Marzipan's Cakes

07/09/13 - Treacle tart

2013-09-07T22:15:00.001+01:00

I have a tendency to go into kitchen shops looking for one thing and come out with several other things I didn't know I needed... This happened the other day, when I was looking for some measuring spoons as my current set needs replacing.
I couldn't find any measuring spoons but I did find a Useful Thing - a pastry rolling mat which is marked so you know how big you've rolled out your pastry! Also a thing I've been meaning to get for ages - a lemon juicing device which catches the pips so you don't get crunchy bits in your pie.

So I needed something to bake to practise using these things, and I couldn't think what to make for a while and then I remembered how good the treacle tarts looked on last year's Great British Bake Off.
Here's the recipe. It even has lemon juice in it!

It took me a few days to get around to buying the ingredients, of course. But this evening I finally tried to make one.

The rolling mat it quite good, but it's hard to tell which line is which when you're not next to the numbers - it might have been better to have stripes than just circles. It's still good to have a flat surface big enough to roll out lots of pastry on though - I used to use a bread board. The lemon juicer got lots more juice from my lemons that my normal method of chopping in half and squeezing them by hand, but it didn't catch all the pips - perhaps I was holding it slanting downwards or something as I was at the kitchen table rather than a worktop.
So here's some pictures:

Pastry case ready for filling

Treacle mix to fill the pastry

Tart filled up to the brim!

Lattice on top

Just out of the oven

Tasty tasty treacle tart... if I'd realised how simple the recipe was, I'd have made one ages ago.

Here's some I made earlier: the year so far in cakes

2013-06-09T19:18:00.003+01:00

I do actually make cake more often than I write about them, because I am bad at remembering to write up my cakes. So here's a few I've made and forgotten to write about.
Start with the Christmas Cake. Okay that was really last year but I did forget to write about it!
Here in Ireland there is a bank holiday at the end of October, and I wanted to make my Christmas cake early so it could mature a bit so I decided to make it then.
The maturing didn't really work because I forgot to feed the cake but anyway I decorated it and we ate quite a lot of it (though not much got eaten on Christmas day on account of us eating too much dinner!)
Here it is:

Cake!

Closer look at the top

I decided to do a blue cake with bells and stars on it. Some of the silver dust went everywhere and the blue colouring stay on my hands for a few days but you get the general idea.

It took a while to get through the Christmas cake and all the mince pies so I didn't do much more baking till the end of January, when there was another Magic tournament to make cake for - the Gatecrash Prerelease. This cake was quite similar to the one I made in September for Return to Ravnica, except that the guild symbols were different. I don't have a picture of the finished cake, but here's one of the guild symbols all together:

And some close ups of each guild symbol:


Boros - Red and White	Orzhov - White and Black	Dimir - Black and Blue	Simic - Blue and Green	Gruul - Green and Red

February is birthday month so I made a ginger cake (again I forgot to take a picture!)
The recipe is from one of my mum's recipe books and it's super tasty so here goes:
Ingredients
1/4 pint (150ml) milk
1 teaspoon (5ml)bicarbonate of soda
4 oz (100g) butter
4 oz (100g) golden syrup
4 oz (100g) treacle
3 oz (75g) soft brown sugar
1 tablespoon (15ml) orange marmalade
4 oz (100g) self-raising flour
4 oz (100g) wholemeal flour
1 teaspoon (5ml) mixed spice
2 teaspoons (10ml) ground ginger
2 small eggs, beaten

(Instead of the wholemeal flour you can substitute 8 oz SR flour if you don't have wholemeal)

Method
Grease and line an 8 inch (20cm) round or 7 inch (18cm) square cake tin. Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the bicarbonate of soda and heat gently until tepid. Place the butter, syrup, treacle, sugar and marmalade in another saucepan and heat gently, stirring until the ingredients are combined and the sugar dissolved. Place the flours, mixed spice,ginger and a pinch of salt in a bowl and mix together thoroughly. Stir the treacle mixture into the dry ingredients, then add the warmed milk and beat well to a smooth batter. Beat in the eggs. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in a warm oven (160°C or 325°F or Gas mark 3) for 1 hour or until a fine skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely and remove the greaseproof paper.

Helpful notes from my mum on the method:
I mix the dry stuff first, then start the treacle mixture on the stove, then do the milk last so it doesn't go cold - it only needs to be slightly warm, you can test with your finger. You don't want it getting too hot as not only would it take ages to cool down but would probably do something dramatic to the bicarb! The mixture will be very runny (pretty much liquid) when you pour it into the tin. I leave the greaseproof paper round to keep it in shape until it was quite cold. I remember it was quite difficult to get a good shape and sometimes the sides of cake were bit funny where there were folds of greaseproof. But it needs to be all one piece of greaseproof (i.e. not separate sides & base) otherwise runny mixture will go through gaps when you pour it in. If you've got a silicone cake tin or cake tin shaped baking parchment liners that would be much better.

