Cake Pops and Push Pops

It's my birthday this week, which has meant some brilliant presents, a few of which seemed to have a, ummmm theme.  As you can see in the picture to the left, I got quite a few brilliant, baking goodies!  Aaaand my Mum made me an amazing birthday cake, yoghurt and lemon flavour mmmm, what a treat! 

I also put in an order for some cake decorating bits and bobs last week, which arrived at the weekend.  So all in all, excitement has been running feverishly high, and my creative cake fires have been very heavily fuelled over the last few days.  

I have been really excited about the idea of trying to make cake pops, and having come across the concept of cake push pops, well, that has just GOT to be tried! Don't you think?!  So I bought myself some pop sticks, and some push pop containers, as well as a few decorating extras.  

Happily enough, I am also on annual leave this week, which is brilliant, because I am soooooo very excited to get to work with some of the new things I have acquired. 

Today I used the red velvet cake recipe from my new book.  I made red velvet and cream cheese frosted cake push pops.  And also white chocolate coated cake pops.  These are a friends birthday present.  Perfect for putting in the post!  

Cake Push Pops

Oh my, these are fun!   You can do so much with them!  The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.  You start off with a little plastic push pop container like the picture below.  I bought mine online, but when I went into my local cake decorating shop today , they had them new in (more expensive mind you, but they were there!), so it would seem that they are catching on quick, and available in shops now too.  

I took my baked and ready red velvet sponge, and using one of the pop containers, cut out circles of cake.  These were layered with white cream cheese frosting, piped in, with the top layer of icing swirled as well as I could manage to create a pretty finish.  I then decorated with edible gold glitter and red sugar love heart sprinkles. 

I can't wait to find out how my friend likes them! I think they have made a really cute present, and I just desperately hope that they come out the other end of the postal system still looking cute, and not a complete mess.

Cake Pops

After stumbling across the Bakerella web site a couple of weeks ago, which lead me to making cupcake hamburger meals I have become a little obsessed with her site.  I have been looking at many of the amazing cake pops, and I have been desperate to try some for myself.  

Soooo I went and bought myself some pop sticks in preparation, and when I had my cake offcuts left over from the push pops above, I got to making some!

I crumbled the cake offcuts into a bowl, and added a nice large dollop of the cream cheese frosting, then mixed well.  This created a lovely gooey cake mess, which I then rolled into lollypop sized balls , and left to sit whilst I got everything else ready. 

I melted white chocolate cake covering in my microwave, and got my lollipop sticks stuck into my cake balls, and I got dipping!  Each ball was dipped in the cake covering to coat the whole ball and as little as I could manage of the pop stick (though I must admit I am not the neatest person in the kitchen whilst I'm in the middle of things, and there was a great  deal of runny white chocolate mess going all over the pop sticks, my counters, and well, just about everywhere!).  

I had a handy piece of florists foam block to hand which I was then able to put the  pop sticks into whilst the coating dried.  Soon after removing from the microwave, when the coating was still very warm, some pops needed a second coat after the first had dried, as the coating was so warm and runny it didn't stick on thick enough, once the coating had cooled some though the others went on thicker.

Once the coat on the pops was thick enough I started decorating them.  I chose three different types of decoration.  Sugar love hearts, hundreds and thousands and gold edible glitter.  The love hearts and the hundreds and thousands had to be added whilst the coating was drying, to make sure they would stick.  But the gold glitter I simply applied with a dry paintbrush once the pops were solid.

They came out so much better than my expectations had been, and looked so cute, that I located some little plastic gift bags and ribbon, and they have gone in the birthday box for my friend as well.  Again, I really hope they don't get too bashed, and they arrive still looking good! 

I had a great afternoon's baking, and I'm so glad I got to do some experimenting!  I can't wait to try some more complicated cake pop designs.  There are just so many things that you can do with these!  I might be lead astray from my giant crazy cakes for a while with the thousands of possibilities!   


But another day, as for now it is time I went to get some beauty sleep.  Thanks for reading, please feel free to post any questions or comments.


Cookie.

Rose cupcakes

Rose flavour cupcakes with rose water icing and fondant ... you guessed it, roses!

I thought I would have a little play with some fondant, and some flavourings last night. 

Just a really quick little experiment this time!  I wanted to play with some simple fondant flowers.

I made a normal batch of cupcakes using rose water to flavour them instead of vanilla.  I topped these with a simple icing of icing sugar and  rose water, I made this nice and thick so it wouldn't run too much and spread it evenly to the edges of the cupcake cases. 

The little rose decorations were simple ones made up of fondant cut into ribbon shapes and then rolled up, with the top edges flattened and flared out slightly to make a more realistic shape.

As I used fondant which I had made previously, these cakes didn't take very long to make, so they were a  nice little mid-week evening bake, which kept me happy.

Thanks for reading!

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!