baking – Kayleigh baking

February 15, 2024February 28, 2024

Ganaching Kit / Cookies and Cream Cake

I have been eyeing up the Frost Form Kit for a while now, but I just couldn’t spend that much money for it as a novice / home baker. The 6” kit is currently selling for £66 which for me is a lot. That’s not saying it’s not worth it, just that it wasn’t something I was willing to invest in.

Last month, I stumbled across a similar product called “Brigid’s Ganaching Kit” which to me looked very similar. The 6” kit was on offer on Cake Cabinet for £19, so I took a punt and ordered one last month. I realised you can order direct from the company who make them though, so check out Brigid’s Cake Room

	Frost Form	Brigid’s Ganaching Kit
Clear Form / Tin	YES	NO
Base	YES	NO
Base liner	YES	YES
Crumb Cutter	YES	NO
Liner	YES	YES
Bottle	NO	YES

You don’t get as much in the Brigid’s kit, but the things I was missing I already had – I have a 6” cake pan with detachable base. I have a 5” crumb cutter to trim my cake layers, so I figured I’d have everything I need.

I made a cake yesterday with no purpose other than testing the kit out. I baked 5 layers of vanilla cake with Oreo crumb, allowed them to cool, then trimmed them with my crumb cutter. I set up the Ganaching kit as per instructions, and began to build my cake*

I had 5 layers of cake, with vanilla buttercream and Oreo crumbles in each layer.

Once it was stacked, I made a white chocolate butter ganache mixed with Oreo powder. I added it to the bottle, then realised it wouldn’t come out of the spout due to the crumbs inside, so I just poured it over the cake instead.

I put the cake in the freezer for an hour to set, and then came the reveal

There was a tear in the ganache, but this was entirely my fault as the cake was pretty much touching the liner at this part & I hadn’t realised. I was ecstatic with the result though for a first go!

What you can see when I cut the cake is that the ganache is a lot thicker on some slices than others. Again, this was entirely down to me stacking the cakes slanted without realising.

*I should have been more careful in building the cake as it ended up leaning to the side. This was entirely my fault and I reckon I could have added ganache around the edging as I added each layer to keep it more in line.

My next test will be a buttercream coated cake.

July 4, 2023July 4, 2023

3 cakes in 1 day

It was our niece’s 6th birthday celebration on Sunday, and add to that it was the Brother in Law’s 40th that weekend too, so we decided to surprise him at her 6th Birthday “party” at our house. That was 2 cakes.

I had also kindly agreed to make a cake for a friend’s mum’s birthday, so that meant 3 cakes to sort on Saturday. I’ve never felt more like a baker, and it took the full day to decorate them all.

I’d pre-baked the layers (5″ rounds of vanilly cake for the niece, and chocolate cake for the other two) and kept them in the freezer. They always turn out amazing & it makes it so much easier to decorate from frozen.

This was the fridge throughout the Saturday:

It was just as well we have a big fridge & that what little food was in there condensed to the bottom shelf & drawers at the bottom.

These are the finished cakes that I ended up making that day:

And a few more shots of the cakes on the day:

July 3, 2023

Pride Cake

We had a Pride Day at Zen and I volunteered to bake cakes for it. I originally planned to do my striped rainbow cake again, but I couldn’t be bothered with the effort to dye and pipe all the buttercream.

I instead came up with a painted version with fondant toppers:

The main cake was vanilla sponge with strawberry jam, vanilla buttercream, and rainbow sprinkles.

I also made some vegan cupcakes to go with it – 6 each of Vanilla and Chocolate cupcakes.

Posing with my creation in all my rainbow-glory

May 15, 2023

Practice Practice Practice

I made another rainbow striped cake, this time for someone who asked me to make one for their sister’s birthday.

The stripes were definitely better this time around:

I added the banner on the top as I felt it just added that something to the cake – originally it was just going to have the candles on, but I liked the banner better. Thankfully, they did too!

The cake itself was chocolate cake layers and chocolate buttercream on the inside, then white chocolate and vanilla buttercream on the outside.

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023

Buttercream Blues

The last couple of cakes I have made really annoyed me as the buttercream kept “splitting” / going grainy and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to be smooth. I tried hacks like adding in a spoonful of melted butter which looked like it made it better, then it just went grainy again. You can see it on the Minecraft I did earlier this month too.

The next time I make a cake, I’m going to be super meticulous in every step to see if I can remedy this. Sadly, I didn’t have the time / energy to re-do buttercreams when I made my dad’s birthday cake this weekend.

Thankfully, my family all thought it was good, but I knew it should have been far better than this. I’m not perfect, but I know my own capabilities and it should have been better than it turned out.

