Violets on a Cake

I made this cake for one of my friends in work, it was her Grandma's 90th Birthday. It was quite a challenge as I have never actually made flowers out of sugar modelling paste before (and I do not want to for quite some time after this cake!)

The Project: 90th Birthday Cake
The Theme: Violets
Ingredients:
For the Cake
16oz Self Raising Flour
16oz Sugar
16oz Margarine
8 Eggs
For the Icing
Butter Icing and Jam for the middle
One pack of purple sugar modelling paste
2 packs of white royal icing
Yellow Dusting
Purple Dusting
Small amounts of yellow royal icing
Purple ribbon

The part that scared me the most about making this cake, were the flowers. I had to start with them first to ensure that they were dry enough to place on the cake

I needed the modelling paste to work it into a play dough like consistency, making it easier to work with. I rolled out a very thin section and cut 5 petals out of it

Once they were cut out, the petals were weaved in between each other and placed on a spoon to raise the edges of the petals, giving the flower a raised, more realistic look.

Using one of my tools that I actually had free from a cake decorating magazine, I pushed down on the middle, creating a dip in the middle of the flower

I dipped a paintbrush, that is reserved especially for cake situations, in a pot of yellow powder and dusted the middle of the violet.

Using another brush that is also reserved for cake situations, I dusted the edges of the violet with a darker purple, which helped give each flower depth. 

Each flower was left to dry out whilst I made the rest of the cake. 
I made two 8oz cakes, both square and both plain sponge. 

I iced the middle with Jam and butter icing and coated the outside of the cake lightly with Jam to ensure that the royal icing would stick to the cake. I coated the cake and made the plaque for the Happy Birthday writing to go on later. 

I checked on the flowers (which had actually been left overnight), and all seemed fine, I added two little balls of yellow royal icing to the middle of the flowers and they were ready to attach to the cake

Before sticking them down, I tied the ribbon around the cake, I wanted to avoid knocking flowers off later, so getting it over and done at this stage, seemed like the best idea. 
Using edible glue (which is one of the best inventions ever created, I might add), I stuck the flowers into place. There were a few catastrophes, some were dropped, some crumbled, some simply didn't make the cut, but I was happy with the results.

Now the only things left to do was to attach the bow and write on the plaque.

Whilst fiddling around to get the right look for the bow, I realised that I actually had no colouring for the icing. A quick trip to Hobbycraft and some self restraint from buying anything else in the shop other than what I needed, and I was back in my kitchen preparing the icing. 

Now, I owe a quick Thank You to someone here, by their recommendation I gave the paste a go. As you all know, I've struggled to find some good strong colouring. So Michelle, thank you very much for the recommendation, it worked like a charm! :)

Here's the finished result:

Overall I think it went quite well for my first attempt at flowers. I was quite pleased with it. But I'm not going to be volunteering to do many cakes that involve flowers. There were literal nightmares involved with this cake, which included me actually waking up from a dream in which I was told that they actually wanted daffodils. Over the years I'm sure I'll make more, but I hope it's not for a while!

Total Time Spent: 7 Hours
Useful Tips Gained: Creating flowers out of Sugar Modelling Paste
Kitchen Items to Purchase: Flower cutters if I ever do flowers again
Items added to Amazon Wishlist: Icing Smoother
Miscellaneous Items Wished for: New icing piping bag or tube, mine split whilst finishing off the writing

Gavin's Mighty Morphin Birthday Cake!

It was Gavin's 27th Birthday this week. It was a bit of a challenge to come up with something awesome to make a cake out of that I could make using butter icing (Gav's favourite type). Here is what I came up with:

The Project: Gavin's 27th Birthday Cake
The Theme: Power Rangers
Ingredients:
For the Cake:
18oz Butter
18oz Sugar
18oz Self Raising Flour
9 Eggs
9 Dessert Spoons of Cocoa Powder
For the Icing and Decoration:
Spare Cake Crumbs
Butter
Icing Sugar
Red Food Colouring
Cocoa Powder
Peppermint Flavouring
Cadbury Twirls
White Royal Icing
Black Royal Icing
Edible Silver Paint

I've made a helmet cake before (previous to the Bakerry Blog), so I knew how to assemble it and what I needed to do to prepare for it. 

After Baking the three chocolate cakes and waiting for them to cool, I mixed up the butter icing for the middle. I never measure the butter or the icing sugar, I always mix it by eye and then to taste, I find that using different butters can make the buttery taste unpredictable. I added cocoa powder and peppermint flavouring. I crumbled some Twirls into the icing too (keeping the pieces chunky); this made a somewhat delicious mint chocolate butter icing, to go nicely with the chocolate cake. 

