Cake roundup

It’s that time again, a quick catchup with my recent cakes. Apologies for the abysmal photo quality, a combination of bad lighting where I’m currently baking and using the camera on my phone.

Up first is Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The head is vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream & the body is rice crispie treats covered with fondant.

Up next is a cake I made for my friend Emma‘s 30th birthday. This was fun as I got to make lots of different fondant pieces depicting her favourite things. She’s got such a wide range of interests that I could have probably added even more. I think she liked the ones I picked! Cake is vanilla with Galaxy chocolate buttercream and all decoration is fondant.

A few more close-up shots of the different elements on Emma’s cake:

And finally I was lucky enough to be asked to make a 2nd birthday cake for my workmate’s son. I made his 1st birthday cake last year, I’m hoping this will be an ongoing tradition! The Handy Manny cake is vanilla sponge with vanilla & raspberry filling, all decoration is handcut & hand painted fondant.

The saw was my favourite tool to create, so much character in those features.

Until next time folks.

Lamingtons – My first attempt

While things settle down in my real life baking has taken a back seat. I’ve made the odd batch of brownies and there are a few cakes I’ve yet to blog about but regular baking has been severely lacking. So obviously inspiration had to strike while I was without all my baking kit. My dad is originally from Australia and despite being the only person in our family never to have set foot on Aussie soil I’m quite partial to some of their sweet treats. I adore chocolate covered Macadamia Nuts, I love that they are big fans of coconut and I have a multitude of the Australian Women’s Weekly cookbooks. I decided that I must make Lamingtons and as soon as possible.

As I was without my cookbooks I googled for a simple recipe and settled on a sort of hybrid version of several recipes. I decided to use my own sponge cake recipe as I knew it was easy and didn’t require any fancy equipment. I used an 8 inch square tin but I’d say this would be best in a 9 inch tin, it’s really personal preference as to the size you’d like your lamingtons to be. I went for 16 squares from my sponge which was just enough for us as the icing is quite sweet.

Basic Sponge Cake

175g (6 oz) soft butter or margarine, plus extra for greasing

175g (6oz) caster sugar

3 eggs

175g (6oz) self-raising flour

1 + 1/2 tsp baking powder

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 180C/ 350F/ Gas Mark 4

Lightly grease and line the bottom of your square tin

Combine all the ingredients and beat well until smooth. Pour mixture into prepared tin.

Bake for about 20 – 25 minutes, until the cake is well risen, golden and springy to the touch.

Let the cake sit in the tin for 5-10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack and let cool completely.

Once the cake has cooled, cut it into squares ready for dipping.

Icing

225g (1/2 lb) icing sugar

2 & half tablespoons of good cocoa powder (I used Green & Blacks)

1/2 tablespoon butter

60ml (2 fl oz) milk

200g packet of dessicated coconut

Instructions:

Combine the icing sugar and cocoa powder in a large bowl.

In a small saucepan heat the milk & butter until the butter is melted, I kept this on low – med heat and it didn’t take very long so keep a close eye on it.

Add the warm milk to the sugar mixture and mix well to create a fluid (but not too runny) icing. It should be fluid enough to allow the cake to be dipped but not so much that none of the icing adheres itself to the cake.

Have your cake squares, icing, a fork & a cooling rack ready. Place the coconut in a shallow bowl. Use the fork to dip the cake in the icing, making sure to turn it to cover all the sides. This bit can be messy but it’s worth it! Tap the excess icing off the cake then roll it in the coconut. This is where you can check if the icing is too runny, it should be thick enough to not continue to drip from the cake once you tap off the excess.

Place the squares on the cooling rack once they’ve been rolled in the coconut. Let them harden up a little then try to resist eating every single one before you share them.

Belfast Taste & Music Fest 2011

The annual Belfast Taste & Music Fest marks the 2nd anniversary of my blog and what a 2 years it has been! Perhaps I’ve lacked the time & motivation to blog as often as I intended but I’m glad that I’ve managed to at least try to catch up with my baking endeavours and not let the blog completely slip away from me.

I had been looking forward to our visit to the taste fest pretty much since we left last years event and I’m glad to say it didn’t disappoint. The weather wasn’t exactly cooperating but we came prepared this time with our own chairs and a multitude of umbrellas at the ready.

