Cake for a Fifth Birthday

On 1 April, I turned 52 and my favourite show, Caburlesqe, turned 5. So we had a HUGE cake.

I love making tall cakes - they are so impressive but really not too hard to do. Time consuming yes. Difficult, not so much. The trick is to know your strengths and stick to 'em.

The cake, enough to feed the whole audience and provide cake for a bunch of lunchboxes for a week.

The little frames are made in white chocolate from a silicon mold then brushed with gold lustre dust. The images in them were printed onto an edible sheet by an Auckland company. A trim and a lick of tylose glue and they were all done.
I tried to create an imprinted velvet look by brushing red lustre dust through a rococco type of stencil onto the red fondant but it is a bit subtle! The bottom tier I sprayed with edible gold paint. I love that stuff.

Sadie von Scrumptious and I are the cake fairies - it was Sadie aka Emily, who got married last August. We share Emcee duties and it is rare for us both to be on stage together and we had a pile of fun!

I got ambushed! Debbie our producer seen here planting one on my cheek, presented me with flowers! Such a lovely birthday surprise <3 p="">
Currently I am feeling the early stages of the nasty cold making its way around the city. Erg. So, it's vitamin C and rest for me. Wish me luck; I don't fancy a winter like last year again.
Mind you, the new shop is warmer and drier than the old one was and maybe I will shake it off!

 

This Takes the Cake!

I talk a big game about cake decorating but I rarely get a chance to. So when my friend Yvonne planned a big 40th birthday bash I decided it was time to have a go.
We sell a heap of cake decorating things in our shop - we're not just about sewing - and I determined to only use what I had at hand. So that is: coloured fondants, tylose, cake boards and cards, blingy numbers, edible pearls, and the cake tins we hire out.
I went for 6" and 7" sized round tins, two cakes from each to make a tall cake. The tops trimmed flat. I got a bit muddled and sandwiched the top one with jam, but the bottom two are separate cakes, so we can unstack them for cutting. The cake itself is chocolate, made with the cupcake recipe I favour, and I made 6 x the usual amount. That's a dozen eggs worth! I skimmed these with buttercream icing. As you can see, them is tall!

Upturned dinner plate and Tupperware container playing duty as turntables. Sometimes I reckon I missed a successful career as a plasterer.

I made a pile of blossom flowers a couple of nights ago out of fondant with tylose kneaded into it to make it set properly. The centres are edible pearls. I stuck them in with glue made of tylose and water. The only thing extra I did was to press every blossom on a soft surface to give it a softer 3-D shape. Lots of processes!

Here's the cake assembled - the ivory bottom and orange top both covered in fondant. I am really bad at this! Especially with such a deep cake. The bow is also fondant strengthened with tylose. I made the bow last night so it had time to set. Ignore the 40 on top, I realised the top needed something else.

Aha! A ball of leftover orange fondant to give some height, then I made some leaves, popped the 40 into it, and covered it in leaves and flowers. Pretty!

Flowers stuck on with the tylose glue. I can't get over how effective it is! The flowers are fairly heavy but they went on with a smear brushed on the back. No slip sliding. however because of all the creases in the fondant that the flowers could only disguise so far, I realised we needed something more serious around the bottom.

And here we are. Probably too many flowers on it, but it does look less fussy in person. I got all the leftover fondant, rolled it into 12mm balls, and arranged them in colour order around the base. It just finished it off nicely.
So, all ready for Saturday night. The fondant and buttercream will keep the cake fresh. It's a nice, tasty cake and the jam helps!
This cake was easy to put together, it just takes patience to go through the various processes needed. And things need leaving overnight to set and dry. I couldn't have got this together in one evening as cakes needed baking and cooling, blossoms needed to dry etc. I did something for it every evening this week but it didn't take all evening.
In terms of the design, I Googled 40th Birthday Cake for ideas, and found this one:

source

You can probably see some similarities. But sadly, we have no black fondant until the end of September. My approach to these kinds of projects is to get an inspiration, then forget it. I never try and copy things I see online - I don't know what they used, how they did something and I would rather use what I have. Also, you know how it is - the home job is never quite as swish as the professional job! So why put oneself into the position of a direct comparison. For example, the black and white cake is buttercream so it has nice sharp edges that fondant doesn't make.

No, I am perfectly happy with my imperfect work. I won't be flashing pics of the inspiration cake around on the night, and the pretty fruity colours of my version suit Yvonne better than the stark black and white one would.

So there! ;-)

Cupcake College

Last Thursday's class was a riproaring success, everyone reports having a great time and learning things they can use. Phew :) 

 Me holding forth on some point of philosophy. Did you know that cupcake decorating is a metaphor for life? I didn't either until I did this class and had a captive audience! I can't blame the bubbles as mine was apple juice!

