Tuesday 21 February 2012

A Devilish little cake

Phew, what a busy cake making week I have had!  Three cakes in one week might be some sort of new record for me.  

Here is the Devil cake which I made for a friend, for the opening night of our local community theatre's production of  The Devil is an Ass, which he was directing.


The inside of the cake was made from red velvet cake, with a little extra cocoa, which was lovely and moist and kept well.  I iced the various layers first with a nice bright pinky red coloured buttercream, and then convered with red fondant for the main section of the devil's face.  The various details were then added in extra black and white fondant.

I did struggle a little, getting the fondant to the right consistency this time around, it seemed very wet and sticky, and didnt roll very easily.  A challenge to overcome with practice I think! 

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Mad Hatter Cake

Though I say it myself I think I have done myself proud here!  I really enjoyed making this cake!  I used some help from a fantastic guide on the Deliciously Decadent flickr page 
( at http://www.flickr.com/photos/deliciously_decadent/sets/72157616259103302/with/3406968002/)
to guide me through the process of how to get the right shape of this cake, and then I had a whale of a time decorating it!  

The topper is a really rather cheap fabric flower which I picked up in a shop, and boy did I then struggle to fin feathers to add to the top!  I wanted feathers large enough to decorate, and do the cake justice, so I had to settle for glue-guning several much smaller feathers onto a length of florists wire.  When I bought the flower it was glitter free, so I decided to get out the glitter glue (like the child at heart that I am) and bedazzle it a little!

For the fondant covering I used a fantastic recipe, and tips guide from the Baking Pan
(http://thebakingpan.com/recipes/fondant/classic-rolled-fondant.html)
substituting the gelatin for vege-gel (as I am vegetarian) and added some purple colour paste to one half of the fondant and added black food dye to the other half, as well as a large amount more icing sugar when the liquid made it far too sticky!

It was my friends birthday, and she loves purple and black, and therefore I think she rather liked her cake!  

I can't wait to get baking some more and experimenting more with the fondant icing!  As they say, practice makes perfect! 

Thanks for reading! 

Bye, bye for now from this baker.

Friday 10 February 2012

One very curvy lady

My latest designer baking project was a requested theme of "hot women" .... Oh where to start with that.   

I thought around all sorts of possibilities, maybe a vegas dancing girl, a pair of boobs, all sorts!  But this was also a cake that was to be given at work, which did narrow the scope to at least something which wasn't too outrageous... not completely sure I was successful.

I thought a bikini gril should cover that theme nicely and so I set to work baking away last night and made a half chocolate and mars bar, half vanilla cake bikini girl.

I must say that carving boobs from cake was a new experience!  Only outdone perhaps by the rubbing and smoothing over them with fondant icing shortly after.  An interesting new experience to put it one way!  

All in all a well received cake, and a good new challenge.   I have been googling away and youtubing some how to guides, and I'm progressing slowly towards better decorated cakes.  I used a new recipe for the fondant for this cake and I have to say it was much easier to work with than my previous one!  

Fingers crossed, and here's to continuing to better my decorating efforts!  (I know my co-workers will be pleased at this idea, since they get to eat all off-cuts, botched bits, and anything else left over that still tastes good!)

Thanks for reading!  It's a busy couple of weeks for cakes, so I should have quite a few new posts up and coming, keep an eye out!