Birthday Cake and Eeyore!

Last week I made a birthday cake for my sister in law, Kirsten, who requested a cake that looked the same as one I'd made for a work colleague earlier in the year. I like it when people ask me this, it's so much easier than trying to think of a design myself as that's not really my strong point!!

Anyway I made a 9" victoria sponge cake, filled with buttercream and jam, covered in white icing and decorated with lots of sugarpaste flowers in a variety of colours, with painted vines intertwining everything.



I still need to perfect cutting the cake in half and remembering to put it back together at the exact same point. This cake did have a little slant to it, but I managed to avoid using those photos haha. To be honest, it wasn't that obvious, I didn't even notice it until I looked at the photographs. But it's all a learning curve and I'm sure it's something I'll improve on (fingers crossed!).

Also just wanted to give a quick update on the cake class. We did cartoon modelling the other week and we made an Eeyore figure! I was so excited when I knew we'd be doing Eeyore - he's such a cute character that I feel sorry for, he just needs a hug. We also learned all about copyright and how when copying a character we need to change some small detail on it so that the owners of the character won't sue us! Good to know! Lol. We didn't have to change anything in the class though as it wasn't being sold. but i changed the colour of the inside bit of his ears to lilac from pink just to be sure! lol. He was quite difficult to make but hopefully should I make another one or another character, I've at least got a grounding in it now.

Baking Review - my birthday cake

It was my birthday on 1st December and despite being told it was very sad, I made my own birthday cake. But I wanted to, especially as I had recently purchased the giant cupcake silicone mould I wanted to try out.

So the day before I had all the ingredients ready to go and used a sponge recipe courtesy of my friend Melissa. As it turned out, I had to make a second batch of the mix as the mould holds more than you'd think - or more than I thought anyway.

I'm not entirely certain how I feel about how the cake turned out, aesthetically-wise anyway. The cake took a lot longer than I expected to cook through - the outside was starting to get burned and the middle was still like mush for a long time. The burnt part of the cake was easily scraped off without losing too much of the look of the cake. I put a layer of buttercream and layer of jam between the base and the top and then covered the top in buttercream.

I was a little worried how it would taste but I needn't have worried as it wasn't too bad to be honest and did taste quite birthday cake-like. Next time, however, I will add another layer of buttercream and jam to the base as there was a lot of cake and it needed breaking up a little more.

On the same evening I also made chocolate cupcakes from the Hummingbird book to take into work for my colleagues. And for the first time, my frosting worked out well enough to be able to use the squeezy piping thing I have and I was pleased with how they turned out :-)