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!