Something Retro This Way Comes

Sometimes it's hard to come up with a project name when you are baking for people who read The BaKerry, this was one of them, even though the recipient of this cake - my big sister - had made a very unsubtle hint about wanting this design, I still wanted it to be a surprise.

I faced a few problems whilst making this cake, the first of which came up during the planning stages - would it be better to do a three layer cake on it's side, or a several layer cake that would be more stable but difficult to cut up for people to eat. I decided to go for the former and face the challenge - next time, it would have looked better if I had done the multiple layers though.

The Project: Something Retro This Way Comes
The Theme: A Red Phonebox
Ingredients:
For the Cake:
12oz Self Raising Flour
12oz Margarine
12oz Sugar
6 eggs
2oz Cocoa Powder
For the Icing:
Nutella
Butter Icing
1 Pack of Royal Icing
Red Colouring Paste
Black Colouring Paste
Green Colouring Paste
Black Edible Ink Pen

I made this cake as a chocolate cake with chocolate hazelnut butter icing in the middle (hence the Nutella in the ingredients list). I baked the cake in a rectangular tin and cut it into three. I then did the usual with the shaping butter icing and cake crumbs to increase the stability of the cake

Whilst it was drying out, I coloured the red icing. I covered the cake slightly differently than I usually would, usually I try and cover it with one whole piece of icing to avoid doing as many joins as possible. For this cake, I covered each side at a time and the top last. Thankfully I did not have to worry about the joins too much, because the edges are covered with more red anyway - yay!

Once covered, I rolled strips of red for each corner edge of the cake and stuck them down. I also created a strip of rolled red icing to go between where the sign and the door will go

The next step involved creating a dark grey icing colour for the windows in the door. I wanted to make the windows first and carve out the door around it afterwards. For the below, I rolled out a rectangle of the grey icing and made red strips to lay over the top.

Once secure, I was able to then carve out the door frame and make a little postbox too. Using some of the white royal icing, I made the signs for each side. I used the black edible ink pen (yes I bought another one!) to write Telephone onto the sign - it was less fiddly than creating letter shapes that small. 

Because I was basing this phonebox on a particular one (that still stands in the little hamlet where my family used to live), which is surrounded by grass and trees on the side of a quiet countryside road; I wanted to cover the bottom of the phonebox in grass. Cutting pieces of white icing in the shape of grass and applying it to the cake, I then used the green colouring paste to paint onto the grass, giving it a nice effect with the different greens

Overall, I was quite pleased. As I said at the beginning, I would do it slightly differently with the cake layering if I ever had to make one of these (or something similar) again, even if it means that people have a seven layered cake :)

Total Time Spent: 4 hours
Useful Tips Gained: Stop thinking ahead about how the cake will be eaten
Items to Purchase: Fine, I've added an Icing Smoother to my Amazon Basket - no more moaning about an Icing Smoother in this section!
Items Added to Amazon Wishlist: Cake Cutting Wire - it just looks like something I need in my life!!
Miscellaneous Items Wished For: More edible pens, I think the possibilities are endless for these with cake decorating, so many finer details that are easier to do because of them!

A Magical Birthday Cake

So it's been a few weeks since my last post. Unfortunately I have had to put a couple of my planned projects aside for a couple of reasons, one being that our little puppy Raph had to have surgery on his leg, which has meant a lot of running around to vets and pet hospitals. 
We have him back now though, and although he has a lot of healing to do, I'm pleased to have him home :)

I had to make this cake for a friend of ours, I had originally planned to make it for her actual birthday, however we were unable to see her on the day and therefore it became a nice little belated surprise!

I really loved making this cake, I had a few ideas on what I could have done, and there are millions of Harry Potter cakes out there, but I am really pleased with the results.

The Project: A Magical Birthday Cake
The Theme: Harry Potter
Ingredients:
For the Cake:
10oz Sugar
10oz Margarine
10oz Self Raising Flour
5 Eggs
Purple Food Colouring Paste
For the Icing:
1 pack of White Royal Icing
1 small pack of Brown Royal Icing
Black Food Colouring Paste
Purple Food Colouring Paste
Red Food Colouring Paste
Yellow Food Colouring Paste
Edible Gold Paint
Edible Ink Blue Pen
Lots of Icing Sugar

Gavin challenged me to make more interesting cakes, not just in the icing and decoration, but also in the cake. This gave me the idea of making this cake as magical on the inside as I wanted the outside to be. I mixed together the usual cake mixture and added purple food colouring paste.

The colour turned out perfectly, although there was a slight discolouration on the tops of the cake, I was cutting it away to shape the cake anyway, but the inside was a beautiful colour.

You cannot very well have a lovely purple cake without purple icing to match, so the icing in the middle of the cake was the same beautiful purple too

Next I had to start the shaping process, aside from cutting the cake in half and stacking it, as shown above, I needed to round off the edges and create a groove to form the shape of the book.

The next step was to cover the cake in the base layer of icing. I needed to make the icing off white, to give the feel of an old book. For this, I kneaded some cocoa into the icing, it gave the pages the aged colouring that I was after.

I covered the cake and used the Brown icing to form the front, back and spine of the book and tucking it underneath the cake all the way around.

I still didn't really feel that the top of the cake was book like enough, it seemed too smooth. So using some leftover tinted icing, I rolled out a thin piece to lay over the top loosely, bringing my Open Spell Book plan to life.

Every cake has it's painfully dull moments. This one was the page indentations around every edge. trying to keep the lines straight when the needed to be straight and curved when they needed to be curving away from the spine.

Although it was not a fun task to do by hand, once they were painted with the edible gold paint and each line matched up with another, I no longer wanted to throw it out of the window and deny all knowledge of a cake.

Now that the main part of the cake was complete, I could start on the decorations. The biggest one was the Gryffindor scarf that I wanted casually draped over the book. I rolled out the whole scarf in yellow, rolled a patterned rolling pin over the top to give it a knitted effect and then added the strips of red. I cut the ends of the scarf to look like tassels (which then turned out to be a complete nightmare to keep nice and straight when placing).

I was just going to use the top of the cake to write the birthday message, however Gavin persuaded me to look up the ingredients of one of the potions in Harry Potter and write it out. I chose the Polyjuice Potion, there are surprisingly few ingredient lists out there for real Harry Potter potions.

I then wrote the Birthday message on the other page, made a wand out of the rest of the Brown icing and used the black to make some Harry Potter glasses.

Then the cake was complete! Now the only thing left to do was to present it to the Birthday Girl!

Total Time Spent: 5 Hours

Useful Tips Gained: Just keep plodding along, it will look good eventually

Items to Purchase: I still need an icing smoother, I really need to buy one of those

Items Added to Amazon Wishlist: More edible pens, I love those things!

Miscellaneous Items Wished For: Surprisingly none this time.