Temari Cakes at Peggy Porschen

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to visit the Peggy Porschen Academy for the first time. I was attending the Temari Cakes course with Maki Searle who is famous in cake circles for her innovative spherical shaped cakes.

Maki of Maki's Cakes took us through the process for making Temari cakes step by step. These gorgeous cakes are perfect for many occasions but are particular popular for weddings...although I'm not sure how I'd feel about making 100 of them! :-)

They're also ideal for Christmas...just make them in festive colours...et voila...you have Christmas baubles!

On the day we made two sizes of Temari cake and also the lovely parcel cake below. We made the spotty bow by cutting out small circles of green and laying them on top of the red before gently rolling over them. You can see the same technique here, which I used to make Pudsey Bear's bandana.

So what does Temari actually mean I hear you ask...or even if you didn't I'm going to tell you anyway! Temari are traditional Japanese hand balls for kids to bounce and dribble. It's not only cake here...you get education too ;-)

To make the balls, the cakes are baked in a half sphere silicone mould. The cakes are then levelled and a small amount of cake is scooped out with a melon baller. Half the spheres are filled with jam and half with buttercream and they're then chilled. Two halves are then put together before the whole thing is lighly coated in buttercream.

When thoroughly chilled the balls are covered in marzipan as you can see Maki doing in the picture above. They're then covered in sugarpaste icing.

The finishing touch is the addition of a little lustre dust, some glitter and piped royal icing using a 1.5 nozzle. I've also seen Temari balls with little snowflakes cut out of flowerpaste, hardened and then stuck on...very wintery and they'd make a lovely Chirstmas present.

If you'd like to know more about how to make Temari cakes then Maki explains the process in her book Cakes to Fall in Love With.

These cakes really are beautiful and I'd love to find the time to make some more. They're so unusual and very original.

To finish any visit to the academy or if you just happen to be passing, the lovely Peggy Porschen Parlour is just across the road. I had a sticky toffee cupcake which was a moist date and walnut sponge with a creamy caramel centre and a toffee frosting. I don't normally rave about such things but I would go so far to say that this was one of the best cupcakes I've ever eaten...truly delicious! I also saved a sugar plum cupcake for the next day which was a tasty combination of plum and cinnamon.

As for my visit to the academy, I did enjoy my day and the Temari cake instruction but I do find the price to be extremely high considering I have paid less for courses elsewhere and the experience has been just as good. That being said...I'm so pleased to have learnt how to make Temari cakes and some other courses use dummies for their Temari instead of real cake so it was worth it for that alone!