As for March baking, I covered most of that in my post at Easter.

April comes round, and another Magic cake to bake - this one for the Dragon's Maze Prerelease.
I spent a while thinking about making a cake with a maze on top, but in the end I made a cake with a dragon on instead.Apparently people were disappointed that it was fruit cake. Admittedly it was a bit dry (I was using gluten free flour which apparently needs more liquid than wheat flour) but I like fruit cake normally.

Red dragons are the best kind!

In May I didn't get much baking done so here's some pictures of striking bus drivers stopping me (and the rest of Irish commuters) from getting to work:

Walking picket line

There should be buses here!

The departure screens at the bus station lying about whether there would be buses

However that all got sorted out eventually (hooray) so now it is June and I made some more Magic cakes as there were more tournaments.
First of all I made a 'colour pie' for the five colours that there are in Magic.This is based on the fruit tarts you get in french patisseries (except I used a flan case instead of making a pastry one). I got the creme patissiere recipe from Nish Bakes blog. The creme patissiere is not too hard to make as long as you don't stop whisking until it's done! Mine was a bit runny in the end so perhaps I took it off the heat too soon.

Clockwise from top: green kiwi fruit, white banana, blackberries, red strawberries, and blueberries.

Then I made a chocolate cake as I'd been asked for one. I made my chocolate earl grey tea cake which i first made two years ago, and I iced it with buttercream and decorated it with mini marshmallows :

Marshmallows form the planeswalker symbol (again from Magic)

Oh and in case you didn't have enough pictures already, here are some of my friends baking cupcakes at my house. Well, eating cupcakes we had just baked.

Tasty cakes get eaten fast!

Very excited to have cakes!

Easter baking, and reading recipes properly

2013-03-29T21:51:00.000+00:00

It's not that I haven't been baking lately, I just haven't written about it.
So here's a post about some buns and messy kitchens.

Today being Good Friday, I decided to make some hot cross buns. (Organised people bake them the day before, but I am far from organised at the moment).
Now I've made hot cross buns before, to the recipe my mum uses, but I'd found another recipe (it's here) I wanted to try out (though they're all quite similar!)
So, as I've made them before, I don't really read through the recipe properly just the ingredient list, and checked how long they take to rise (for hot cross buns are made with yeast). It says 2 hours, and I have the afternoon off, so i think 'that's fine i can mix the dough now and bake them later before tea'
So I'm working away, following the recipe, kneading the dough, when I think 'that's funny hot cross buns have dried fruit in and i haven't added those yet'. Check the recipe, and it turns out this one is 'double proved' which means you knead it, let it rise a while, then knead it again and let it rise more before you bake it. So they will actually need 4 hours to rise, not 2. This screws with my meal-timetable slightly (not normally a problem but I have family visiting so I need to be eating at a normal time)

For tea I've planned to have Good Friday Fish (aka smoked haddock) with another recipe I've not read properly. But I look at it and it seems ok... till I notice there's poached eggs in the middle. By this time I'm using about 3 different pans anyway so we decide to leave out the eggs. The recipe says to steam the fish but my 'tiered steamer' consists of a colander over a saucepan so we decide poaching will be quicker to cook the fish properly.
At which point I remember the buns need baking....
So while the fish is poaching and the potatoes are cooking, we split the nicely risen dough into buns (whoops, I should have done that before the second lot of proving. Not that it makes a huge difference but again failing to read words on a page). I put the buns into the oven so that they can bake while tea's being eaten, and check the recipe for how long they need to bake for...

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Brush the buns with a little beaten egg. Mix the remaining flour with enough water to make a thick paste, then transfer to a piping bag fitted with a small round nozzle, or use a sandwich bag and snip off one corner. Use the paste to pipe crosses over the buns - this is easiest if you pipe in one big circle, then put a line across the middle of each bun. Bake for 25 mins until golden and cooked through.

Hmm... so the crosses were supposed to go on BEFORE I baked them? and the glaze too? whoops.

I blame my mum's recipe for the forgetting to glaze as her buns get glazed after they are baked (with sugar glaze not raw egg), but even hers put the crosses on before they get baked. As the buns had already gone into the oven, and dinner needed eating, I decided to used icing for the crosses instead and the sugar glaze.
Final buns look like this:


They aren't in a ring, either. But that was deliberate.	Tasty tasty buns

Which isn't too bad for not having baked them for three years or so, and failing to read the recipe right!

In more successful baking news, last week I made a Simnel cherry tart. I followed the recipe and it was lovely! (Kind of like a bakewell tart with a bit more marzipan). So it's not that I can't follow instructions! I forgot to take any pictures of that before it was eaten though.