To make the helmet shape, the cakes were stacked off centre

I did smooth down the edges on the front of the cake and I cut in a groove for where the mouthpiece will go, unfortunately I cleverly did not take a picture of that part though. The next step is to mix together some butter icing with cake crumbs, this ends up covering the cake as a bottom layer, allowing you to control the shape, making it smooth and adding curves where you need to. 

I had to pop it in the fridge to set for a little while as I was adding more butter icing on top of it. 

Once it was suitably set that it would not mix in with the outer layer of icing, I mixed together the butter icing with the red food colouring and began the decoration. I marked lightly with a knife where the visor would go, adding too much butter icing would mean that it would possibly slip down the cake, I wanted to ensure that the visor went onto the butter icing base. 

Once the white icing was rolled out and cut to shape, the messy job of adding it to the cake without getting covered in red icing, began. 

Then the gaps were filled in with the red icing. I rolled out extra white icing for the teeth and for the mouthpiece and put them to one side. I then prepared the black icing for the main part of the visor and stuck to the white. Happily in place, the teeth were cut and added one by one.

More white was used for the mouthpiece and the lips and stuck to the front of the helmet.
Extra red butter icing was added to the front of the visor to form the shape of the nose. Black icing was used for the eyes and the nostrils of the dinosaur.

The teeth and the mouthpiece were painted with the edible silver paint.

Once the front was finished, the detail needed adding to the top of the helmet to make up the rest of the face of the dinosaur. This was a bit tricky because I had to pipe this with black icing by hand, I marked roughly where I had to pipe.

All that was left was to write "Happy Birthday Gavling!" and the helmet of the Red Power Ranger cake would be finished

He liked the cake, the only difficulty I had was actually getting it to the restaurant in one piece. I need to remember to purchase bigger cake boxes.

Total Time Spent: 4 Hours, 30 minutes (not including chilling time)
Useful Tips Gained: Butter Icing based cakes are not as scary as they seem
Kitchen Items to Purchase: Stronger food colouring
Items added to Amazon Wishlist: None
Miscellaneous Items Wished for: Bigger Pallet Knife

Cinnamon and Butter Muffins

As usual on a weekend, I wake up pondering the possibilities of what to have for breakfast. On weekends like these then the cupboards look emptier than they usually do as we draw nearer to shopping day. After a spot of researching on Google for some inspiration, I stumbled on something that sounded so delicious that I had to send Gavin out to the shops to get some more butter so that I could make Cinnamon and Butter Muffins. Luckily, everything we had everything else on the list!

Ingredients:
Coating:
4oz Sugar
1/2 tbsp Cinnamon
7oz Butter
Muffins:
10oz Plain Flour
1 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Ground Nutmeg
6oz Butter
6oz Sugar
1 egg
200ml Milk

It's personal preference as to whether you want to start the muffin making first or prepare the coating. I started with a bit of both whilst I was waiting for the butter to arrive. 

The oven was preheated to 175°C.

I combined the Sugar and the Cinnamon together in a bowl and left it until later.

I was waiting for my butter at this point, so I started mixing together the dry ingredients for the muffins. I combined the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and nutmeg in a bowl and put to one side. 

Arrival of butter - Yay! Thank you Gavin!!

Now that I had butter, in a separate bowl (still making the muffins), I added the butter and sugar and mixed until fluffy, then I added the egg and mixed it in.The milk and the dry mix of flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt, was added gradually until it was combined.

The mixture was then divided into silicone cases and went into the oven for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, whilst the muffins were baking, I melted 7oz butter in a saucepan on a medium heat. The butter needed to go beyond just melting though, it needed to simmer for a bit and become transparent. Once we had got to that stage, it was set aside until the muffins were ready to come out of the oven.

When the muffins were ready, they were left to cool slightly, until I was able to pick them up without burning my fingers. I have built up a fairly high tolerance to picking up hot things over the years, so it was not too long until I was able to pick them up.

Holding onto the bottom half of the muffin, they were dunked into the butter, lightly shaken to get rid of excess butter and then rolled in the cinnamon and sugar mix.

As soon as the entire batch had undergone the process, they were ready to be served, they are best served warm, but I did read that you can bake them and pop them into the oven to refresh them if you need to make them a day ahead before adding the topping.