A selection of completed cakes. Didn't they do well!

Maz making butterfly wings our of white chocolate. Great concentration and steadiness of paw!
None of the photos show the pretty aprons I made for everyone properly, there is just a glimpse in this shot. Lots of cake happiness. :)
Anyway it was fun, everyone helped clean up afterwards, bless them, and we're doing it all again next week. :)

Sharing the cupcake love...

You know, I make no secret of the fact that I LOVE to make cupcakes, decorate cupcakes and feed them to others, although I rarely get to taste one of my own creations. They do taste good, I am told, and at work, at our annual craft market and at the odd event where I reliably turn up with a few dozen, they are anticipated by many.
It was neverthless a delight when someone suggested I teach others how to make and decorate them. But the idea appealed - after all, I have let hoards of children driven indoors by rain loose on the decorating materials at summer camp and survived to tell the tale. A small group of adults is a pushover by comparison. And it's a chance to earn a little bit of return on investment while also donating a chunk of the proceeds to my favourite cause, Wellington's Downtown Community Ministry.
And so, dear readers, this week I am teaching my very first class. Attendees will wear a cake infested apron made with my own fair hands, and be let loose on six cupcakes with a few of my decorating tips to guide them. It's going to be fun, not to mention interesting! And it had better work, as I have another scheduled a fortnight later!
If you had a chance to learn something about cupcakes, what would it be? I get asked all kinds of questions from technical ones I don't know the answer to, to ones that I am amazed aren't self apparent (which is the trouble with experience, you forget that once upon a time you didn't have it). It will help me to get prepared for thinking on my feet while making icing, melting chocolate (always perilous) and talking and fielding questions, all at the same time! Wish me luck xo

Cupcake frenzy!

Three lots in two weeks. I like to make them in colours that suit the person they are for and this first lot were for a friend at work who loves red and white:

Great photo isn't it! I work with a guy called Rowan who is an ace photographer and he commandeered the camera. I love this angle! And I've learnt something too.

 Having not seen at this point the photos Rowan took, I was still taking bad ones. These were for a 6 year old's birthday party. Pink is my friend!! So is glitter! :)

Ready to be delivered. This is a tray from the cupcake carrier-it has inset spots for the cakes and it stops them falling over in transit - very handy!

 And finally, one giant, gluten free cupcake birthday cake. A tip for anyone who tries this - make sure the buttercream icing is really firm - my first try it all slid off!

Here is a better idea of it size. My two favouritest little blondies - Zoe who was turning 9 and Peter her little brother. (my niece and nephew). :) 

Cookies, the kind you eat

Why are those little tags of data websites leave in our computers called cookies? Can't eat them!
Anyway I just pulled a tray of dark and white chocolate and apricot cookies out of the oven, the apartment smells heavenly, and they are so easy to make I want to share the recipe. I adapted it from another one and process it very differently.

Easy yummy cookies
100g (3.5oz) butter
1 cup sugar (I use brown or white, both fine)
1 tablespoon golden syrup (not sure what this is elsewhere)
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups flour
About 1 generous cup of any combination of: dark, milk or white chocolate drops, chips, chopped melts etc, nuts (I love almonds the best) and fruits like dried Californian cherries (not glace) chopped apricots, peel etc.
Vanilla, almond or any essence, grated orange or lemon rind optional

Put the chopped butter and golden syrup into a decent sized microwave bowl or pot, and melt together. Don't get it too hot. Stir in the sugar and soda. Add the egg, beating furiously with a fork so the egg doesn't poach in the hot mixture. Fork is definitely the best tool for this! The mix will be a bit fizzy. Add the flour and essences or rinds if used, mix thoroughly, and dump onto the kitchen bench. Pat the dough out into a rough disc and leave it to cool off. If it is too hot and you add chocolate, it will just melt! When it is cool enough to handle, dump the chocolates and/or nuts on top. Start to fold the mixture over the filling. Note I haven't said put flour on the bench - it is so buttery it's unlikely to stick much and if it does, just scrape it up with a spatula. Only use flour if it seems wet and glistening in places. Work the dough and the fillings together until the dough has caught them all up into its spell. Now you could do all this in a bowl instead but it's so easy doing it on the bench and very cathartic. 
Form the dough into a rough log. Cut a length of silicone baking paper long enough to fit in your fridge, about 15 inches, and dump the log onto it. Roll the log in the paper until it is kind of smooth and even, the roll the paper round it. Lift the whole thing into the fridge and let to get cold and solid. Then just carve off slices about 1cm thick (scant 1/2 inch), arrange on a silicone paper covered baking tray and bake at 180C or 350F for about 10 minutes. I save the baking paper and reuse several times.
Another cool presentation I discovered by accident when I was being impatient. I cut the log when it was still soft and the slices flattened into leaf shapes, so I popped them onto the tray and gently bent the two ends together like a fortune cookie. You can also do what the original unadapted recipe advised, which is to take spoonfuls of dough and press them with a fork but doing it that way requires too much patience!