Unhealthy oranges - 15/10/12

2012-10-16T19:11:00.003+01:00

So the tale begins a couple of weekends ago, when I was in Kinsale with family. We happened to go into a chocolate shop called Koko, and someone nice bought me chocolate covered orange slices.
As we were exchanging mooney for tasty chocolate, the man in the shop said 'I've just crystallised those oranges the other day, so they're nice and fresh'

And I ate the chocolate orange slices, and they were tasty, and I fancied some more, only I don't go to Kinsale very often.
So I thought, 'maybe I could crystallise some orange slices? Sure it's only sugar'
I found some useful instructions on this blog post on how to crystallise the oranges.
(The conversion I used gave 1.5 cups water to be 350ml, half a cup granulated sugar to be 95g. Those amounts are for one orange but you'd probably only want to do one orange at a time unless you owned a chocolate shop!)

And so I bought an orange, some tasty chocolate and some sugar and had a go.

The water & sugar took longer to come to the boil than I thought, and I probably should have used a flatter frying pan rather than a big saucepan to make it easier to turn the slices over, but here are some tasty sugary orange slices after they've cooled:

The house smells of oranges!

They are very sticky

Then today (I crystallised the oranges yesterday) I melted some tasty Green & Black's Maya Gold (which already is orangey & spicy & tasty) and dipped the oranges in it, then dipped them in sugar to stop them being so sticky.

One tasty chocolate orange slice


Lots of tasty chocolate orange slices

So here is how to make oranges unhealthy! Just add 100g sugar, 350ml water, and about 70g chocolate. Hopefully they're as tasty as I think they will be.

29/9/12 - Ravnicake

2012-09-30T20:19:00.000+01:00

While my main hobbies are making cake and sewiing and girly things, Mr Marzipan (as I call the husband) is a big geek. One of his hobbies is playing Magic: the Gathering and last year he persuaded me to come to the prerelease event for the new set (they release four new sets of cards a year and a week before the release of each set there is a 'pre release' event where you can play ing a tournament building a deck using the new cards). Anyway a year later I'm ~~addicted to~~ playing Magic quite a lot. We were looking forward to the release of the new set 'Return to Ravnica' (Ravnica being the setting for a previous set of cards a few years ago). Anyway one day i was talking about how I like making cake and someone suggested I make a cake for the prerelease event. I'm not sure they were actually expecting me to make one!

Final cake

The design was based on the art for one of the cards in the set, Tablet of the Guilds, which they were using for advertising prior to the release of the set. The main theme of Ravnica is that it is a city dominated by ten guilds which each use two of the five colours of mana for their magic. Five of the guilds are in this set, and the other five will be in the set which is released in the new year.
I decided to put the symbol for each of the five guilds around the edge of the cake, but how to make the symbols look good (I'm no good at freehand drawing with icing!)
I got the images for each of the five guilds from the website for this set , GuildsofRavnica.com and I used paint.net image editing software to turn the art into a black and white stencil image. I traced the outline of the symbols from the stencil onto the circles of sugarpaste icing with the end of a pin, and I used the outline to help me draw the symbols with writing icing.

Guild	Colour image	Black & white stencil	Final icing
Rakdos - black and red
Selesnya - green and white
Izzet - red and blue
Golgari - green and black
Azorius - blue and white

All final icing symbols

The cake itself was also important, as brian who organises the tournament can't eat gluten so I needed to make a gluten-free cake so that he could eat some too. My chocolate and tea leaf cake is gluten free, but I've made so many chocolate cakes lately I wanted to make a plain sponge as it would be easier to ice as well. I found a recipe for Orange and Almond cake which seemed tasty and not too complicated, so I decided to make that. I made the guild symbols while the oranges were boiling and the cake was baking, and then in the morning I made some buttercream to spread over the top of the cake.


Cake with buttercream swirled over the top	Final cake with symbols on it

Everyone said it was super tasty! The only problem was I couldn't cut it into more than 16 slices, and there were about 40 people there. Luckily by the end most people had already eaten lots of food in between rounds so I think the people that wanted some got some! The next challenge is to make one with less sugar in for the diabetic gamers...

ETA: Copyright information
Magic: the Gathering® and Return to Ravnica™ are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA and other countries.
All guild symbols are copyright © 2012 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

16/9/12 - A cake with a name

2012-09-25T18:41:00.000+01:00

A while ago my friends had a baby, and I made them a quilt as a present. Well now the baby is a bit bigger (she's still very small though!), they were having a baby-welcoming party (like a baby shower, but after the birth) Obviously they've already had their present, but I was asked to make a tasty cake so I made a cake with the baby's name on it. It's a chocolate cake similar to the birthday cake I made in August, but with raspberry jam instead of cherry for the sandwich-joining.
For some reason the cake rose very unevenly in the oven but i managed to fill in the dips with jam and chocolate icing. The small lumpy bits on the icing are where I didn't quite melt the chocolate in the ganache because my cream wasn't hot enough. Ah well.

