More cake updates - Part One

Things have continued to be hectic and time consuming, hence my continued lack of posts. I have been busy with cake making though - it does take up quite a bit of free time!

I've had a few orders since I last posted and of course my continued decorating classes which I'll start with as that'll be easier. In cake class we have made calla lilies, 'star/flower bursts', we have decorated cupcakes and we have practiced some writing with royal icing.

I enjoyed making the calla lilies but I found them quite difficult and time consuming to make and not sure I'll be purchasing the necessary tools, not right now anyway.

 The star/flower bursts that we did are designed to add a nice effect to the top of a cake. The 'burst' is placed inside posey picks which then go inside the cake. Numbers can also be used if the cake is for a special birthday or anniversary, as well as other designs such as hearts or butterflies; anything as long as the cut out isn't too big or thick as it needs to be supported on a thin wire. I especially liked the one below where we made the flower red and sparkly!

 One of my favourite classes that we did was the week we had to bring in some cupcakes to decorate in whatever way we liked. I had recently purchased 'Planet Cake', a cake decorating book which incorporates birthday cakes and cupcakes. I decided to use these for inspiration and managed to make a few different varieties; a bumblebee (didn't turn out brilliantly but I did rush that one at the end of class), ladybirds, dragonflies, babies. Although I enjoyed making these, I found that the shape of my cupcakes wasn't always conducive to the design I wanted to use - I need a more dome shape than I had achieved and I'm not entirely sure how to go about getting a better shape - maybe more research for another time.

 Our last class was about writing using royal icing. I don't think I took any pictures of this as it mostly just looked like white squiggles. We had a look at various ways of getting different styles of script onto a cake which was really useful.

Our last class is on tomorrow and we are going to be going through costings and varying quantities, two things I'm very interested to learn properly, and we'll also be attempting to model a person out of sugarpaste.

Anyway that's it for the classes. I'll do another blog post covering cakes I've done recently :)

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 :-)