These cookies also work fine without added extras except a spoon or two of spice.
I love recipes that allow one to be creative. :) And now I am taking a noodle box of them out to the Embroidenator to pick up the Bernina 1230 I just bought second hand, that was delivered to her place. A nice excuse to see her. Happy baking everyone!

That's what I call a kitchen!

We landed up in Glastonbury and after climbing the Tor (more on that some other time) we went to see the abbey ruins. I could write a book about them, so fascinating, but I am going to focus in right now on the Mother of all Kitchens.

 This is a kitchen. It's the size of a 3-bed house and about four storeys high. Only one room inside though.

 One of the four fireplaces set up like it would have been in the 16th C, when it was last used.

 Another fireplace. There is one in each corner, in fact they ARE the corners, with a hood across for the chimney. It was a beautiful day, quite warm, but it was chilly inside the kitchen. Thank goodness as with those fires going it would have been roasting!

 The ceiling and a window.

Me trying to get a photo that captures the grandiosity of the space.
This is the Abbot's Kitchen. It didn't serve the whole Abbey, just the Abbot and his immediate staff, guests and visitors! It does give one a sense of how important the Abbot of Glastonbury was, until Henry 8 came a long and ruined it all. Pillock.
Perhaps my efforts to renovate kitchens in the past few years are unambitious? Me, I'd happily LIVE in this one! Maybe with better heating, and not from one of those big draughty fireplaces...

English Coffee - an oxymoron I have come to dread.

We were warned that the English didn't really understand about coffee. But being warned and living with it are two different things.
They just do not get it. The coffee is tasteless, the beans stale. Quite upmarket cafes still serve filter coffee, or plunger coffee, less upmarket places sell instant.
But the thing that has fascinated me (a good distraction from wanting to scream in the middle of many a cafe) is the way they make latte.

 The very patient lady behind the counter at Wells Cathedral Cafe was perplexed as to why I wanted to photograph her making our lattes. They fluff/heat the milk, then pour the 'coffee' into it.

It takes on this layered look. It is almost always served in these tall glass mugs (handles are turned away from camera). Yes I know that having coffee so milky is not very staunch, but at home a latte or flat white TASTES OF COFFEE too.
If you order a flat white, you usually get a black coffee and a jug of steamed milk.
*sigh* Mojos I hope you are ready for our landing at Wellington Airport. No sweeter welcome could I have!

Flirty at Thirty

Joie de Vivre turns 30 this week and to celebrate, had a bit of a shindig on Saturday night. The occasion definitely called for a cake.

:)

And finally...!

The finished cake. It tasted great and went down a  treat. Could have been half the size, but hey, the children of quilters all over Wellington are well pleased that I didn't make it smaller! :)

Exterminate! One mouthful at a time...

I need practice, this one would never be able to take on the world!!!

More cake things

 Well I made the rest of the HOF blocks, and took photos of the process. Not all came out, but enough to get the idea. :) 

 

 I rolled the fondant icing out between sheets of silicon baking paper, and trimmed to a 7 inch square.  I then scored the 'patchwork' lines onto it for guidance. Before starting on the red, I painted glitter patterns onto the bits of the white that will be showing on the final piece.

I then rolled out the red fondant in the same way, as thinly as I could, and marked and cut the pieces needed.

These red pieces then got the glitter paint treatment. I love glitter!!!

Lastly, I carefully placed the cut pieces onto the white background, using the score lines to get the positioning right. All done! :)

OK, this is not the same one as you can tell by the different pattern of glitter, but they all look the same otherwise, which is the whole point of scrappy patchwork ;-)

Cake icing meets patchwork!

Wow. I said I'd make an enormous cake for my quilting club's 25th anniversary, and it's this Saturday so I've started already. Our emblem is the Hand of Friendship block, so it made sense to me to use it in a fondant icing quilt, in our colours of red and white. It's also the BOM for the same meeting. My contributions are all going to edible!

The cake is 24" square, divided into 3 x 3   7" blocks and a red border. Five blocks are the hand of friendship, the spacers are white and will have writing on them. Tonight I made two h.o.f's and one plain one.

this is how I did it:

I printed out the words in a nice font, and traced through the paper onto white fondant, pressing hard so the line showed on the rolled out icing.

Then I outlined it with this very cool edible felt pen I got from the cake supply store. They think of everything!

It looks cool like this, but I couldn't leave it alone!

Here I am filling in the outlines with glitter paint. This is just edible glitter mixed with a little gin, makes it east to apply with a brush and the gin evaporates.