We visited Botanic Gardens on the Sunday afternoon, arriving at 1.30pm and leaving at approx 5.30pm. I must say that the admission prices aren’t great so we always make sure to arrive before the price changes to evening admission. 12noon – 4pm was priced at £6 and from 4pm onwards it was £10. I’ve never been a fan of the entry price at all but £10 is quite a high price to pay considering how much people will spend on tokens and drinks. I know that the entertainment is one reason for the entry fee but to be honest I’m there for the food, if its someone I like its a bonus for me. I guess not everyone feels like that and may go at night to enjoy the bands and the bar in conjunction with the food.

So we paid £6 entrance fee and bought one set of 20 tokens at £10 to start us off with the definite intention to buy more (as we always do). We found a spot and even managed to nab a table to congregate around.

I had come prepared with a spreadsheet for each person which included each restaurant, chef and the dishes they were serving. I decided to gather up all the token costs for each dish so that we could decide the best course of action for joining the queues and making sure we had a variety of dishes to share that were still hot.

I took pictures as quickly as I could of each dish and then gathered comments and scores from everyone to compare the different dishes that we shared. I’ve included pics of nearly everything we tried with scores on taste, appearance and overall comments afterwards. Each token costs 50p, I’ve included token cost and £ cost after each dish. Some were definitely worth the higher token price in terms of either taste or quantity while others definitely didn’t warrant the higher cost.

Cake catchup

Well hello folks (that is if there’s anyone left out there reading my blog!)

A quick catch up on cakes from the past few months to get us up to date before I attend the Belfast Taste & Music Fest this weekend. This year I’m even more organised and have created a spreadsheet with all the menus including space to score each dish and add comments. I’ll be doing a lengthy blog post in order to give an overview of the fest next week.

Onwards with cakes. I’ll start with my most recent and one of my favourites. This was for the ever lovely Sera who wanted to celebrate her son’s 1st birthday in style by throwing a fabulous Pirate themed bash. This was so much fun to make, I even found a coin making machine and made all the booty by hand, the coins were Galaxy or Milkybar chocolate. All other decoration is fondant, the lid was constructed from card and covered in fondant.

The rest of the pics are after the jump….

Team Peace

I expound the benefits of Twitter on a daily basis, my family, friends & work colleagues find it bemusing and at times downright tedious but it truly has so many plus points. I have met some absolutely wonderful people that I now consider friends. Without this unusual form of social networking there is no way I would ever have encountered them in my real life.

Two such lovely ladies are @GreatLezBritain (aka Sarah & Lee) They are the British writers for afterellen which is a fantastic website that I have been a fan of since it’s inception. They were the promoters for the recent Heather Peace tour (supported by Jill Jackson)  I was excited about the tour making the effort to come across the pond to our city (take note huge productions; there are fans here who sadly are quite often neglected) Not only were we on the tour schedule, Belfast was the opening night on the two week tour of the UK. I asked Sarah & Lee if they would like a few treats to celebrate the start of the tour and they said that would be lovely. I’m sure you can guess that most of my twitter conversations are about baking & food in general. I’m happy to share that love of food with my tweeps.

I decided straight away that I would try to tackle a completely new (to me) form of baking in order to get images of the artists onto my baked goods. I ordered two sheets of edible icing images online. I took a risk in just googling for UK suppliers but I was seriously lucky in finding Cakes Crazy. They accept picture submissions & instructions via email and are super quick from sending wonderfully edited proofs to receiving the final product and at a great price.  

I quickly came up with an idea to use the album covers as cupcake toppers and larger images to top sugar cookies. I made raspberry & white chocolate cupcakes and banoffee cupcakes, both topped with white chocolate buttercream. The cookies were a simple vanilla sugar cookie. The edible images were placed on fondant before being attached to the cookies and cupcakes. The wife made the fab ‘Team Peace’ bag toppers for the cookies. As an extra and to add some chocolate into the mix I made a huge batch of my favourite brownies.

I had the great fortune to meet Heather & Jill just after their soundcheck to give them the baked treats. They were absolutely lovely and sweetly enthusiastic about the baking despite the fact that everything was running behind schedule due to some insane travel delays due to crazy high winds. Due to these constraints I was only able to briefly say hi to Heather, Jill, Sarah & Lee but I am so grateful for the opportunity to bake for them all and to have enjoyed a fabulous opening night of the tour.

If you’re a fan of great music please be sure to click on the names above to check out their websites for more info on their wonderful albums and all upcoming gigs.

