Christmassy Goodness

I baked our 2011 Christmas cake back in early November. Probably not as early as it should have been, but not last-minute at least. It was a fruit cake, fed with brandy once a week until it was time to decorate!

I kept the decorating fairly simple - since it was my first Christmas cake I didn't want to try anything new for fear of messing it up completely - so it was covered with marzipan and fondant icing, and fondant decorations/writing. I didn't have any alphabet stamps, so I had to cut out the letters with a knife.

I had also intended to make a single, large gingerbread house. I found a recipe I wanted to use here (recommended for lovely soft gingerbread with a delicious spicy flavour), but was completely confused by the template (because our printer wasn't working at the time, I couldn't print the template, so I tried drawing it. But without measurements, I wasn't able to get it to the right dimensions.) I decided to improvise, using the same recipe for the gingerbread but cutting out several different shapes with pastry cutters. Once baked, I was able to use the shapes to assemble three smaller houses:

I also used the Christmas tree shaped cookie cutter to create a festive tree, and added a snowman to complete the picture.

The decorations are just jelly sweets and glacè icing.

I also sprinkled icing sugar over everything for snow.

Also, from earlier in December, were these:

Another go at practising piping buttercream icing, coloured a strong shade of blue with the colour paste. I was quite pleased with the effect I was able to achieve on the final two cakes in the picture.





I've been given 'The Home Guide to Cake Decorating' by Jane Price for Christmas (courtesy of the other Arf), as well as a guide to making fondant animals and a book of loads of cupcake recipes, so expect more to come soon!

What I want to try next:

Fondant animals.
New cupcake and buttercream recipes.