The plus side – it was still edible 🙂

October 20, 2020

Autumn Carrot Cake

I had a request to make an “autumnal carrot cake” and this was what I made

The cake was a carrot cake recipe taken from Chelsweets, though I only used half the amount on her site. It was a good cake!!

The cake was stacked, and iced with cream cheese frosting, and I coloured some fondant to cut out the leaves (with a plunger set from Amazon).

September 21, 2020

Loaf Cakes

L-R: Lemon Gin Cake, Lemon Drizzle Cake, Spiced Courgette Cake.

I was trying to keep myself busy a few weeks back to distract from feeling sad (one of my friends had died and we had been to his funeral). This resulted in me spending a Saturday afternoon in the kitchen baking up some random loaf-cakes. I didn’t originally plan on making three cakes, I just got carried away again.

The first cake I made was a lemon + gin pound cake. This is made using equal weights of egg, sugar, butter and flour, and then adding gin and lemon juice to the mixture. Normally you can really taste the gin, but on this occasion I must have gone too easy. It’s topped with a gin + lemon soak.

The second cake I made was a vegan cake: spiced courgette cake with a lemon glaze. This was made following a recipe from Domestic Gothess that turned out so well I made the cake again the weekend after!

The third cake I made this day was a vegan lemon drizzle cake; again made with a recipe from Domestic Gothess

Again, this turned out really well and was very tasty!

As I wasn’t ever going to eat 3 loaf cakes to myself, I ended up slicing them all up and packaging them into cellophane wrappers to send to some people in the post as a pick-me-up / thank you for their help over recent weeks. It was a LOT of cake:

September 3, 2020

Soft Baked Pretzels

How is it that we’ve been in lock down since March, and I still feel that there’s no time to do anything (aka keep this blog updated). Looking back through my photos, I’ve got loads of bakes that I hadn’t uploaded from the last few months, so I suppose this means I’ll have quite a few posts to add over this week!

First up – soft baked Pretzels!

I’ve been following Neurotic Mom on Instagram for quite a while now. Amy adds her bakes there, as well as other channels including You Tube. I took this upon myself to follow one of her recipes by making soft baked pretzels back in May!

I usually only bake cakes, as bread seemed scary. I had some quick yeast in though so decided it was time to try some bread baking. Following Amy’s video made it all really easy – and I had yummy pretzels to eat that week (including some beer cheese I made the next day to go with the savory pretzel)

Left the dough proving slightly too long – it tried to escape

March 29, 2020

Social Distancing Baking

It’s a struggle to try and pretend that everything is normal at the moment, but I still wanted to do some baking and spread some joy to people (whilst keeping my distance, of course).

I had two people to make some cakes for and do a doorstep drop & run (cakes on doorstep, knock on door, run away).

The first batch I made were Red Velvet Cupcake Baileys cupcakes. This was made using the limited edition “Red Velvet Cupcake” Baileys, and resulted in some pink cakes (no food colour used, this was solely the colour of the Baileys).

FOR THE CAKES
1/4 Cup Butter
1/2 Cup Sugar
1 Egg
1/4 Cup Baileys (red velvet)
1/4 Cup, + 1/4 of the 1/4 cup Self-Raising Flour
1/4 Cup + 1/3 of the 1/4 cup Plain Flour

FOR THE ICING

1/4 block butter
Red Velvet Baileys
Icing Sugar

The second cupcakes were for my Sister-in-law and these ones were chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing.

For the Cakes

1/2 Cup Sugaer
1/2 Cup Plain Flour
1/4 cup Cocoa Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Baking Soda
Pinch Salt
1 Egg
3 Tablespoons Milk
2 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 Cup Coffee

For the Buttercream

1/4 block butter
Cocoa Powder
Icing Sugar
Milk

Chocolate batter and Red Velvet Baileys batter before baking

February 19, 2020

Anonymous Cake – February

The weather so far this month has been awful! High winds, multiple storms, and what feels like non-stop rain. It’s been sad to see people’s homes and businesses impacted yet again by the weather. Sadly, some of my old roller derby friends were impacted by flooding again, so I wanted to do a little something to cheer them up a tiny bit.

I made some PB&J blondies and boxed them up to post to them anonymously (unless they read this blog, in which case – oops!)

I used this recipe that I found online for the blondies. I then added a small bag of chocolate chips to the mix, and topped with white chocolate ganache.

Once they had cooled down, I cut them in to squares and put into cellophane bags. I posted them and thankfully I knew that they had arrived as my friend put a post on Instagram asking who the sender was (I still haven’t owned up).

Next up, I need to think about what to bake & give away in March!