Cupcake Magic – Competition closed

It’s time for my first ever blog competition. Over the years that I’ve been baking I’ve been drawn more towards cakes or other treats rather than cupcakes.  I think this is partly because there has been more demand for novelty cakes but it’s also because I was never very happy with lots of the cupcake recipes I tried. I discovered a few great vanilla recipes but had never pinned down a chocolate one that didn’t taste either dry or greasy. Someone bought me Cupcake Magic by Kate Shirazi and I was delighted to finally find a chocolate cupcake that I liked. I’ve only tried a few of her other recipes but the buttercream recipe is one I use almost every time I need a decent buttercream. It’s a great read as it’s not written like a traditional cookbook evidenced by her choice of names for both the cupcakes and the levels of difficulty involved, anyone who uses the word faff this much is a friend of mine.

I have one copy of Cupcake Magic to giveaway to my readers.

You will also win this natty apron. I’ve covered over certain letters for blog purposes but the apron has no censorship so you have been warned about the fully fledged cursing!

I’ll also throw in a few extra surprises for the winner from my collection of baking goodies, still to be decided!

This competition is open to international readers, the closing date for entries is Saturday 16th April 2011 at 4pm.

To be in with a chance of winning, comment on this post with your favourite existing cupcake flavour & also tell me; if you could choose any flavour combination in the world what cupcake would you create? Would it have a surprise filling, an unusual savoury topping…? I’ll choose a winner with a random generator and they will be contacted via email so be sure to leave an email address in order to be contacted for postal details.

Good Luck!

Edited to add: you should be able to add your email when you log in to comment so that only I can see it, just in case you were uncomfortable about putting your addy in your comment. Sorry for not clarifying that!

WE HAVE A WINNER!

Congrats Lily Ramirez-Foram. There is an email on its way to you now to arrange posting of your prize. You were picked via www.random.org

Roundup

Time for a quick catchup before I have my first ever blog competition!  Baking has taken a back seat recently, I’ve been churning a lot of ideas for potential future treats but putting them into practice has proved difficult. I’ve also been plagued with worries about an impending wedding cake and another secretive baking job that I hope I can divulge a little more about in a few weeks.  I’ve gone through many days filled with doubt at my skills and fear that lack of time means I’ll not develop or adapt to ever advancing ideas out in the baking ether.  I have to rein my brain in and remind myself why I’m doing this….because I love it. A swift kick to remind me that it’s not about anyone else, it’s not about being better than others, it’s not about charging to little or too much, it’s about the love of creating.  I want to always think about bringing a smile to someone’s face with the look and taste of what I create, that’s it.  The rest is just gravy peeps. 

 Onto recent endeavours…

This cake was so much fun to design.  I was told that it had to be penguin themed, that’s it.  I decided a scene would give me greater scope for modelling and I knew I wanted to create a winter wonderland effect with the whole cake rather than just placing a few figures on top of a plain base.  It’s one of the few cakes I’ve finished and thought it actually looks insanely close to how it looked in my head while I was designing it!

All the toppers are fondant; the igloo is rice crispie treats covered in fondant. The trees were made with my mini star cutters and I trimmed a few to make them graduated a little at the top.  The ‘water’ in the fishing hole is a little royal icing tinted blue and poured into a dip created in the top of the cake.  I’m committing a cardinal sin by stating that I can’t remember what the cake inside is!  I think it might be vanilla but I’m not really sure!

These cupcakes were whipped up at the last minute to bring into work for St. Paddy’s Day.  I got it into my head that I wanted to make something bright to cheer everyone up and St Pat was a great excuse to make rainbows and pots of gold. The cupcakes were a basic vanilla tinted green and the frosting was the divine white chocolate buttercream.  This buttercream has become my new favourite and will be adorning most of my future cupcakes.  It firms up beautifully, it’s not greasy and tastes sweet with a lovely creamy kick from the added chocolate.  

All the toppers are fondant.  I used a mini heart cutter to make my Shamrocks, very simply adding a stem and sticking them together with a little water.

The rainbows were made by rolling thin lengths of different colours, sticking them with water then rolling them thin with my mini rolling pin and cutting them to size.

The pots are balls of black fondant, a small disc flattened on top with a mound of yellow on top. I rolled a few smaller balls of yellow and flattened them onto the large yellow mound then painted the whole thing with some gold lustre dust. 

And of course I had to tint the cupcakes green, it’s almost mandatory when it comes to St Patrick’s Day baking.

