Cookie Writing

Last week I attended a two hour 'Cookie Writing' evening class at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney. It was a chance to go along and learn about a variety of different ways to write on and personalise your bakes. Many of these ideas can be used on larger cakes but for ease and due to the limited time, we tried out our new skills on cookies.

As you can see below we used royal icing for piping by hand, this is quite tricky and requires a bit of practice. There were also edible images, if you're feeling really keen you can print these yourself by using purchasing edible ink and using a designated printer for edible images!

Tappits can be used to give a nice uniform finish, as well as regular cutters to give the finish you can see in number 4. Finally, why not just style your own writing out of rolled sugarpaste, or alternatively you can use edible pens to write straight on! All of these suggestions are great ways of adding the personal touch to your cakes and cookies and as always the Cakes 4 Fun team came up with some fab designs and a great colour scheme which ties all the cookies together! 

1. Piping with Royal Icing                                           2. Edible Images

3. Tappits                                                                      4. Cutter

5. Rolled sugarpaste                                                     6. Edible Pen

I don't want to give too much away as if you want to learn more and find out how to use each of the methods properly, I'd definitely recommend going on the course. Cakes 4 Fun always run great classes and the tutors are lovely, so if you're ever in this neck of the woods, give it a go! :-)

Baby Shower Cake

This week I made my first baby shower cake. It's a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling, made with 70% Green & Blacks and double cream...nice and healthy!! ;-)

I wasn't sure of a design to use but then I saw these super cute baby clothes cutters at Cakes 4 Fun and the decision was made.

The recipient didn't know if she was having a girl or a boy, so I went for both pink and blue which adds a bit of interest to the cake. It was really simple to make using the cutters and the washing line is just a line of piped royal icing. To make the clothes look slightly more realistic I also piped on buttons and used the end of a piping nozzle to cut in some details.

The finishing touch was the teddy and blocks on the top, which is just teddy bear brown icing (unsurprisingly) with CMC added to stiffen it up. To add the stitch detail, a stitching wheel was used and the eyes are just black paste colour on the end of a cocktail stick and then pushed in to the icing.

The result is a really cute baby shower cake, based on a design by Cakes 4 Fun, which was well received by the baby shower ladies!

Cake Club: New Year, New You

This Thursday was the second meeting of the Cakes 4 Fun cake club. Unfortunately the first rule of cake club is not to talk about cake club... however, as a baking blogger this could prove rather difficult!

The theme for this month was New Year, New You. I was a little short on time and imagination this month, so my healthy cake consisted of baking with blueberries and using low fat cream cheese! Some of the other cake clubbers were far more imaginative with cakes such as chocolate and courgette, as well as another chocolate cake which was butter and flour free!

My offering was a Blueberry Soured Cream Cake with Cheesecake Frosting, and you can find the recipe here on BBC GoodFood. I discovered a little too late that I didn't have the size of tin specified in the recipe, I only had a larger one. So I baked my cake for less time but it was rather shallow when it came out of the tin. I therefore made a second one exactly the same and sandwiched them together with lemon curd. In order to prevent my blueberries from sinking in the cake, I also washed and floured them... which seemed to work!

Overall, this wasn't a bad cake, a little sweet but certainly tasty! Next month's theme is 'Anything Goes... except Chocolate!'. So if you are around the London area and fancy joining us for cake, wine and chat, then check out the Cakes 4 Fun website.

Double Height Stack Cake

Yesterday I attended the double height stack cake course at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney. There was a lot to fit in, in one day...cutting, crumb coating, covering and stacking... and that was before we even started on the decoration. To give the double height lower tier, it is actually two cakes on cake drums stacked on top of each other with dowels holding the weight of the top part of the tier.

 

 

Once the cake was covered and stacked it was on to the decoration. We made the butterflies using PME butterfly cutters and then left them to dry in a folded piece of cardboard so that it gives the appearance of flying! We also made the lovely rolled roses which look great and take a lot less time than proper sugar flowers.

 

 

Finally, it was on to the decorations on the sides. We used brush embroidery for the flowers and also had an opportunity to paint the darker flowers on. The finishing touch was to add the tendrils, these were added with an edible pen but these could also be painted on. When using an edible pen on icing, it is best to let the icing set for a while, hence the reason why there are two pictures at the top, one was taken yesterday and the second was taken today once the tendrils had been added.

 

 

This was a fun course with a very pretty cake as the result! There were loads of techniques to learn and it would have been nice to have even more time to really perfect our cakes.

