The latest batch of cakes

As previously warned, here's another cake post.  We've had another batch of cupcakes to do just like the last ones, a Rubik's Cube, a giant cupcake and a Garfield cake.

The Rubik's cube cake was our first go at doing a stacked cake using dowels, it's got a bit of a journey to reach it's final destination so it needed to be sturdy.  Also we had to consider how it was going to get cut up, we didn't think having a long skinny piece with either loads of icing or not much at all would be very good so it's basically two cakes on top of each other.  They'll be able to cut up the top layer, lift off the board that's nestled inside the cake, then cut up the bottom layer.  It was a whopping 40 ounces of cake mixture and 2kg of fondant icing to produce this cake!

The giant cupcake was basically a big version of the latest cupcakes we'd produced, pink and girly.  This is vanilla sponge with buttercream in the middle and piped buttercream on the top half and fondant icing on the base.  It's decorated with coloured sprinkles and wafer flowers and with ribbon round the base.  This is created using a special cupcake shaped tin which you can buy here.

And here's the Garfield cake.  He was good fun to make, he's a nice simple design and piping the black detail on really brings it all together, and we've used orange flavoured Matchmakers for his whiskers.  Of course we had to sample some of the Matchmakers to check they were OK!

More cakes to do next week, lots of cupcakes, a triple chocolate cake and a tinkerbell cake.  I guess August is a busy month for birthdays.

Valentine's cupcakes and Mickey Mouse

Here's the latest cakes my husband's been asked to make, some Valentine's cupcakes and a Mickey Mouse cake.  As usual I've lent my hand to decorating, he prefers to bake (and is very good at it - very tasty cakes!) and seeing as I love to make things, I'm best at the decorating.  So we make a pretty good cake making team.

The cupcakes are vanilla sponge with pink buttercream, decorated with fondant icing discs and I've piped letters on spelling out 'I Love You' and decorated them with a few hearts.

The Mickey Mouse cake took a bit longer to do!  But at least he's relatively easy to make, quite simple features so nothing too complicated to make.  

 

He's all cake too, the mouth is sponge (not just masses of icing) and the ears are simply miniature cakes.  Only his nose is a lump of icing.  Everything's cut out by hand too, no special cake tins have been used or any templates, and what you can't tell from the pictures is just how big this cake is.....it's BIG, beats any shop bought cake any day!  

 

Golf Cake

Here's the latest novelty cake my husband and I have created.  This time we were asked to do a golf themed cake for a 65th birthday.

I'm getting better at modelling with icing, each person I've had to sculpt has gotten better each time (I think I could've done better at positioning the golfer with his golf club, not sure holding a club like that will be very effective!). 

I did have an 'OH NO!' moment whilst piping the shoes on though, my tiny piping bag full of black icing split and a great big blob of icing squirted out onto the cake!  I quickly scrapped it off and managed to remove most traces of black but it had left a mark.  Luckily it was quite near the edge so I could cover it up with buttercream and make the 'rough grass' a bit wider.  Few!  Panic over.

It was also my first attempt at writing with icing, which went better than I expected.  No mishaps with the piping bag this time!

We've now got a small batch of green buttercream left, I guess we'll just have to whip up a few cupcakes to use it up - what a shame!  Cupcake anyone?...............

If you'd like to see the other cakes we've made click here and here and here!

Another Birthday Cake

Here's the latest cake creation, and I'm pleased to say this one went a lot better than the last one. No disasters in the kitchen this time and I was getting on better with the icing.



We were asked to do a cake featuring a man playing on a PlayStation, I had a photo of the man in question so I could get a resemblance (hope he's not too offended!).


I was told he had a PlayStation 2 and that he liked playing war games and racing games, I opted for the war game to display on the TV screen.

So here he is enjoying a game on the PlayStation.

My husband had to make do without his mixer for this cake, he had to put some good old fashioned elbow grease into it. Despite his worries the cake turned out well.

The only bad thing is, we won't get to have a piece of this cake :(

Birthday Cake

It's my sister's birthday today and to celebrate we're having a get together with some friends at my house tonight. My husband likes to bake so he said he'd make her a cake (which means I help out with the decorations and cleaning!). As we both have to work today we were busy cake making last night.

We'd come up with a fairy garden theme, complete with a little cottage, pond, gnomes and toadstools, and of course a fairy. I did a sketch of what we had in mind. A bit ambitious perhaps but we thought we'd have a go.

My sketch of the cake

It took a long time to decorate and the kitchen looked like an icing sugar bomb had exploded with some butter cream and food colouring mixed in! As if that wasn't enough mess, Jay's hand mixer decided to burn out (literally), the motor started making a funny noise, then I noticed it glowing blue and orange through the vent! He turned it off just in time before the whole thing went up in flames, but there was plenty of smoke and a rather strong burning smell. Time to move the cake out of the kitchen while we tried to get rid of the smoke! Come to think of it, I've been involved in a few incidents in the kitchen where something's caught or nearly caught fire, maybe I should get a fire blanket or extinguisher!

Things weren't going too bad, although mixing coloured fondant icing was a bit time consuming, so I reverted to painting some of the objects with the food colouring. Sculpting with fondant icing is quite tricky, it's too soft, I managed to make the fairy (just) but had to give up on the idea of gnomes and toadstools as they were too small and fiddly to sculpt out of fondant icing. I'm sure there're plenty of people that could manage it but I was losing patience and time was getting on.

Edible fairy wings!

The fairy wings are made out of edible wafer paper with coloured sugar sprinkles glued on (yes glue - but an edible version). I made the sugar sprinkles by putting some granulated sugar into a food bag, added a few drops of red food colouring and mixed it all together, and there you have it, some pink sugar sprinkles! We've used these coloured sugar sprinkles on top of cupcakes before, which adds a nice bit of sparkle and crunch.

Yummy cupcake with home made sugar sprinkles!

With everything pretty much finished, the cottage was done (which is basically a mini cake, sponge, jam, butter cream and covered in icing), the fairy was done, as were the pond and flowerbeds, all that was left to do was the piped icing shells around the bottom of the cake. For this we needed royal icing as it sets nice and firm, providing you get the mixture right. I don't think we'll have any problems with the royal icing setting firmly, the mixture was so stiff it was a job to pipe! I think it's safe to say that things weren't going too well with this cake, and we've done a few novelty type cakes in the past, none quite as eventful as this one.

So here's the finished cake



It's hardly in the same league as Ace of Cakes (a tv programme about Charm City Cakes, a bakery in America that do amazing novelty cakes) but I'm sure it'll taste great....I love birthday cake and can't wait to try a piece of it.


We've got another cake to do in a couple of weeks time, I hope that one goes smoother than this one did!