Category: Cake

Posted on

Happy Birthday to Me

It was my 40th birthday at the weekend. I wanted to do my own 80s themed birthday cake to use up some cake ingredients that I had in the house. We had a few celebrations planned to split out friends and family over the weekend, so naturally I ended up doing 2 cakes.

FAMILY CAKE

The first event we had was a meal with family on the Friday before my birthday. I had bought 2 packs”Cake Cream” from the Frost Form website last year when making my grandad’s 80th birthday cake and only used the one, so I decided to use that for the first cake and do a black cake again.

I used my ganache kit from Brigid’s to get the smooth lines on the cake again, but I still managed to layer the cake on a diaganol so one side of the buttercream was thicker than the other.

I had also bought some cake toppers to use on the top of the cake, which I cleaned and re-used on the second cake. Some of the decorations were edible (pink cake hearts, pink biscuits) but the rest were not.

CAKE NUMBER 2 – VEGAN FRIENDS

The second cake I made needed to be vegan to include some of my friends who were coming around on Monday. Thankfully, vegan cakes are far nicer than they used to be thanks to all the new ingredients available! This one was done to use some egg replacer that I got from Aldi earlier this year. The egg-stuff was gross as a scrambled egg replacer. Rather than just bin it, I decided to bake some vegan cake layers and freeze them for future use.

I made the full cake vegan by replacing dairy / animal products with vegan equivalent. The above egg replacer instead of eggs, Flora plant butter instead of butter / margarine, and oat milk instead of milk.

I had iced the cake and fully wrapped it in the freezer to make the baking less stressful on the week of my birthday. This is the “here’s one I made earlier” picture just before I decorated the cake. I wrapped the cake in baking paper, then cling wrap, then tin foil to keep it as air-tight as possible in the freezer,

And this is the finished version once I added the re-used decorations from the cake on Friday:

The cake layers in this one had definitely moistened and look dense in the picture, but they tasted lovely!

At the end of the weekend and events, I sliced up what was left and took it all to work to pass on to my workmates, as there’s only so much cake I can allow myself to eat at home!

Posted on

Pretty Retirement Cupcakes

My mum retires this month and has a retirement lunch with her workmates today so I made her cakes to take along.

They are lemon and raspberry cupcakes with edible flowers. They’re all a combination of:

  • Lemon or raspberry cake
  • Lemon or raspberry buttercream
  • Lemon curd or raspberry conserve
  • Crushed (homemade) meringue and raspberry powder
  • Edible flowers

I ended up with spare buttercream, so I made a few more for people to share this week too:

Happy Retirement, Mum!

Posted on

Severance Themed Birthday Cake

My friend is 40 today. He’s the penultimate person in our quiz-friend group to turn 40, with me being the last one next month. We all have a love for the TV show, Severance, so I decided to make a cake for his birthday based on this.

I usually lack my own ideas and look to the internet for inspiration… but there were so few out there! I had to use my own imagination.

The front of the cake / balloon was based on a TV poster for season 2:

I then went for the “numbers” for the rear of the cake.

The cake itself was verrrrrryyyyy soft. I ussed plant butter for the buttercream (just as it’s so much cheaper than butter) but I added some liquid to it like I do with usual buttercream and this led to a very soft consistency. It held shape, but it did not hold up to being sliced with a butter knife at the pub. At least it tasted AMAZING!

Posted on

Astronaut Space Cake – Amber’s 10th Birthday

It’s Amber’s 10th Birthday!

Amber is my eldest niece, and I’ve made her birthday cakes every year since she was born. Usually, I make a cake based on her request and over the years this has included:

  • Unicorn Cake
  • School Cake
  • Minecraft Cake
  • Rainbow Ballerina Fairy Caterpillar

Her birthday falls quite soon after Christmas, and often the ideas come my way later on. This year, I asked if I could just run with my own idea and I was told to “have fun with it”. In school last year, Amber learnt about space and has been really interested in it ever since. She was jealous that we went to visit NASA in Houston on our trip last year, so I knew that I wanted to make her a “space” themed cake.

I made a fondant cake topper astronaut with its helmet off, so that I could try model a character of Amber to sit on the cake. The glasses were the hardest part for me – I couldn’t make them out of icing (too fiddly) so I ended up stripping a pipe-cleaner instead.

The planet on the top of the cake was made using a round silicon mold that a workmate gave me in December as they weren’t going to use them… never has something come to me so perfectly timed.

I was scared that they’d snap when trying to remove them from the mold, but they came out intact – hooray!

I tried to make the letters for “AMBER” in the same planet design, but the chocolate didn’t quite fill the molds. I still used them though – never waste food!

The cake was a “standard” birthday cake: Vanilla cake, strawberry jam & vanilla buttercream. I iced the cake by hand (didn’t use my cake coating kits for ths one) and used a scraper to achieve the colouring on the outside of the cake. I used a base of light-pink coloured buttercream and them added purple, magenta and silver for the pink “galaxy” effect.

I used a paint brush to apply the silver star splatter, and used some fancy sprinkles that my friend got me for Christmas to add stars to the outside.

After adding the planet and the astronaut topper, I used some cake balls to add some additional planet design to the outside of the cake.

We presented the cake today, then cut some slices for people to enjoy – I was really happy with how this one turned out.

Posted on

Christmas Cake

The first time I’ve made my own Christmas Cake… just because I felt like it! I LOVE fruit cake (not everyone does) and made this 8 inch cake in case anyone in my family fancied it this week.

So far, I’ve only tried some cake scraps when I trimmed the top of the cake to flatten it off (and they were goooooood):

The cake is topped with marzipan and fondant icing (as is standard) but I used a ginger preserve to stick the marzipan to the top.