The flowers are chocolate floodwork, similar to the floodwork flowers I made here but made out of melted white and milk chocolate instead of runny icing. The white chocolate for the outlining went a bit lumpy so some of the flowers were not very good - these are the best ones! The milk chocolate melted much better so filling the flowers was easier than the outlines. I kept the flowers in the fridge until I was ready to attach them to the cake, so they wouldn't melt.
The name is iced directly onto the cake, I practised a couple of times on greasproof paper to get the letters the right size and I made small marks in the icing with a skewer to keep the writing even (the marks were covered up by the writing)

Cakes for a birthday party - 11/8/12

2012-08-11T22:50:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed that I like baking with my friends. One of those friends is Esther, who has her own recipe blog at 'La Recette du Misther' (as long as you can read french!)
So for her birthday she decided to have an afternoon tea party, and asked me to bake a cake.

Well I looked through my recipe books, and couldn't decide which cake to make so I baked three:

Chocolate cherry cake, bara brith, lemon cheesecake

They're actually three cakes I haven't baked before! They're all Good Food magazine recipes so I can post links for you.
The chocolate cherry cake is a variation on the chocolate raspberry cake I made for a friend's birthday last year (here) - I just replaced the raspberries with cherries. (original recipe here)

E is for Esther!

The lemon cheesecake (recipe here) is quite similar to a vanilla cheesecake I made around christmas time, though that had chocolate digestives as a base instead of plain, and white chocolate grated into the cheesy bit instead of lemons. I accidentally bought two lemons and a lime instead of three lemons, so it's technically a lemon & lime cheesecake. I found citrus flavoured sprinkles in the shop and couldn't resist them to decorate it!

Tasty cheesecake!

Finally the bara brith (recipe here).My previous attempts at bara brith involved yeast and went terribly wrong, but this one has self-raising flour instead so it's basically a more interesting tea loaf.

Lovely sugary bara brith

It has sugar crystals on top of it for added crunchy tooth rotting goodness!

So I made toomuch cake, there's lots left. Oh well!

Birthday Cake - 30/3/12

2012-08-06T17:41:00.000+01:00

I haven't made many cakes lately as I've been mainly concentrating on sewing, but it seems that I forgot to write a post about the cake I made from my mum's birthday in March.

It was a chocolate cake (because my mum loves chocolate!)
I was going to try to make lots of flowers as she is a florist, but I ran out of time so I settled for the ring of buds and writing 'mum' in daisies.

In the end she got two cakes as she made herself a battenburg too! They were both tasty!

Christmas cake - December 2012

2012-08-06T17:40:00.001+01:00

I really have been bad at blogging lately - I even forgot to post about how I adapted the top layer of our wedding cake for Christmas.


You may recognise me from a larger cake....	The hearts are the same, the ribbon is new!

All I did was change the ribbon and add a decoration to the top as I was quite busy before Christmas. The three months had made the cake mature nicely though, so it was very tasty!
Here's what it looked like before:

Christmas gingerbread - 4/12/11

2011-12-04T17:12:00.000+00:00

It's been a while since I posted! I have been making a few cakes, but not so many as I used to. I have a recipe for gingerbread houses, so I decided to try out the recipe to make some gingerbread shapes.


I made different shapes including angels, stars, trees and people	Some of the first batch burnt, so I turned the next batch halfway through

If you want to make them yourself, the recipe is from Good Food magazine (I used a quarter of the quantities given to make this many shapes)

I should probably ice them before I eat them all, but they're so tasty...

House cake for a house warming - 24/9/11

2011-09-25T15:52:00.000+01:00

My friends moved to a new flat recently, so i made them a cake for their house warming party. I decided to make a chocolate cake because I already had all the ingredients (and also chocolate cake is tasty!) so I made a loaf cake because the recipe for that is quite simple. Then I cut the top of the cake where it had risen to make a steeper roof, and coated the cake with chocolate ganache.
The doors and windows are made out of fondant icing because I didn't think to get any white chocolate for them!

Front of the house

Back & side of the house

The chimney is a piece of cake and the roof has mini marshmallows along it.

The ganache is quite simple to make:
100ml double cream
150g dark chocolate, broken/chopped into small squares (or dark chocolate chips)

Chop up the chocolate and place in a bowl
Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan
Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and stir until it is smooth.
If the cream does not melt all the chocolate, you can melt the mixture over a pan of boiling water like normal chocolate, but the cream should be hot enough to melt it all on its own if you pour it over straight away.

The cake is a recipe for a two pound loaf tin, I made it in a tin 20cm by 10cm (8 inches by 4 inches). The ganache will cover a cake this big quite easily.

Wedding cake flower spray - 8/9/11

2011-09-16T17:28:00.000+01:00

So, in my previous post, I described the individual flowers I put in my wedding cake spray.
Before I'd started making them, I'd done some sketches to work out what I needed and how big the flowers should be.
So once I'd made up the stems of flowers, I had to make a cake-shaped box to help me arrange the spray properly. This was made up of various boxes and a block of oasis to stick the flower pick into (I'd got two big posy picks as well as some smaller picks, so that I could have a set for the cake and a set to transport the flowers with).

