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!

I Heart Cupcakes

At first glance you may think that these are fairly standard cupcakes... move along please, nothing to see here! But wait...underneath that unassuming exterior lies a secret...a hidden heart!

To make the cakes, the cake mixture was prepared and then a small amount put in a seperate bowl and coloured with red food colour. This was then baked in a 8x8 tin and when cooled, the hearts were cut out. Then a little of the original mixture was put in each cupcake case, a heart was placed in the centre of each and then covered over with the remaining mixture. The whole thing is then baked together.

The only important thing to remember is when the cakes come out of the oven it is important to keep them all facing forward on the cooling rack as otherwise when you cut through the cakes, if the heart is not aligned, you will not get the desired effect. I put the cute 'Eat Me' toppers in when iced to show which way was forward.

The idea for these cupcakes originally came from Cupcake Takes The Cake. If you'd like to try them you can check out a video tutorial on the site.

It would be quite easy to adapt this idea to include different shapes and colours inside your cakes. You could even try writing a message... I had a go at 'I Love U' as you can see...I may need to play around with this a bit but it didn't turn out too bad.

You may also be thinking it's a little bit early for Valentine's Day, these are however my entry to Cakeboule's Virtual Valentines bake and craft competition 2012. So if you want to join in, why not hop over to Cakeboule's blog. The closing date is 4th February and you can enter both crafts and bakes.

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.