Noah's ark cake

After successfully completing my first ever self-designed "big cake" at Christmas, I was itching for an opportunity to get making one without the supervision of my college tutor. Most of my friends are now married, so a wedding cake seemed unlikely. Luckily, the married folk are now having babies, so an opportunity arose to make a cake for my friend Susie's baby shower.

Being the prepared sort, Susie already knew she was having a boy, and had already revealed that he would be called Noah, so the cake really designed itself! I decided to make a Noah's ark cake, and created a secret Pinterest board to capture pictures of inspirational cakes. Now, if you haven't done an Internet search for "Noah's ark cake", let me tell you there are LOADS. They vary from pastel colours to bright colours, one tier to many tiers, water or no water, Noah or no Noah (animals only), waves or calm, rainbow or plain, etc. I decided to stick to my style, which appears to be - plain and simple! I like clean lines, with not much fuss, and having only done a little modelling, decided I wasn't ready for people and stuck to animals.

I chose to bake a chocolate cake, and used the chocolate truffle cake from the Great British Bake Off Showstoppers book. This was partly because the recipe in the book gives you the quantities and timing to bake a 6 inch, 8 inch or 10 inch cake, and I used the 10inch and 6 inch cakes. The 10 inch is my base, and the 6 inch I used to make the Ark itself. I was lucky enough to find a 6 inch long oval cake board, and this made the template for the ark, and then I used the trimmings to fashion the cabin of the ark. The pieces were glued together with ganache, and then I covered it with Renshaw's chocolate flavour and colour sugar paste.

The main cake would be covered in Renshaw's baby blue sugarpaste, and with that in mind, I wanted to choose the animals to give a good mixture of colours. I decided on - giraffes, tigers, lions, elephants, pandas, and a dove, complete with olive branch. It was very daunting modelling the animals, but in the end I just went for it, starting with the lions, and finishing with the dove (because I was most scared of him!). The key was to get the heads just the right size, and in the end they only just fit on (and even then some of the heads were partly hidden).

I used dowels in the base cake to make sure the ark and heads didn't sink into it, and although I'd never done this before it was pretty easy. It was tricky marking the plastic dowels without marking the icing with the knife (I didn't manage it, but smoothed the marks out easily enough), but once that was done, they snapped no problem.

Once the ark was in place I made up a little royal icing, and coloured it blue to match the sugarpaste as closely as I possibly could! I then used this to pipe shells around the based of the cake, and around the ark base. Then it was time to add the animals! I used spaghetti in the giraffe necks to stick into the ark to strengthen them, and the other heads were just glued in place with a little royal icing. Unfortunately, the giraffe's strengthening spaghetti insides were not quite strong enough, and they snapped overnight, but there was limited damage to the ark, and they stayed up long enough at the party for photos.

The finishing touch was to add "NOAH" in green icing, to break up the blue and add that little personal touch to the cake. The girls loved the cake, and Susie did say she wasn't sure she could cut it, but I made sure we did as I wanted some of that lovely truffle cake! (I tasted the trimmings and it's a properly gorgeous tasting cake - my new favourite go-to recipe I think).

I loved making this cake, and can now add "tiered cakes" to my list of skills! I'm currently doing another course, so another big cake is on its way. Watch this space...

Merry Christmas Cake!!!

I like love cake! Most of you will already know this, and many of you will also know that this year I decided to formally expand my skills by joining a Cake Decorating course at Trafford College. It was a 10 week course which gave us the basic skills needed for cake decorating including piping skills, covering a cake (properly rather than my bodge job!) and some modelling.

It was a practical hands on course, and during the ten weeks we developed the required skills to design and ice a Christmas cake. First job though - inspiration!

I had a couple of ideas, and I gathered the inspiration around my ideas on this Pinterest board. I started with the idea of recreating this year's Cath Kidston Christmas Tree and deer design, but decided the legs on the deer might mean I struggled to get the little guy to stand up. (However, since then I found the final pin on my Pinterest board which shows a lovely little model deer which I may have to try next year). 

