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