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...

Diamond Jubilations!

Sorry I'm late! Meant to post this earlier in the month, but hadn't got the pictures uploaded! Anyway...

I love the Royal Family. So I really enjoyed the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. However, somehow, I managed to not really do anything for it, despite organising a street party being the kind of thing that's right up my street. As it were!

My boyfriend, Andy, on the other hand, is not that fussed about anything like the jubilee or the royal wedding last year, or generally anything royal (other than the Duchess of Cambridge). So imagine how unfair I felt it was when he rang me one day to tell me he'd been invited to the jubilee lunch! He is currently doing an MSc Surface and Polymer Science and Technology, and is lucky enough to have secured a bursary from the Dyers Association. So, as the theme of the lunch was "youth" (and despite him being 30 years "young") he was invited as he is one of the students they sponsor. (The other invitees were also from University and 6th form classes).

So last Monday, we drove down to Reading to stay with some of my family so the train to London was at a reasonable hour. By reasonable, I mean 7am on a bank holiday tuesday. Joy! (More of that in a moment).

On Monday we spent the evening watching the Jubilee concert on TV, which was the point at which I suddenly decided that I needed to do something for the jubilee. As luck would have it, it turned out there was a beacon on a church about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying, so we had a quick walk down there at about 10.20pm.

Unfortunately I missed the moment of the lighting, but there were lots of people down there celebrating and they were projecting the concert onto the wall of the church tower, so we joined in singing along to Paul McCartney and watching the fireworks in London. (If you look closely on the picture above you can see Sir Paul on the screen!).

Then it was home to bed for the early start in the morning. The other half was pretending not to be excited, but as you can see from the picture, he really did enjoy himself very much.
The early start was 6am - so Andy could get beautified and dressed, and then I drove him to the station to get a train to meet the others at Dyers' Hall. There was a very nice moment for Andy on the train when some toffee nosed posh bloke informed him snootily that he was off to St Paul's for the service with the royal family - not something folk like Andy get to do apparently. Imagine the poor man's face as Andy politely told him that actually, he was off to lunch at Westminster Hall later! Priceless I would imagine.

This picture was sent to me in a text shortly after they arrived at Westminster Hall:

The lunch itself was some salmon to start, followed by lamb stuffed with mutton shoulder, and a trio of desserts (bread and butter pudding, chocolate delice and some berries). It turned out that Andy was sat at the table directly behind the Queen, so when the Royal Family left the building you could see him quite clearly on the TV as they walked past. Apparently Prince William accidentally brushed past one of the girls on the other half's table, and apologised ever so politely - sending her into semi-hysterics! Bless her.

At the end when they left, they were told they were free to take table decorations if they wished, so the other half grabbed the nearest one for his Gran. They just happened to be the ones from Her Majesty the Queen's table, which might explain just how chuffed Granny looks in this picture we took when we delivered them to her!

I am well known for my love of souvenirs, but I managed to resist most things I saw (although I'm regretting this in a couple of cases!). In the end I went for a lovely mug from Cath Kidston, as I thought it went perfectly with the Coronation mug I have inherited early from my Gran. I think they look fab together:

Here's to many more years your Majesty!