Be sure to check out my next post for my first ever competition!

Happy Valentine’s Day

A quick picture post to show two simple sweet ideas for your Valentine (or yourself!)  I made my go-to Brownie recipe and for dessert I simply cut out hearts and paired them with vanilla ice cream.  To stop us from eating 2 trays of brownies I then crumbled the rest, rolled them into balls and dipped them in a variety of chocolates & Valentine themed sprinkles.  I have been gathering up these sweet sprinkles & sugars for quite a while and was looking for a great excuse to use them, I just popped them in silver & red metallic mini cupcake liners and they made an impressive treat.

Enjoy the day of love, however you may be spending it xo

Picture Post

Well peeps, 2 blog posts in one week, I’m spoiling you After the epic length of my previous ramblings I’ve decided to let your brains rest with a nice picture post.  It is lengthy as it’s a catch up of all my endeavours for the last few months but I want to bring myself up to date.  I have a few interesting jobs coming up that I’d like to blog within at least one month of the actual cake being made, I know, don’t quote me on that.  Apologies for the lack of picture quality, my netbook is still broken and I’m having difficulty uploading pics from my camera. These were all taken with the iphone, not so great for blog posting.

The pics after the cut are in actual timeline order but I wanted to start with this bad boy.  The wife adores all things Japanese so I wanted to combine a few elements into one cake for her birthday.  Unfortunately it was while I was making 2 other cakes so I was pushed for time.  I made the mini Buddha from rice crispie treats, fondant and gold lustre dust, the cake is a simple double layer vanilla sponge with raspberry & vanilla filling and the cherry blossoms were handpainted with sugarflair paste colours.  She loved it!

Resolutions & Realisations

So another year has passed and as we enter a new one I’m once again pondering whether I’ll be able to keep on top of blog posting as much as I would like to.  I was going to make a New Year resolution but I don’t think my brain could handle the additional guilt at not being able to stick to my promise.  Instead my focus is on a fresh start.  While life has been kicking me in the behind recently my baking has been neglected and part of me is happy with that.  Don’t all faint at once, it’s taken me a long time to realise that I have no one to answer to when it comes to how often I bake, or blog, or even brush my teeth (well except my dentist)  I think I’m still under the misapprehension that everything I undertake is being overseen by some higher being that has some power to punish me if I fail.  What exactly am I failing at if I don’t bake when no one has asked me to, ordered something from me or is paying me to do so?  The answer is nothing.  I don’t fail at life if I down baking tools, take a break and pay some attention to what is happening around me.  It’s something I’m still learning about & I can’t say I’ve progressed very much but I’m trying to bring the enjoyment back.  Every hobby or interest I’ve ever taken on has very quickly morphed into a chore and baking has been gradually becoming a monster in my life.  At times I feared the passion was gone altogether, I couldn’t even get motivated to think about it never mind produce something worthy of consumption. However I find myself with renewed vigour and the love for the art is back.  Now is the time to put the passion to good use and learn to balance the need to bake with the need to have a life too.  I was bitter for so long that I couldn’t pursue this full time, that other bakers, cake decorators, food bloggers had it lucky and I was forever destined to reconcile invoices while dreaming about macarons & brownies.  I can’t say I’m happy to acknowledge that this may well be my future, no one can know for sure, but I do know that I should not let that affect the love that is in my heart for the craft.

 Now that I’ve shared that insightful little part of my psyche with you I’m going to move onto more constructive information.  Not only was I finding it hard to find time to bake amongst the madness I couldn’t get past the fact that my baking equipment was a mess.  There was no point pretending any longer, I wasn’t even sure what was lurking at the back of the cupboards and instead of creating a space for everything I was just piling new on top of old and holding my breath hoping the whole Jenga like construction wouldn’t fall down round my ears the next time I opened the cupboard.

I’ve decided to share my organisational skills with the world in the hope that it inspires you to de-clutter or even to start picking up the tools of the trade that you think you might need to embark into the crazy baking world.

First things first, this is the horror before I tackled it:

There was more to this mess but I’ll refrain from bombarding you with it all.

And this is the result, totally worth 5 hours of my precious day off, really.

I’ve decided to delve deeper into each of the boxes to share my  basic baking toolkit.  I don’t consider my  collection to be large but I’m sure some beginners would find it overwhelming.  In order to save your sanity I’ll put the rest after the jump…apologies for the lengthy ramblings!