Then to arrange the flowers. I had two single calla lilies, two stems of lisianthus with leaves, two stems of freesias and five stems of spray carnations with rose leaves.

In the end, I only needed three stems of carnations so the other two went on top of the cake, the spray going from the bottom layer up the sides.
The final spray looked like this:

Yes, that is an icing sugar box posing as a cake!

And here is a photo my friend took of the cake all assembled and ready for eating:

Tasty tasty cake!

You can probably see that the main posy is actually in three separate picks because the lisianthus stems were too big to fit in with the rest of the flowers. What you can't see is where the icing cracked on one side because the picks were too close to the edge of the cake...

This cake is two layers of fruit and one layer of madeira, each layer is on a thick board (the middle madeira layer is actually on two boards as it was shorter than the fruit cakes!), with ribbon around the edge of each cake & board. The lower cakes have dowels in to support the upper layers. The top layer has pink hearts inlaid into the sugarpaste as well as the flowers.

Wedding cake flowers - 29/8/11 to 5/9/11

2011-09-05T00:36:00.002+01:00

Calla, showing the curve of the petal

In between baking the fruit and madeira cakes, I've been making sugar flowers. There are two lots.
First the favours which will be callas made out of sugarpaste, as in this post, but everyone is getting one each in the end as three hundred sugar callas is too many for me to make. I've done the sticks and the stamens for these (and I still haven't done a tutorial. Whoops.)
Then I decided what flowers I was going to put in the spray to go on the cake. These are made out of flower paste, which is less brittle than sugar paste (but also less tasty!). I decided on freesias, lisianthus, carnations, calla lilies and rose leaves as these will all be in the actual flowers as well.
I've been making these flowers for the past week, working for a few hours each day, and I finished making the individual flowers today. Then I need to make them up into stems, and then assemble the stems into a spray.

Individual freesia buds & flowers taped together into a spray

The tutorial I made for freesias is here, though I do now have a freesia cutter with three separate petals, and it's easier & quicker than the method I used in the tutorial. I did the biggest freesias using the original method as I needed bigger petals than the freesia cutter made.

The carnation tutorial I made is here, but instead of just folding a stamen I wrapped florists tape round a hooked wire to have a firmer base to start from. As I am making carnations which are white with pink tips, I also painted the edges of the petals with pink food colouring using a fine (no.1) paintbrush once the flowers had dried.

The callas I made on wires rather than wooden sticks so that I could shape the wires in the spray. I used three gauge 18 wires, taped together with flower tape all down the length. This also made the wires green as my gauge 18 wires are white! I found that the inside of a kitchen roll is good to rest them on while they dry, as they curve properly at the back of the flower. A large rolling pin would be equally good.

Spray of lisianthus with heart-shaped leaves

As for the lisianthus (latin name is Eustoma), which look like this in real life, I found a rather complicated tutorial here, which I followed to make the stamens etc and then simplified. Instead of wiring each petal separately, I used a gauge 18 wire for the stem and then made the flower in a similar method to the first flowers I made (remember these?), wrapping the petals around the stem before glueing the final one. This worked for some of them, but for others I hadn't made a big enough lump for the ovary so i had to add extra sugarpaste to attach the petals to. This is working so far. The lisianthus are white with purple edging, so I painted the edges of each petal with purple food colouring once the flowers had dried. This helps to highlight each separate petal, though it takes a while as you have to keep it neat!

As a guide, this is what I have made and how long roughly each bit took:

Spray carnations with rose leaves

Freesias - 2 stems, on each stem 1 small bud, 2 bigger buds, 1 nearly open bud, 2 open flowers, 1 bigger flower. Altogether these took me about 4 hours over two days.
Leaves - 18 rose leaves (some big, some small), 16 heart-shaped lisianthus leaves. These took two or three hours.
Carnations - 10 individual flowers (to be made into 5 stems with two flowers on each). These took about two hours to make, and another two hours to paint the edges of the petals.
Callas - 2 individual calla lilies, these didn't take very long at all but I had to let the stamens dry overnight so probably two half-hour slots would make these.
Lisianthus - these took the longest, as I hadn't made these before. Making the stamens was quite fiddly (though it could probably be simplified to make it slightly less botanically accurate). I think these took at least 4 hours, with another hour to paint the edges of the petals.

Now I've updated with pictures of the flowers, you can have more of an idea of what I've done.

Baking wedding cake - august/sept 2011

2011-09-04T23:52:00.000+01:00

I decided not to bake the cakes until I was in the correct country, so I didn't have to transport cakes as well as everything else. This did mean that I had to bring my cake tin (luckily it folds flat. See this post), my scales and several other things as well as all my icing things! I did manage to forget a mixing bowl though (fatal error), so I had to buy some cheap ones along with the ingredients.
The top and bottom layers are fruit, so I baked those a couple of weeks ago when I first got here. They are 6 and 10 inches square. The middle layer is 8 inches square madeira cake, and that was baked yesterday, so tomorrow I am going to add marzipan and then icing.
Apologies for the lack of pictures, I don't have a digital camera here so you'll just have to see pictures of the finished cake when it's done.