My next idea was to keep with the theme of animals and Christmas trees, but this time maybe a rabbit. I must admit my inspiration for this one was memories of the gorgeous bunnies in "Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and so I pinned a couple of pictures of these to my Pinterest inspiration board. 

I also found a few cakes with ponds or ice rinks on, and as we'd done inlay work on the course (a new trend in cake decorating) I decided this would be the direction I would go in. I also decided to use this idea to demonstrate my piping skills.

I've previously blogged about making the cake so you will know it is a large cake. I thought about adding a design to the side of the cake, but in the end decided to go traditional, so I crimped the board, added holly and berries, and crimped the top edge of the cake too. Once I'd finished the design on the top, I decided it was a bit plain, so I painted the crimp red to balance the colours out.

And there we have it. My cake! I hope you like it. How on earth will I bring myself to cut it!?!?

Merry Christmas bunny!

Giving the "Dancing on Ice" celebs tips on how it's done!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Candy melt buttons

I was recently asked to bake a cake and cupcakes for a friend's God son's christening. She had no requirements other than the amount of cake, so I had free reign to come up with an idea. I had seen (and bought) some lovely chocolate buttons that looked like real buttons, and thought it would be lovely if I could make some coloured ones. (The ones I bought before were from Vintage Chocolate buttons by Hotel Chocolat, and they make lovely gifts.

So, with my friend's approval, I ordered a silicone mould tray from eBay to make my coloured buttons and two bags of Candy Melts - one blue, one bright green. Candy Melts are super easy to use - just melt them like ordinary chocolate. I did mine in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. The first batch I made I used a teaspoon to put the melted Candy into the mould, but this meant the first few had bubbles of air trapped at the bottom/top of the button. 

You can see the air bubbles in this first batch.

So, the second batch, I used a paintbrush from my cake decorating kit to fill the mould slowly, making sure the Candy Melt went to all the edges of each button leaving no bubble holes. I used the back of a dinner knife to level each button off, as some of these will sit flat on the top of the main cake.

I'm really pleased with the results of these buttons. I've used silicone moulds before, but individual ones, which I've pressed sugarpaste into and turned out to leave to set. This way is so much quicker, especially as the Candy Melts only take a matter of minutes to set. Highly recommended. 

Selection of green and blue Candy Melt buttons.

Update: I thought you'd like to see the buttons finished on the cakes. I used the bigger ones on their own on a cupcake, and the smaller ones as toppers for the larger cake. I think they look quite effective, and I'm very pleased!

Chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream, and a Candy Melt button!

6 inch chocolate cake with cherry jam and vanilla buttercream filling, sugarpaste icing, and Candy Melt button decorations. 

The 2012 Christmas Cake

For the first time this year, I have baked my own Christmas cake. This year, I am doing a cake decorating class at a local college, and the end result is to have our own Christmas cakes iced to our own design. This will show off all the techniques we have learned, and I have lots of ideas for mine (which I have to have settled on by this Thursday! I'm not good at decisions!).

But the first thing we had to do, was bake our cake. Our tutor gave us a recipe, but I found another I wanted to try which was the Bettys Tearoom recipe. You can find it online here along with their Christmas pudding recipe.

I altered the recipe slightly, because I fancied putting in some different fruit, and I also wanted to use rum. Partly because this is mine and my boyfriend's preferred spirit, and partly because I already had some in! (I originally wanted to use amaretto but didn't have any). So, I soaked figs, dates, raisins and glace cherries with the zest and juice listed, and quite a lot more than the amount of alcohol stated! I left this for a few days before using it.

The rum soaked fruit added to the cake batter

I'll be truthful here - this was the second cake I made. I had a baking disaster with the first one. I was reading the recipe off my netbook screen, so had to keep scrolling up and down to get the quantities needed for each step. Which was fine, until I forgot to check when I got to the instruction "add the beaten egg" and only added one. There was meant to be three. Suffice to say it was very thick, and didn't "set" properly even after 3 hours of baking! So I had to chuck that one out and start again.

