A look back at my journey

I've put together a collage of all the large cakes I've ever decorated, in the order I did them. I was interested to see if there is a notable difference in them based on what I have learnt over the months.

On some of the pictures it seem like I have perhaps taken a step back since decorating the previous cake, but I think the quality levels are quite dependent on who I am making the cake for and what the occasion is. For example, the wedding cake is (in my own opinion) the best cake I have made, but of course a wedding cake is one of the most important parts - materially speaking - of the wedding. Whereas some of the cakes have been made for myself, just for fun, and I think it shows that I cared slightly less for these!

Today's cake is not included in this collage for the simple reason that it was not about the decorating. It was more about baking practice, and about the CHOCOLATE FUDGE! :-D

Christmas Cake

So I finally finished it - at about lunchtime on Christmas Eve mind, but I finished it :-)

So, here we have an 8 inch square fruit cake (made with Delia's recipe) covered in marzipan and sugar paste. I managed to cover the cake and board together without ripping the icing, which I always feel is the hardest part as it's the most difficult thing to fix. It was a little bit lumpy, but I think once the decorations were added then the lumpy bits were less obvious.

I cut out some stars and sprayed them with silver lustre, cut out some holly leaves and modelled some berries and a little penguin which people tell me looks like a famous children's TV penguin, but that wasn't deliberate. The image must just be etched in my brain :-)

I also added some snowballs just to fill in the gap.

A vast improvement on last year's effort, I think :-)

In case you forgot...

Christmas cake is coming

Christmas cake is on its way... it has been marzipanned and iced. Now all I need is some inspiration for the actual decorating. Hmmm.












Oh, the potential...

The Latest Baking Practice

Just a few of the latest creations from my baking practice:

Chequerboard biscuits: These were fun to make but didn't taste very good. Might be because I ran out of plain flour and tried replacing it with the only vaguely suitable thing I could find - brown rice flour. Didn't work...

Jamaican ginger cake made with stem ginger. That's lemon icing drizzled over the top. Yes, I know what it looks like.

Well, you've got to make mince pies this time of year haven't you? Unfortunately I over filled them and they exploded. That stuff sets like concrete so I couldn't get them out of the tray! I made the shortcrust pastry myself though. 

I rather fancied some chocolate so I threw these together in a hurry ;) The cake is Rachel Allen's chocolate cupcake recipe and the icing is the Primrose Bakery's chocolate buttercream. I used Co-Op's Fairtrade Ghanaian 84% cocoa solids chocolate for the buttercream - it was lush!

Battenberg!

I've decided that I need to concentrate more on baking methods for a while, rather than just decorating. Plus after the wedding cake experience I'm all decorated out, so to speak. For a little while anyway.

So I've been on Amazon and bought myself a little pressie - Rachel Allen's Cake, and gave her Battenburg recipe a go. It surprised me in that the cake itself was just a basic Victoria sponge recipe; it was the method that was the tricky part. I had to separate the batter into two batches so one could be coloured pink (harder than it sounds - I had to try and stir the colour in thoroughly without knocking all the air out of the mixture.)

The batter then had to be put into a square 20cm cake tin which had a folded parchment separator in the middle to give it two compartments and therefore produce two rectangular cakes, one of each colour. Trying to get the first lot of batter in without the paper collapsing was the tricky bit! Once the second lot was in, each side kind of held it up so the only trouble was making sure it stayed in the middle.

Whilst baking, the paper did seem to drift off to one side, so I ended up with one wide short cake and one narrow tall cake! But with a bit of trimming, I was able to fix this.

Half a jar of apricot jam and far too much marzipan later, this was the result:

Not bad for a first attempt, I like to think!

Wedding Cake - Cascading Roses

So here it finally is, my first ever wedding cake!

I decided to go for the cascading roses style, as that is quite popular at the moment; and it was quite handy as the decorating theme for the reception was roses too, as you can see from the table! I had already known the colour scheme was red, but I hadn't known about the roses theme, so it was quite lucky really. :-)

I originally made the (49!!) roses on cocktail sticks, with the intention of using them to stick them to, or rather in, the cake. But because there ended up being so many of them I felt uncomfortable with the idea of so many cocktail sticks being stuck in there; it seemed a bit unprofessional; so I took them off the cocktail sticks and stuck them on with royal icing instead. I was terrified that they wouldn't stay stuck and would fall off during transport, but the cake was well packaged in a box bought from www.craftcompany.co.uk (expensive for a box, but well worth the money), so they were all OK and the cake made it to the reception in one piece!

I was especially proud of the fact that I manage to cover all three cakes with icing on the first attempt without any tears or folds, and on the bottom tier I managed to cover both the cake and the board in one go! Yay me! :)

Here is a close up for you:

I have to say I thought I'd lost interest in cake decorating, until I made this cake and heard the reactions of all the people who were impressed by it. I know there are much better cakes out there, but I can't help but feel a little warm glow when I look at this one.

PS. Apparently it was delicious too.

Wedding cake

So I finished the wedding cake, after a week off work and several moments of panicky 'I can't do this!!'

The wedding is today so I won't be showing any pictures until later ;-) but I can tell you I made nearly 50 roses in the end! I ended up buying a 5 petal cutter to make the job slightly quicker, but it still takes time! The trouble is, I can't cut out all the petals at once as flower paste dries out so quickly, so it's a fiddly process of rolling out the paste mega thin (I bruised my hands doing that!), cutting petals, frilling them, wrapping them round the cone, then back to rolling out more paste. Sounds a quicker process than it actually is.

This was also my first experience of stacking cakes - as it was a 3 tiered job I had to put dowels in the bottom cake to support the two above it. As the middle tier was a dummy cake I didn't have to put dowels in that, apparently. If that had been fruit cake as well then I'd have had to use dowels in that one too.

The cake itself was Delia's own rich fruit cake recipe, found here.

After hours of watching YouTube tutorials on how to ice a cake, I managed to get the icing on all three without it ripping. I even managed to ice the bottom cake and board in one go! Yay me!

The bride's reaction was apparently good, although I didn't get to see it, but I'll see her later so I'll know then. :)

All in all, a bit of a confidence booster in the end.

More on this cake, including pictures, later this weekend.