Cake on a plane - 1/8/11

2011-08-19T00:16:00.000+01:00

I was going to a funeral, and I'm not very good at arranging flowers so I thought that I'd make a cake with a bunch of flowers on top. So I looked online for pictures of flowers that I could use as a base, and I found this page of colouring sheets. I then simplified the picture a bit more using paint.net, and drew over it to check I could do it properly:

Coloured in version

Final outline shape

I made two of the same design in case one got broken. The outlines I made the night before, and then filled in with more runny icing (the same method as the floodwork flowers I made a few months ago).

Outlines

Finished designs

The cake is fruit cake iced with marzipan and sugarpaste. I added a yellow ribbon around the base as well. This is it after icing:

It was an eight inch square cake on an eight inch board, so I put it in an eight inch box and took it on a plane to the funeral. It survived very well under the seat in front of me! The edges of the icing cracked a little where they were squashed by the box but mostly it was fine.
The decoration I took on the greaseproof paper as well, and that also survived. However when I tried to take the decoration off the paper, it cracked into many tiny pieces. I think despite my simplifying, it was still too complicated a design for this method. I probably should have iced it onto a plaque of icing so that it didn't need peeling off the paper, or just cut around the design on the paper!
Better luck next time.

Pizza cake - 13/7/11

2011-07-14T10:15:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I last made a cake, so yesterday I got together with my friend and we made a cake to look like a pizza. The idea came from Making Great Cakes, another cake book I seem to have acquired.
The cake itself is a 9" (23cm) round madeira cake, as I need to practice making sponge cakes as well as fruit. So we cut the top off and turned the cake upside down, then added some red buttercream for the tomato sauce:


lots of red food colouring everywhere

Next was some cheese, this is yellow sugarpaste (fondant icing) grated with a cheese grater:

Then we added some sausage (red marbled with a bit of green, made into a roll and sliced) and some green leaves and green herbs for a garnish:

you could also do the herbs with dessicated coconut, but we didn't have any to hand

The beauty of this is that you could do whatever toppings you liked, as long as you could make them with icing. Also the positioning doesn't have to be perfect because it never is on a real pizza!

Wedding favour - 16/6/11

2011-06-18T19:10:00.002+01:00

I decided to see if I could make some wedding favours which were sugar flowers, to show off my flower-making and also because I don't like sugared almonds, the traditional favour.
As the main flower at the wedding will be calla lilies, I made some and then tried to arrange them in a pretty way. They are doubling up as place names.

I was originally going to do just one flower each, but that didn't look very good so I made a little bunch of three. This does mean I'm going to have to make three times as many flowers, but never mind.
The stem is made out of half a wooden kebab stick painted with green food colouring. I made the flowers out of white paste and then painted them afterwards, but colouring first would probably give a better colour.
They are similar to the calla lilies I made before, but I bought a proper cutter so that I don't have to make the shape each time. The stamens are about an inch long and the petal is about 2 1/2 inches long by 1 1/2 inches wide. If you didn't want to buy a special cutter, you could use a similar sized leaf cutter and cut the stem end off.
I'll take photos when I make the next batch and do a tutorial.
(Cross-posted to Marzipan's Crafts)

Caramel upside down pear cake - 10/6/11

2011-06-10T19:58:00.000+01:00

I made one of these a while ago, but it got eaten before I managed to take a picture of it! Quite a few friends asked for the recipe, so here it is. It's from The Really Useful Cookbook, which lives up to its name.

4 large ripe pears (not too ripe or they fall apart)
150g golden caster sugar
125g butter, softened
120g brown sugar
2 eggs
125g self raising flour
pinch of ground ginger
23cm (9 inch) round cake tin

1. Preheat to oven to 180°C (Gas 4). Grease the tin and line the base with baking paper.
2. Peel the pears and cut two of the into quarters and then eighths, giving you 16 slices. Cut the remaining pears into 1cm dice.
3. Place the golden caster sugar and 3 tablespoons of water in a saucepan and bring to the boil over a medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil gently without stirring until it forms a golden caramel. Carefully pur the caramel into the base of the tin, swirling it to cover the paper. Arrange the pear slices on the caramel.
4. Beat the butter and brown sugar together. Whisk the eggs and add to the mixture. Sift in the flour and ginger and fold in to the mixture. Stir in the diced pears.
5. Spoon into the tin and smooth the top. Bake for 45-50 mins. Test with a skewer.
6. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a serving plate.

I actually used dark brown sugar for the caramel as I didn't have any golden caster sugar. I've used white sugar before, I think the main difference that it makes is how dark the caramel is.
I use a springform cake tin (where the side detaches from the base) as I don't have another 9 inch tin. This makes it easier to get the cake out, but you need to line all of the tin not just the base, or the caramel will leak out!