Here it is before baking:

All ready for the oven.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of it once I took it out, but it went a lovely deep brown colour, and very shiny on top. Quite moist looking too. Yum!

Last Thursday we covered our cakes with marzipan, and some of the girls had to trim their cakes flat. Most of them had used the recipe our tutor had given them, but not one of us had followed our recipes to the letter, and everyone had used different fruit and alcohol. All were delicious, and we had to stop ourselves scoffing all the scraps. Our tutor has taken the crumbs away to make us some christmas cake truffles, so we're looking forward to Thursday!

So for now, here is my cake. I will post again once I've fully decorated it, and maybe, if you're lucky, I'll post a picture of once it's cut!

Modelling chocolate

I love cake. I love eating cake. I love making cake. And I love watching other people make cakes - specifically very talented people making incredible cakes. For this reason, I really, really enjoy watching Ace of Cakes on Good Food and any other digital channel it pops up on.

In Ace of Cakes, Ace and his team make the most incredible creations for people who want something epic in a cake. (You really should search for some of his creations - the Hogwarts cake for one of the HP premieres is particularly spectacular). The material they use most for this is modelling chocolate. I had never heard of this stuff til I started watching a few years ago, and to be honest I assumed is was an American thing. Which it is, but it's becoming more and more popular over here with bakers, because it seems to be such a fabulous material.

Modelling chocolate is basically like modelling clay: only made of chocolate! It tastes like chocolate but behaves like clay, meaning you can use it to sculpt figures and things. Bakers use it wherever they might use sugar paste.

I've been thinking it must be time for me to have a go at using this, and in the last 24 hours I kept coming across posts about it. First on facebook when a cake supplier I follow announced they now stock it. Then on Pinterest someone I follow posted a link to a post with a recipe to make some. So, given that I had some birthday cupcakes to make, and with no time to order any, I thought I'd have a go.

The ingredients are very, very simple. Chocolate, and golden syrup. In the USA they use Corn starch, which is a specialist product here, so you can substitute golden syrup or glucose syrup. I already had some golden syrup, so that was an easy decision.

There are loads of recipes on the internet, so I picked one (you can find it here), and got on with it. I melted 100g of white chocolate (I wanted white so I can try colouring it later), and left it to cool slightly (although probably not enough), and then added just under 50g of golden syrup which I'd warmed a little to make runny. Then I mixed hard until it came into a soft lump. At this point it looked VERY oily, but the instructions said this was fine, so I poured it onto some foil and popped it in the fridge. Two hours later, I had this to play with!

Now, I'd read people saying things about this stuff that it was a joy to work with - I must admit I thought it was a bit of exaggeration. But no! It really is fabulous. It's quite hard at first, but softens up nicely in your hands. I wore gloves as suggested and glad I did as it's quite oily. I added some pink colour gel to mine (a bit too much if I'm honest), and it took about the same amount of time as colouring sugar paste.

But when it came to rolling it out it was a revelation. I had run out of icing sugar so I had nothing to dust with, but on a plastic mat it rolled out nicely WITHOUT STICKING. Very pliable too, mre so than sugarpaste, and much more forgiving. I cut out some shapes and put them on some foil to pop in the fridge. I experimented with shaping the flowers a bit and adding some white centres, and it was SO easy. It holds it's shape beautifully. Then I put it back in the fridge to harden for use later.

The final result looked lovely. I urge you to have a go at this because it's SO easy. And if you need cake decorations at the last minute, it's perfect, because unlike sugar paste shapes, you don't need to leave them for days to dry - half an hour in the fridge and off you go. Brilliant!

I added these to some lovely chocolate cupcakes I'd made for my friend's 30th bithday present. I hope she likes them...