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!

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.

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!

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!

Sugar Flowers - 31/3/11

As the last cake hasn't been eaten yet, I decided to try out some more sugar flowers. Most of these flowers were made following or adapting instructions from Sugarcraft Flowers by Claire Webb. (Some of the instruction pages can be found on the 'look inside' previews of the book's Amazon page.)

First of all, I tried some 'pulled flowers'. These are made without cutters, and are shaped just using cocktail stick, fingers  and a knife to cut the petals. They are quite small so slightly fiddly to shape but quite simple as filler flowers or to represent small flowers such as violas or primroses.

Three 'pulled flowers' drying on an egg box.
The centres are made of pins which also attach them to the egg box.

A 'pulled' daffodil drying on an upturned egg cup.
I spent too long fiddling with this and the petals went funny.

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This is a small spray carnation. it's quite simple, just three small flower shapes folded and glued to the stamens in the centre.

Carnation drying on a cutter.

Carnation in my hand to show it from a different angle.

Finally, I made a calla lily in the same way as the purple ones I've made previously. This is slightly smaller than the last ones and turned out a bit better:

Calla lily drying in a jug.

I also made some freesias, but they're not joined together so I haven't taken any pictures of those yet.

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!