Mad About Macaroons

Yesterday I attended a much anticipated Macaroon course at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney. It was a great day of Macaroon madness! When we arrived we watched a demonstration of how to make the macaroons using the Italian method, before setting to work on 3 batches of our own. By lunchtime we were surrounded by trays and trays of macaroons, raspberry, lemon and chocolate. On top of that our lovely tutor made us pistachio, as well as some cinnamon flavoured macaroons. Before they went in the oven we were able to add some decorations to our pink macaroons, including little coloured balls (dragees), pink sugar and royal icing flowers.

In addition, we then made some Swiss meringue buttercream to which we added a variety of flavours. At the end of the day we all ended up with:

• Lemon macaroons with lemon curd buttercream
• Chocolate macaroons with ganache
• Raspberry macaroons with raspberry jam buttercream (white chocolate ganache also goes well!)
• Cinnamon macaroons with buttercream
• Pistachio macaroons with pistachio paste buttercream

If you consider that a single macaroon at that well-known French macaroon patisserie costs £1.40…then all of a sudden this course seems like extremely good value. We left at the end of the day with around 50 macaroons… which would cost you about £70 if you bought them in a shop… and they were just as delicious but with the added satisfaction of being homemade!

So what were the top tips from the day?

• Use the Italian method rather than the French method
• Don't bother to draw out circles to pipe your macaroons
• Leave your macaroons to rest for at least 30 minutes once piped before putting in the oven - until they go dull and form a skin

So what did I do with all my macaroons? Well I popped a few in these fab Christmassy gift bags and gave them out with my Christmas cards today, along with yesterday's biscotti! Although, I may have also sampled one or two myself!! ;-)

I would thoroughly recommend this course if you have a penchant for Macaroons…although, I already have a little bit of a Macaroon addiction and I’m sure being able to make them at home can only make it worse!

Cake Club: Glitz & Glamour...

This evening was the inaugral Cakes4Fun cake club which is to be a monthly get together... each month has a theme and all participants must bring an appropriately baked and decorated cake. It's a great excuse to try new ideas, eat cake and discuss all things baking!!

The theme this month was Glitz & Glamour... this was a tough start... thinking of a cake to bake to meet the theme took a while. The general consensus seemed to be chocolate and glitter... with 6 out of the 7 cakes being chocolate... including mine!

I decided to go for a White & Dark Chocolate Cake from BBC GoodFood which looks really good visually when you cut in to it. I did however, double the recipe to give more height to the cake. To make the chocolate stars you can either make your own or Dr Oetker now do good chocolate stars in the supermarket. The ones I decorated my cake with are covered in edible gold leaf and gold star transfer paper.

All the cakes were delicious... for the record the only non-chocolate one was a lovely hummingbird cake which was very moreish!! I'm now full of cake and am already looking forward to the next cake club meeting!!

Why not set up your own cake club with friends or follow this link to the Clandestine Cake Club where you can either find a club near you or start one up!

Cake International

This weekend I made my way up to the NEC in Birmingham for my first visit to Cake International! If you've never been then I'd highly recommend it...although your purse may come back quite a lot lighter!! There were a great range of stalls offering all manner of cake decorating equipment. In addition, there were cake decorating demonstrations, a baking theatre, cake competition entries, a live competition, as well as some hands on areas to learn new skills. During the day I watched two demonstrations including Lisa Slatter from PME demonstrating their dove cutters amongst others and also a demonstration of the Cricut Cake machine. If you've never seen a Cricut machine before it cuts patterns and designs out of paste...it does produce lovely uniform designs but it's a bit of a faff, relatively expensive and is it cheating...I'm not quite sure! ;-)

I also managed to spend far too much money on an array of cutters including a Scottie Dog from Cakes4Fun, flowers from Patchwork Cutters and a Babouska Doll from Cakes by Bien.

The pictures I've included here show only a fraction of the cakes that were on display and some were truly amazing...a great source of design inspiration!! I better get decorating now to use all my new cake tools!! If you fancy a visit then Cake International at the NEC will be back next year...and they're now planning a show in London next June if that's closer to home...this may become an annual trip!

Wonderful Wonky Stack...

Wow what a weekend... I attended the Wonky Stack course at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney and it was with some trepidation that we all arrived on Saturday morning... would our wonky cakes look anything like the dummy... and more importantly would they stay standing!!

It was a great course, we learnt to carve our cakes to create the tapered effect, done upside down and then flipped over!! We also stacked the cake which is strangely easier than stacking a normal cake. However, there is a secret element... a spiked dowel driven right through the middle, a little nerve wracking as you're hammering it through!! Other techniques learnt include the fantastic rolled roses, a quick and easy method to create great looking roses which could be used on many types of cake. The final product was amazing and more than a little Alice in Wonderland.

This cake is sure to impress but having laboured so painstakingly over it you may be loathe for anyone to go near it with a knife!!