Cake iced with home made icing - 3/6/11

2011-06-08T18:55:00.000+01:00

So, after I'd made my icing from scratch, I attempted to decorate the cake with it. I had quite a lot of problems rolling out the icing, I'm not sure whether that was because it was different icing, or because I was trying to roll out a bigger piece (this cake is 8 inches square, and before I'd only done 6 inch square cakes). It was also a hot day which i think made the icing stickier.
In the end, with the aid of some margarine on the surface instead of icing sugar, it got rolled out and attached to the cake. I was using some of the flowers I'd made a while ago for decorations, as well as a wide ribbon around the sides.


There are a few crumbs in the icing, as the marzipan was only on the top of the cake not the sides.

It was supposed to be an anniversary cake for our visitors, although their anniversary is actually the 2nd of June not the 3rd. As I ran out of time to make new decorations, it ended up being a bit of a random cake. But it tastes good!

View from the front of the cake

Cake from the back. The ribbon is hiding the messy sides of the cake!

There is still about a quarter of the cake left in my kitchen. It tastes good but is quite crumbly when you cut it.

Marzipan makes marzipan (and icing) - 1/6/11

2011-06-05T21:14:00.001+01:00

I've been meaning to make my own marzipan and icing when the blocks I'd bought ran out, so for this cake I found some recipes. So far I've made the marzipan and put that on the cake, with a recipe I found here. It works quite well with my cake recipe, as the cake asked for lemon zest, almonds, and vanilla and almond essence, and the marzipan wants lemon juice, more almonds, and vanilla and almond essence!
One of the best bits about making this marzipan was eating the bits that were left over. I think it's the lemon juice that makes it so nice.
I thought I'd made enough to cover my cake, but I couldn't roll it as thin as I've been rolling the shop marzipan as it fell apart, so I only covered the top of the cake.
Here's my marzipanned cake and the recipe:

You can see where I've used marzipan at the bottom of the cake to fill in the gaps

Ingredients
200g ground almonds
120g caster sugar
120g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
1 whole egg
1 tsp lemon juice
3 drops vanilla essence
2 drops almond essence

1. Sift the caster sugar & icing sugar together. Add the ground almonds and stir well.
2. Beat the eggs and add to the mixture, add the lemon juice, vanilla and almond essences. Mix well.
3. Knead on a board with icing sugar until smooth.

That's it! I thought marzipan was much more complicated than that. Marzipan from the shop is cooked so it doesn't have raw egg in it, or you can get recipes which use liquid glucose or glycerine instead.
The amounts I've given should cover an eight inch square cake, I actually made half that amount as usually I don't use much marzipan.
Now for the sugarpaste (ready to roll/fondant icing).
I used the recipe from Beginner's Guide to Cake Decorating (available on Google Books here.) It's also quite simple. I used the egg white which was left over from making the marzipan, but again, if you don't want to use raw egg you can get dried egg white which you make up with water, or liquid egg white from the chiller section of the supermarket. There are also alternative recipes which use gelatine and glycerine instead of egg white.
The mix is quite crumbly and not sticking together at forst, but enough mixing and/or kneading and it comes out quite smooth. Here's mine wrapped in cling film:


Not a very interesting picture!

Next I'll ice the cake and see how my icing compares to the shop-bought stuff.

Alternative fruit cake, 31/5/11

2011-06-01T11:03:00.000+01:00

I was away last week, and I bought a magazine to read on the train called Cake Craft & Decoration. Mostly it has cake projects to make that concentrate on modelling figures or flowers and things, but it also has some recipes in it, so I've made one of them - a Glacé Fruits and Nuts cake. it's supposed to be a lighter alternative to a normal fruit cake. Also it has lots of interesting dried fruits in it - cherries, angelica, crustallised ginger, pineapple, apricots and mixed peel. So it should be very colourful!

The fruits and nuts all chopped up together

It did take quite a while to chop up all the interesting fruits though, not to mention the almonds. Note to self: next time a recipe says 'blanched almonds' and wants you to chop them all up, just buy chopped ones!

The mixture all together

In the multi-sized cake tin

It's eight inches square, so I can practice bigger cakes as so far all the ones I've iced have been six inches or less.
After two and half hours in the oven:

It could probably do with coming out a little earlier next time, but i was distracted by cooking dinner!

Floodwork flower cake - 14/5/11

2011-05-14T17:44:00.000+01:00

So today the cake was ready for the flowers I made the other day to be attached! Quite a few of the flowers had broken in their box or as I was arranging them but hopefully as I get better at making them I'll break less.

Front view

Back view

Each side has one flower and two leaves on it, and the top has two flowers on it. You might notice that the flowers I made with thinner petals don't appear on this cake - this is because the petals are too thin and nearly all of these flowers have broken. The best design for these flowers seems to be a more uninterrupted shape like the ones with bigger petals. The leaves have also survived well.

