18th Birthday Cake

An 18th birthday cake I made last summer.

This was the first cake where I successfully rolled out the fondant large enough to cover the cake! It took a while to master it but I got there in the end.

There are a lot of stages involved in this cake decorating lark - I can see why cake shops charge so much money. It's exhausting - but really really fun and worth all the effort.

Chocolate & Vanilla Marble Cupcakes

I saw these in my Hummingbird Bakery recipe book and thought I have to have a go, as I've never made a marble type cake before. 

Hummingbird Bakery recipes are usually very American, therefore use plain flour with baking powder instead of self raising flour. They also use milk as well as butter. I personally don't like it very much as I find they make the cake too heavy & dense - I usually prefer using a lighter good ol' victoria sponge recipe - 6oz flour, 6oz sugar, 6oz butter, 3 eggs.

They came out OK apart from putting too much of the egg/milk mixture in the vanilla cake batter resulting in them not marbling very effectively - boooo! It's also important that the chocolate and vanilla icings are exactly the same consistency else it's a nightmare to get them to swirl nicely when icing the cupcakes. 

Multicoloured Macarons

So I've always avoided making Macarons because they look so faffy.

But yesterday I stumbled upon a recipe that had lots of reviews saying how easy they were to make. So I went for it. I even coloured them (that seems to be the 'in' thing to do).

The result - they don't look as perfect & smooth as they do on the recipe's photo, but they taste gooooood and went down very well at work. I'm not a huge fan of the multi-colouredness either, plus I didn't choose the nicest of colour combinations - purple & orange (complimentary on paper but not in food).

Always fun to experiment though.

I got the recipe from here http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/multicoloured-macaroons

American Style

Americans seem to use a circle nozzle to ice or 'frost' their cakes and it reminds me of erm....how shall I put this...doggie poop! But I've always wanted to give it a go. And now having given it a go, I quite like it!

These are chocolate banoffee cupcakes. Chocolate and banana sponge with toffee buttercream and grated chocolate on top.

I made the mistake of using a very under ripe banana and so the sponge tastes like very under ripe banana and has big banana chunks in it oops!

Sparkly Cupcakes

A few weeks ago my husband asked me to make a batch of 20ish cupcakes for the teachers at his school.

After 2 hours of kitchen carnage ta daaaa!

I used cream cheese icing and lots of edible glitter & sprinkles. I really need to track down some extra large piping bags but I haven't discovered any yet.

I've had good use out of these cupcake boxes - great for transporting large amounts of cupcakes in the cars rather than using hundreds of cake tins.

http://www.cupcakeboxesuk.com/Corrugated-Cupcake-Boxes/24-Corrugated-Cupcake-Box-White-6cm-Divider/flypage.tpl.html

Cath Kidston inspired cake

Here's a cake I made this week based on Cath Kidston designs http://www.cathkidston.co.uk/.

It was very fun to make. I still need to work on my fondant roses - the petals always stick together I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong?!

I think it'd look very cool as the top cake for a wedding with a tower of cupcakes underneath. I've run out of washing up energy to make any today though.