.

They were delicious. They are like a cross between doughnuts and muffins, because of the cinnamon taste, they remind me of Christmas, so much so that I am considering serving them on Christmas morning.

We served them with Bacon drizzled in maple syrup, which was suggested during my Google research, but the general consensus was that the taste of the bacon jarred with the cinnamon. Perhaps they are best served by themselves with a nice cup of tea, that's my future plan anyway. 

James' 18th Birthday Cake

I've been quiet for a few weeks on the baking front and this is why. Novelty cakes take quite a lot of planning and this one was the biggest project that I have ever done. 

The Project: James' 18th Birthday Cake
The Theme:  Computers
Ingredients:
For the cake:
36oz Self Raising Flour
36oz Sugar
36oz Butter
18 eggs
For the middle and first layer:
Several boxes of icing sugar
Butter
Cake crumbs (for the first layer only)
For the decoration:
5 and 1/2 packs of black icing
2 Cadbury Wispas
4 Nestle Milky Bars
Silver Paint
Edible Glue
White icing
Liquorice Laces

This cake had 4 elements to it, as all computers do; a tower, mouse, keyboard and monitor. There's usually a couple of things that make me nervous about certain cake projects and with this particular cake, I had one main worry; the monitor. An old fashioned monitor would have been no problem at all, however this is 2013 and flat screens are the norm. This is where things got creative, chocolate was the only answer.

I started with the monitor, I needed time for it to set and it was the piece that was worrying me the most. 

I melted 4 bars of Milky Bar (the big kind), in a bowl over a saucepan. Whilst that was slowly melting and smelling more and more delicious by the second, I lined the tin with foil and partitioned it as my tin was too big. When the chocolate was melted, I poured it into my lined tin and let it cool, then popped it in the fridge

I only actually have one rectangular tin, so I could not start the cake baking until it had set.

On with the baking. I made 3 tins of cake, estimating that I would need three layers for the tower, one layer for the keyboard, some for the mouse and some for the butter icing mix that holds it together (Once again, I still need a bigger mixing bowl) There was a lot of sponge cutting involved but it was the least wasteful option. 

Now that I had my layers baked and iced. I mixed up some butter icing and crumbled some crumbs into it and spread it across the sponge that made up my keyboard. This mix sets and gives the cake an even and smoother finish. I did the same to the mouse and then to the tower and let them set.

Next, I rolled out some black icing and covered the tower, monitor and keyboard.

I covered the mouse, added two buttons and the middle scroll bar.

This is where the tricky decoration begins. I had to meticulously measure out the icing that was going to be used for the keys on the keyboard, position them to check it would fit, and then stick them down. 

Thankfully, there was very little detail work to be done on the tower. I added the two side vents first by rolling and cutting two squares of black icing. I then used one of my icing tools to create little holes, about halfway through the second one was when I started to lose the will to carry on slightly, but I persevered and managed to finish them. 

After they were safely attached I started work on the front of the tower. I made two buttons, two usb hubs three plain panels and...three more panels with holes in (marvellous).

I then added detail to the buttons, jacks and usb ports by painting them silver

Having completed that, I realised (with the help of Gavin who actually pointed it out), that there should also be a fan on top. I had not accounted for that in my planning. A minor panic and a eureka moment later, I knew how it would work. Create the circle and the blades inside a square and add strips over the top. 

Now that the monitor chocolate was perfectly set and chilled, it was time to ice the edges and make the stands. I rolled out some more black icing and covered the edges

I then covered two Wispa bars in black icing and stuck one to the bottom of the monitor as the first part of the stand.

The final touch to the monitor was to pipe Happy 18th Birthday James.

Rather stupidly, I left the most difficult part until last; the piping of the keys, by this time it was getting late, and I very much regretted leaving it until last. However, I think it turned out quite well after a couple of attempts at a few of the letters and after I had developed a new hatred for the number 7 key with the "&" symbol

All that was left to do was to get it to the restaurant in one piece, stand the monitor up and add the cables. The stand didn't quite work, whether that was because it would not stick to the board or because the chocolate was still too cold, thankfully it was suggested that we use the menu stand behind it, which worked nicely. Project complete!

Total Time Spent: 11 Hours
Useful Tips Gained: avoid panicking, the answer will come to you
Kitchen Items to Purchase: Bigger mixing bowls, more rectangular/square tins
Items added to Amazon Wishlist: None
Miscellaneous items wished for: A kitchen elf to help clean up