I then scoured the icing to look like quilting, and used white glitter to paint some squigglies on the white - it's supposed to look like a tone on tone print.

These I made earlier and forgot to photograph as I made them. I've got three more to make so I may yet do so. It is really easy to do this. Much faster than I thought it would be. The red is fondant icing also, they make it for Christmas, it comes in green too. Amazing!

I may get time to do something else this week! Especially since I have farmed out the actual cake baking. It's actually going to be two cakes, one chocolate and one banana, butted together. MrC is making a BIG cake board for me :)

Merry Christmas!

I love Christmas Day. I love the preparation, the gift making and choosing, the planning and the creative outlet of it all. I love the religious significance of it.
This year, I also enjoyed enormously setting a table for 14-16 people. The magnificent cloth is a 6m length of craft cotton bought on sale from Snotfight. Yes, OK, sometimes they come through for us. My mother doctored the crackers, adding big bows and chocolates to the outside and much better presents to the inside. The miniature water pistols were particular favourites. Gorgeous serviettes from Whare in Christchurch, my table decorations as previously blogged, and the mandatory glasses of chocolates finished it all off.We had a sumptuous feast of traditional foods. I received some hand made gifts that will merit their very own posting, but not tonight. I hope that wherever you were and whatever you ate and whatever kind of table setting you had, you had a wonderful day. M xxo

Pre-Christmas dinner

Terry presiding over our Pre Christmas table.

On the 23rd December, MrC and I were joined by our dear friends Ross and Terry for Christmas Dinner. This because they are escaping to Oz on the big Day, so we exchanged presents, ate ham and had a lovely time. I forgot crackers, though. But I was happy with the table - a length of Christmas craft cotton topping the table cloth made for a festive feel.

It was a cutey little ham, perfect for a small number. I glazed it with wholeseed mustard mixed with orange marmalade, yum. A simple meal, it is summer here after all and the full excesses of traditional Christmas food are too much for me! The platter on which the ham is sitting was made by my mother in her pottery days. For dessert we had trad pudding with lemon brandy sauce. Noone got a photo of it, but it tasted great. Ross and Terry loved their shirts, I hope to have photos to upload. Perhaps I'll do a whole post one day on the shirts I have made them through the years...

My Pavlova Obsession

No I don't have a thing for Russian ballerinas, I have a thing for that Antipodean specialty, the Pavlova. It is so underrated, this dessert of the Gods. Its sheer simplicity makes it a base for so many exciting variations. It makes me want to weep seeing a perfectly bland pav sitting there with kiwi fruit slices or even, heaven forbid, strawberries on it! ERK!!!
I have a few secret taste combos that I am stingily not sharing, because a gal has to have some secrets. But I did want to show this pavlova that I made for our department's Christmas function. This function takes place at my boss Pen's divine 1920's home, and as Pen is a Culinary Goddess of the highest divinity, only a chosen few are allowed to bring food across her threshold. I am one of the blessed, and this is due to my pavs.
This is the photo I took just before we left Isn't she pretty! A topping of raspberry coulis, a ring of cream and topped off with some of my signature butterflies. I laid her ever so carefully in the back of the car, which is completely flat, and David drove off ever so carefully. In spite of this, somewhere along the way, the raspberry slid sideways, taking the cream with it, and the whole thing looked like a train wreck. I was gutted. However my ever positive co-workers jollied me along and we carefully slid most of it back into place. The way in which it was demolished with many groans of pure ecstasy I think really showed that appearances are not always everything.

Never one to miss a learning experience however, my Christmas Day pav will be garnished at the venue!

'Twas the Night Before Christmas...

...And nothing much is stirring around here but me! Tomorrow is the Big Day, we have a 6 metre table to decorate, so I thought I'd get it done tonight, to free up tomorrow for food preparation.
The other night I wired up loops of ribbons,
stuck little apples onto wires, and I found wonderful gold rococo tree decorations that I stuck to wooden skewers. These are an important design element as the table cloth has a lot of that in it.
Then it was outside to raid our one and only fir type tree, and start building a base. Note pavlova cooling gently in the background. Pavs are always better cooked the day before.

This is the middle piece being built in a rectangular dish so it can hold three candles.
After a lot of sticking in of objets, voila!
Almost complete. all that is needed is a few burgundy glass baubles poked in, and as they are still on the tree I'll do that tomorrow. It's for colour balance - the cloth is black with poinsettia in it, and has a lot of darker reds. These decos have a more tomatoey red thing going on and the burgundy will help balance the colour.And here they all are, two smaller, rounder ones with one candle, and the main, larger one with three.
This is what I love about Christmas, and I can't wait to take a photo of the table all set up tomorrow afternoon.