Another bake this month was this “Mini” cake for my Grandma’s 80th Birthday. We made a hamper for her full of nice things, and the cake was a small addition.
It’s just vanilla cake, with jam and vanilla buttercream. The daffodils are fake.
Brain Cake
I feel really into Halloween this year. I’ve got plans to carve two bulldog pumpkins (One for work and one for home) and I’ve just spent today decorating mini pumpkin cakes made from mini bundt cakes.
Yesterday, we went to our friends’ house for a Halloween gathering.
Although we went Day of the Dead style (thanks to some half price outfits purchased last year), they had a “mad science” theme so I decided to have a go at making a brain cake.
I started earlier in the week by baking some vanilla cake layers and dyed them with red food dye. I had ran out of gel colour though and had to resort to liquid – this resulted in pink cakes and not red. I covered in a buttercream coating, and shaped it as best as I could work out freehand…
I used fondant (dyed ivory and pink) to make the “brain tissue”. I then just attached it in swirly patterns to make my brain.
After completing the first half of the cake, I continued the “twizzling” with the other side of the cake until it was fully covered.
To finish the cake, I covered it in a seedless strawberry jam which gave it a shiny, bloody glaze:
Everyone told me that it turned out well – I was really impressed with it as it was quite a low effort cake!
Last Minute Wedding Cake
This post was originally on my old website, but figured it was another good one to share on here….
In November, my parents’ friends were let down by their cake maker and I got asked around a week before if I’d be able to make something for them. I could do anything – their theme was poppies as they were getting married on Remembrance Day. This was the results of my labour:
I spent most of the evenings in the run up to their wedding making things for the cake. Due to the last minute request, I had no time left to book any leave from work. I ended up making over 100 cupcakes (red were vanilla and white were lemon). I made the poppy toppers by hand cutting out and shaping fondant, and topping with glitter.
The top of the cake tower was a three layer vanilla sponge with jam and buttercream. It was not quite as neat as I would have liked, but the fondant tore three times when I was trying to decorate it, and this was the best I could manage at 10pm the night before their wedding!
It didn’t turn out too bad though – and the bride and groom were very happy with the result:
Rainbow Cake
The above was the result of being asked to make a “rainbow cake”. The inside consisted of seven different colour layers (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet).
I covered the cakes in vanilla buttercream, and make multicoloured ganache drips for the top.
I decorated using white chocolate jazzie sweets, white chocolate bark, and rainbow jelly laces.
First Birthday Cake
It was my niece’s first birthday last week and I got asked to make her birthday cake. There were no requirements other than to make it cake flavoured.
I did have a busy weekend (a 10k run, as well as setting up for the birthday party) which meant I didn’t do anything fancy on the inside. Instead I just went for vanilla layers with jam / buttercream between them. I iced the outsides with vanilla buttercream and then added the pastel layers.
Cake Contest – Drip Cake
CaWe have a lot of charity events at work and a while back they hosted a baking contest where we could enter any baked good, and after judging the cakes would be cut up and sold off for charity.
I had been seeing lots of Drip Cakes on Instagram at the time, and so I decided to get a little crazy.
I made vanilla and chocolate marble layers, iced with vanilla buttercream and then decorated with White Chocolate bark, and cake truffles (made with off cuts of the cake).
I came second in the contest, but this won me an extra day’s paid holiday from work, so I was happy with that result!