To finish the cake, I decided to make fondant gonk alongside holly and berries:

The gonk is a simple design but I like how effective it is.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Posted on

Homemade Yule Logs

I remembered this weekend how much I enjoy baking when I do it just for fun and not because I HAD to bake for someone.

I decided to try making a yule log for the first time and had a look online. I found a recipe for a larger pan so I did 3/4 the amount as I had a smaller tray.

I made a whipped white chocolate cream ganache filling using 200g double cream and 200g white chocolate.

The recipe I followed said to roll the Yule log lengthways (longest side) but due to the thickness of my cake and filling it ended up looking like an arctic roll.

I coated the outside of the log with a dark chocolate ganache buttercream & found when I was finished that I had too much coating left. Being me, I decided to make another Yule log to use the excess filling and coating.

I made the second Yule log with less ingredients to make a thinner cake in the hope that it would be easier to roll. This time, I rolled from the thinner end to get more of a swirl

I used the leftover coating to cover the Yule log:

I assume it’s because I left the coating overnight, but the second Yule log looked far darker than the first even though it was the same mixture.

Overall, I was really happy with how these turned out. They look OK, and taste really good! Marry Christmas to me & my family!

Posted on

King Cake

I didn’t realise how long it had been since I last posted. I’m still baking – honest. This week was my husband’s birthday, and instead of making a normal birthday cake, I tried to make him a “King Cake”

King cake is something we discovered last year in New Orleans that plays a huge part of Mardi Gras celebrations. I’ve been to New Orleans twice – though never at Mardi Gras. We went to the “Mardi Gras World” Museum where they gave up samples of King Cake, and I was hooked. The below was the sample cake we had at Mardi Gras World

The “cake” is actually a bread dough similar to cinnamon buns, but one strand contains cinnamon sugar and the other contains a cream cheese filling.

This was my attempt at the spiralled strands:

Once baked, the cake is topped with an icing made from icing sugar, lemon juice and cream cheese, and then coated with Mardi Gras coloured sugars (gold, purple and green).

My result was rather TOO dense – but tasted a lot better if warmed up for 30 seconds in the microwave. You could just about see the cinnamon layer, but the cream cheese filling vanished in the dough:

Posted on

Birthday Blondies

Another 40th birthday, and this time I opted to make some blondies with a loving message on the top.

I made the letters for the top and kept them in the freezer until ready. They were literally just made by melting white chocolate and using a silicon letter mold.

The blondie recipe is from Jane’s Patisserie, but I mixed the chocolate chunks instead of just white chocolate. Mine have milk, dark and blonde chocolate chunks as well as some Biscoff biscuits.

You can see the mix-ins in this picture:

I topped the blondies with a ganache made from Blonde chocolate and double cream (3:1 ratio). I made around 420g of ganache so weighed out into 70g portions and coloured them with oil-based colours.

I piped rough stripes diagonally across the blondies whilst still in the pan and allowed to set slightly before adding the lettering.

I liked how the lines ended up – very trippy!

I finished the blondies with edible glittery.

The recipient took this picture of the sliced blondie this morning – and it looks great if I do say so myself!

Posted on

Giraffe Birthday Cake

I have the pleasure to occasionally dog-sit for Betty the Bulldog. This is a picture of Betty a few years back on her birthday when I made her pupcakes…

Anyway, Betty’s owner asked me if I could make a cake for her grandson’s first birthday. I was given a picture as inspiration, but she lets me go with my own design.

This was what I made:

It is 5 layers of vanilla cake sandwiched with vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam.

Because the weather was warmer last week, I decided to coat the cake with a white chocolate coating instead of buttercream as I figured it would be more stable during the warmer weather.

I made the topper from fondant, following this guide online

and I kept the cake in my fridge until collected to ensure it was as fresh as possible (I made it the day before collection). Here it is sharing a shelf with my cold brew:

The balls were only decorative and bought online – I don’t have the skill to make my own!

Posted on

Birthday Bunny Cake

The youngest niece asked for a bunny cake for her birthday…

She is always quite indecisive when it comes to what she wants, though my husband had a conversation with her on video the other week that went something like:

“What cake do you want?”

“A Bunny Cake”

“What Colour?”

“Orange”

“What Flavour”

“Erm, Chocolate”

So I at least had the guidelines of what to aim for with this one (though the end product was more of a browny-orange than actual orange).

I started by baking 5 layers of chocolate cake, and making a chocolate buttercream:

After that wa stacked, I wrapped it in cling film until I needed it and put it in the freezer. In the mean time, I made fondant cut-outs for the bunny’s face / ears:

I had decided to pipe the fur on (vanilla buttercream) using a nozzle that frustrated me loads as it keps pushing through the piping bags due to its shape. Thankfully I got through it though after 6 piping bags.

The top of the cake had a “crown” of various colours (again, asked for by the birthday girl” and I put the cake in the fridge overnight until her party. The ears had to wait until the party itself as they were too tall for any of my fridge shelves, and I couldn’t be bothered to re-jig the shelving.

I usually write “Happy Birthday” using fondant on the cake board, but I’ve been using a silicon mold with chocolate recently for brownie slabs. I did the same for this cake, though they nearly didn’t fit on the board due to them being bigger than my fondant cutters.

I added sprinkes first (Easter-themed ones) then melted chocolate and allowed them to set

The party was yesterday, and the cake was cut – and it was decadent!! Very rich chocolate cake and buttercream. The funny thing is, although I LOVE cake, I don’t really like chocolate cake that much and so I didn’t bother having any myself:

We cut the slices to half height because people were VERY full of sugar and food already!