

Dimir - Black and Blue

Simic - Blue and Green

Gruul - Green and Red

February is birthday month so I made a ginger cake (again I forgot to take a picture!)
The recipe is from one of my mum's recipe books and it's super tasty so here goes:
Ingredients
1/4 pint (150ml) milk 
1 teaspoon (5ml)bicarbonate of soda 
4 oz (100g) butter 
4 oz (100g) golden syrup 
4 oz (100g) treacle 
3 oz (75g) soft brown sugar 
1 tablespoon (15ml) orange marmalade 
4 oz (100g) self-raising flour 
4 oz (100g) wholemeal flour 
1 teaspoon (5ml) mixed spice 
2 teaspoons (10ml) ground ginger 
2 small eggs, beaten 

(Instead of the wholemeal flour you can substitute 8 oz SR flour if you don't have wholemeal)

Method
Grease and line an 8 inch (20cm) round or 7 inch (18cm) square cake tin. Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the bicarbonate of soda and heat gently until tepid. Place the butter, syrup, treacle, sugar and marmalade in another saucepan and heat gently, stirring until the ingredients are combined and the sugar dissolved. Place the flours, mixed spice,ginger and a pinch of salt in a bowl and mix together thoroughly. Stir the treacle mixture into the dry ingredients, then add the warmed milk and beat well to a smooth batter. Beat in the eggs. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in a warm oven (160°C or 325°F or Gas mark 3) for 1 hour or until a fine skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely and remove the greaseproof paper.

Helpful notes from my mum on the method:
I mix the dry stuff first, then start the treacle mixture on the stove, then do the milk last so it doesn't go cold - it only needs to be slightly warm, you can test with your finger. You don't want it getting too hot as not only would it take ages to cool down but would probably do something dramatic to the bicarb! The mixture will be very runny (pretty much liquid) when you pour it into the tin. I leave the greaseproof paper round to keep it in shape until it was quite cold. I remember it was quite difficult to get a good shape and sometimes the sides of cake were bit funny where there were folds of greaseproof. But it needs to be all one piece of greaseproof (i.e. not separate sides & base) otherwise runny mixture will go through gaps when you pour it in. If you've got a silicone cake tin or cake tin shaped baking parchment liners that would be much better.

As for March baking, I covered most of that in my post at Easter.

April comes round, and another Magic cake to bake - this one for the Dragon's Maze Prerelease.
I spent a while thinking about making a cake with a maze on top, but in the end I made a cake with a dragon on instead.Apparently people were disappointed that it was fruit cake. Admittedly it was a bit dry (I was using gluten free flour which apparently needs more liquid than wheat flour) but I like fruit cake normally.

Red dragons are the best kind!

In May I didn't get much baking done so here's some pictures of striking bus drivers stopping me (and the rest of Irish commuters) from getting to work:

Walking picket line

There should be buses here!

The departure screens at the bus station lying about whether there would be buses

However that all got sorted out eventually (hooray) so now it is June and I made some more Magic cakes as there were more tournaments.
First of all I made a 'colour pie' for the five colours that there are in Magic.This is based on the fruit tarts you get in french patisseries (except I used a flan case instead of making a pastry one). I got the creme patissiere recipe from Nish Bakes blog. The creme patissiere is not too hard to make as long as you don't stop whisking until it's done! Mine was a bit runny in the end so perhaps I took it off the heat too soon.

Clockwise from top: green kiwi fruit, white banana, blackberries, red strawberries, and blueberries.

Then I made a chocolate cake as I'd been asked for one. I made my chocolate earl grey tea cake which i first made two years ago, and I iced it with buttercream and decorated it with mini marshmallows :

Marshmallows form the planeswalker symbol (again from Magic)

Oh and in case you didn't have enough pictures already, here are some of my friends baking cupcakes at my house. Well, eating cupcakes we had just baked.

Tasty cakes get eaten fast!

Very excited to have cakes!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.