Close up of one side

The floodwork has given me a liking for piping, so I also did some writing with icing left over from sticking the runouts to the cake. I practiced first on some baking paper to make sure that the letters would be the right size to fit on the cake. The words 'Le Chéile' are Irish for 'Together' - it is the name of the group I made the cake for.

Practice piece on baking paper

Writing on the cake, copying the lettering from the paper

______________________________

I had to put quite a lot of icing in the bag so that I could write neatly, so I used it up by making some more flower outlines for more runouts.

The outlines before being filled with colours

Floodwork flowers and leaves, and some cookies - 10/5/11

2011-05-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

I've finally got around to doing some more decorations rather than just making tasty cake and eating it!
These are some flower and leaf decorations made by a technique called flooding or runout. Basically you draw some shapes on a piece of paper, cover that with baking or greaseproof paper (somethinig non-stick that you can still see the lines through), draw over the outline with stiff icing, then water it down and colour it to fill in the outlines. Colouring in in icing form, in fact. Sounds simple, but actually more difficult than it sounds if you misread the recipe as i did and put too much liquid into the icing! The end result looks pretty good though:

Flowers and leaves on a sheet of baking paper

The same shapes in different colours

Here's a quick recipe, and some things I would have found useful to know:
Recipe from Beginner's Guide to Cake Decorating.
Ingredients:
1 egg white
250g (9oz) icing sugar, sifted
3 tsp lemon juice (TEASPOONS not tablespoons)
food colourings

Equipment:
template drawn on paper (you can make up your own, or find one somewhere. I drew mine on the computer and printed it out so they were all alike)
baking paper
paper piping bags (if you don't know how to make them, there's a video tutorial here. Don't cut the tips off yet though.)
1mm piping tip
cocktail stick

Lightly beat the egg with a wooden spoon. GRADUALLY, add the icing sugar and beat until it is a smooth paste. Add 2 tsp lemon juice slowly until the mixture has a stiff piping consistency. Fill a piping bag fitted with a 1mm tip (a couple of teaspoons of icing should be plenty to make as many as I did) and cover the rest of the icing with cling film on its surface so it doesn't dry out.
Pipe over the outlines and leave them to dry. I taped the paper to the table so it didn't slip about.
When you have enough outlines, gradually add more lemon juice to the icing until it is easy to spread smoothly. If you want to colour the icing, divide it into smaller bowls or cups and add the colouring, mixing with a teaspoon or cocktail stick. Don't forget to cover the surface of the icing with cling film when you're not using it to keep the air out.
Fill a paper piping bag with the thinner icing before cutting off the tip, only cutting off a small amount of the tip so that the opening is 2mm or so across (you can always cut off more later if you need to). Gently flood the outlines with the coloured icing. I put a couple of drops of icing in and spread it gradually with a cocktail stick, but this is mainly because my icing was too runny to pipe properly.
Leave them to dry overnight and remove carefully once completely dry with a palette knife or by peeling the paper backwards from the shapes.
They should keep for up to a week if stored in an airtight container. I layered them on kitchen paper so that they could be kept safe.

And I used up my egg yolk by making tasty choc chip cookies. The recipe is from Cooking:a Commonsense Guide, but I don't have the metric equivalents as I generally bake in imperial measurements.

5oz butter
1 1/2 oz brown sugar
3oz caster sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla essence
5oz self raising flour
3oz chocolate chips

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg yolk and vanilla, then the flour. Mix to a dough. Add most of the choc chips. Make into small balls of about a teaspoonful each and place them on a baking sheet with lots of space between them. Push the remaining choc chips into the tops of the cookies. Bake at 180 C for 10-15 minutes.

Chocolate raspberry torte - 28/4/11

2011-05-03T18:42:00.000+01:00

Another chocolate cake, baked for a friend's birthday. This is another recipe from Good Food magazine (here), though I used less of the raspberry filling than they suggested.
The main problem with this cake is that it wants two cakes baked in 9inch tins, and I only have one tin. I simply baked the cakes one at a time, but trying to line a hot tin with baking paper led to a slightly odd shaped cake! Fortunately these things are easily covered up with icing. Perhaps next time I should just cook it as one cake, and slice in half afterwards, though this would make a different texture as the cake is supposed to be still gooey on the inside after baking.

Un-iced chocolate cake - 4/4/11

2011-04-04T19:02:00.000+01:00

Today I was meeting some friends for lunch, and they asked me to bring pudding. So I made chocolate cake. This was a new recipe which I had found in Good Food Magazine, available here. It is very gooey and lovely. It uses ground almonds instead of flour so it's even gluten free! The recipe says it takes twenty minutes to prepare but it took me more like 40 minutes. I forgot to take any pictures before we ate most of it but here are some of what is left.

A quarter of it left.

You can see the gooey centre.

It was baked in a 9 inch diameter round springform tin, and dusted with icing sugar on the top.