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.
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.
This cake was done as part of the Free Cakes for Kids group that I bake for. The spec: Frozen – she especially loves Elsa.
I looked online for some inspiration, and opted to make Elsa using a cake topper / cut out. When I looked for cake toppers, I thought they were over-priced for what they were. I figured I’d buy a birthday card to use but then saw a gift bag for 99p when in Poundstretcher:
Seeing the chance to save some money, I got the bag & made my own topper using kebab sticks
The drip was made with white chocolate and silver lustre dust. I added some sprinkles and edible glitter for the finishing touches, as well as a candle I picked up at Asda for £1
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.
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.
Lemon Gin Cake
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.
Spiced Courgette Cake
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!
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:
Back in January, i made a unicorn cake for my eldest niece. When I posted a picture of it on the socials, a friend (jokingly) commented when her birthday was. I noted to make her a unicorn cake for her birthday which I dropped off at her house as a surprise.
It was only after I dropped it off and looked at the pictures did I realise that I had forgotten to make some ears for the unicorn. Oh well! She liked it anyways.
The cake was made with red-velvet Baileys so the pink colour actually came from using the Baileys.
Luckily for me, there was spare cake at the end from trimming the top layers, so I made some mini cakes for me & my Husband:
One of the girls who I used to play Roller Derby with got in touch with me earlier in the summer to ask if I’d be willing to make her son’s first birthday cake as she had always loved my cakes (what a nice compliment!). I can be fussy when it comes to making cakes as I don’t usually like using fondant – at least not to cover cakes.
She asked for chocolate cake, with something jungle themed. went for this:
Jungle Cake + Cupcakes
The cupcakes were made to have little animal cake toppers on, which were a tad easier than icing a full cake in fondant. I was happy with this one, although I couldn’t get the buttercream quite perfect. I need to buy a new cake scraper to see if a metal one works better than plastic.
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 escapeFormed the pretzelsAfter the Pretzels had their water bathAfter baking
