Happy Meal

I really can't take any of the creative credit for these!  I saw them on Bakerella's website and it was a case of, I saw and I had to make! 

These are just the cutest little happy meals, and boy did they make everybody in my office happy.

 

The burger buns are made up of halved vanilla cupcakes, with super gooey chocolate brownie burger patties, and icing piped on to make some very sugary ketchup and lettuce replacements.

A few sesame seeds sprinkled on the top of each bun, added the perfect touch.

The chips were a sugar biscuit dough, which I rolled out and cut into thin strips and coated in granulated sugar, before baking for 7 minutes at 190 c.  

I quickly learned that the difference between baking for 7 minutes and 8 minutes, was golden cookie to dark brown overdone cookie!

The strips I cut spread out too much, and I decided to cut them in half length ways again to get a thinner french fry shape.  This has to be done VERY QUICKLY after removing from the oven though, otherwise they got very solid very quickly, and I just ended up with shattered biscuit flying over my carpet!

For a full set of instructions on how to make these tasty meals, and for a pdf download of the print outs requried to make the paper containers in which I put them, visit Bakerella's Fast Food Fun page.  

The only real stray from the instructions I made was that I baked all my bits from scratch, unlike Bakerella, who followed the fast food theme, and used packet mixes.  I also took out the extra layer of icing for "mustard", as mine looked a little like ungainly sky scrapers already, and I feared them falling over with any more height! 

Many thanks for the inspiration Bakerella!  I loved making these.

I am looking forward to a new goody baking challenge, I just need a new theme or idea to start from .... hmmm

Thanks for reading, until next time! 

Cute and Fuzzy... or rather, Cute and Fudgy!

I love a good challenge!  My friend asked me to make a cake for her brother in law, and lo and behold ...   

A cute little fuzzy fudge covered bear, with white chocolate fudge and as much chocolate as I could possibly get in there!

I carved him out of several stacked circular cakes, and used one tray baked sponge for the laptop, table and the bears legs.  

The arms were foam covered with fudge icing to make sure they werent too heavy and didnt fall off.  

Overall I think he is quite cute!  

There are still some things I would like to improve!  Such as the head to body ratio, but all in all a fair effort I think.  And at least all recipients of the cake raved about it, so if nothing else it tasted good! 

Please feel free to post any comments or questions!  Or any interesting themes that you would like to see in cake form.  I am always after new ideas!

Thanks

Cookie

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.

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.

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!   

Christmas has been and gone, and I've only just got around to a new post!

Well Christmas may have been a couple of weeks ago now, and I may have been somewhat useless, but I will now, finally get around to posting my christmas baking experiments!

I made christmas cupcakes for all of my family.  I started off experimenting with four sets of cupcake flavour:

Gingerbread cupcake with spiced buttercream icing

Orange and Cranberry cupcake with port and cranberry buttercream icing

Port and chocolate cupcake with chocolate marshmallow icing

Candy cane cupcake (vanilla sponge, died half red, and swirled together) with whipped cream on top.

After initial experimentation I decided to select two of the christmas themed flavours, to bake for christmas.

After a short stint as the Christmas cupcake fairy at work, I concluded that the two favourite flavours, were the gingerbread and spice, and the cranberry and orange.  

For the second round I added some toppers, of gingerbread christmas trees, and white chocolate snowflakes.  I also changed the icing's on both slightly.  

The finished products created a very pleasant display on christmas day, with plenty of cakes for all.  Gingerbread cupcakes with spiced cream cheese icing, and cranberry and orange with buck's fizz floavour buttercream.  

Mmmmm that's a lot of cake! 

If anyone is interested in any of the recipes used etc, please feel free to comment below.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

Bananarama

As you may be able to see, transporting this cake, did not do it the best of favours!  I really need to find a better way to move my cakes.  

I made this delightful little cake from vanilla sponge, with a layer of white chocolate fudge icing to make the inner banana the right colour.  The skin is dyed fondant, which came off a little worse for wear after an hour in the car.  Then some fancy decorating with an icing squeezy drizzle bottle, and some food colouring.

My other half's Dad can't stand bananas, so this was a good trick to play ;)