1950's Vintage Dress Cake

A few weeks ago I attended a course at the Cake Parlour with owner Zoe Clark. Zoe produces the most beautiful cakes for weddings and other occasions and also supplies Fortnum and Mason. Her latest book is Chic and Unique Vintage Cakes and this vintage dress cake is from the book along with other designs such as a Singer sewing machine.

One of the reasons I wanted to go on this course is due to the gravity-defying design. The cake is suspended on a dress makers dummy. The design is also so chic, any lady would love this cake for a birthday or special occasion. This cake requires some construction including cutting foam board, attaching a threaded rod and nuts and using a glue gun but the finished product is worth the effort. The principle can also be applied to other designs such as a Christmas tree or bird house.

The dress I made is quite 'poufy', Zoe's original is a bit more slim line which is a little more elegant. However, the more poufy, the more cake! The body for the mannequin is made in advance with lots of CMC added which allows it to set hard. The cake is carved out of three different layers of cake to give the shape and some folds were also carved in.

The skirt part of the cake is covered in sugarpaste and then the body is added on top before adding the bodice in flowerpaste. I had a little bit of a problem with the sugarpaste as it buffed up to a really shiny finish and then it didn't dry and set as you would expect, it seemed a lot stickier than normal so I ended up with a bit of a wonky hemline but it was just about rescued!

The finishing touches were the necklace which was made using a First Impressions pearl mould, the bow around the waist to cover the join and the top of the dummy with the wooden handle. I particularly like the floor boards on the cake board, they were made using the edge of a ruler to mark out the boards and then a Dresden tool to mark the grain. Finally, to give the colour, a little paste colour was mixed with water and brushed on.

This is a lovely idea for a cake from Zoe. If you want to see more of her designs, check out her books.

Ghoulish Graveyard Halloween Cake

With Halloween and All Souls' Day this week I made this Ghoulish Graveyard Halloween Cake. It was fun to make and would be great to bake and decorate with kids. It would also be perfect for a Halloween party.

The recipe for this cake is from BBC GoodFood and you can find it here. It is easy to make as it's just a basic chocolate sponge cake recipe made in a 20 x 30cm tin. The resultant sponge was light and tasty. Once cool, the whole cake is covered in chocolate buttercream. I put my cake on a rectangular cake board and then covered the board in buttercream too and put a black ribbon around the edge. Alternatively if you have an appropriately sized slate or granite board this would look good too, or you could cover your cake board in black sugarpaste.

The gravestone biscuit recipe is also included on the BBC website. They are made with soft light brown sugar and lots of golden syrup. You can cut your shapes out freehand or you can also cut them out in cardboard first and use this as a template. I used a cereal box to make my templates. To add the details I used royal icing piped with a size 2 nozzle.

To construct the cake you just need some Matchmakers, Oreo cookies and some Halloween jelly sweets. The jelly sweets are usually available in supermarkets and Haribo make good ones around Halloween time. The Matchmakers should be snapped at various lengths and then pushed into the buttercream around the edge of the cake. To make the soil on top whizz the Oreos in a food processor (or you can bash them with a rolling pin in a plastic bag), when it's a fairly fine crumb, sprinkle them on top.

Finally, push the gravestones gently into the cake and add the jelly sweets for a bit of colour and to complete the ghoulish graveyard look.

Giant Cupcake Cake

If a regular sized cupcake doesn't quite hit the spot...why not make yourself a giant cupcake! I've always admired the pictures of giant cupcakes that I've seen but I've never made one myself. So when the Cake Decorating Store recently offered to send me an item from their website to review, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try out a Giant Cupcake Tin.

If you are looking for cake baking and decorating equipment then you can find everything you need at the Cake Decorating Store. If you want to make a giant cupcake or any other cake check out the Cake Decorating Store website for bakeware, boxes, icing, colours, dusts, cutters and lots more.

The cupcake tin came with a recipe and instructions for a Double Chocolate Pound Cake made with cocoa powder and chocolate chips. By using a pound cake recipe, it means it's a bit denser and will hold it's shape better and support the weight. The recipe did state that it would take 60-70 minutes to bake, mine took closer to 100 minutes but this may have been my oven! The good news is that it came out of the pan very easily thanks to the Easy Bake spray you can see at the end of the post.

You can obviously choose to decorate your cupcake anyway you choose as you can see from these images of other giant cupcakes on Google. I chose a fairly simple design covering the base in a teddy bear brown sugar paste and then using buttercream on the top. To get the raspberry ripple effect on the top, I coloured half my buttercream with a pink paste colour and then filled my piping bag on one side with plain buttercream and then the other side with pink buttercream. I then piped it on and used a palette knife to smooth it down.

To finish off I added some sprinkles, along with florist paste butterflies and flowers. You can make your own butterflies and flowers using the cutters you can see in the equipment picture. To get your butterfly wings to open upwards, fold a piece of card lengthways and place the butterflies in the fold to dry in position. You can also use the corner of a cut cereal packet for this which is what I use.

To present my cake, I put it on a cake drum that had been covered with white sugarpaste and then finished with a pretty pink ribbon around the edge. You could of course also put it on a plate, cake stand or an uncovered cake board.

The following is a list of equipment that you might find useful for making a giant cupcake, depending on your design, or any other cake that needs decorating:

1. Sugar Florist Paste - a firmer paste that dries hard, useful for making the flowers and butterflies.
2. Ribbon - Give a neat finish to your board.
3. Sugarflair Paste Colour - to colour white sugarpaste or florist paste. I also used it to colour my buttercream.
4. Cutters - to create butterflies and flowers, although a whole array of cutters are available. Used to cut the sugar florist paste.
5. Ready made flowers - if you don't have the time or inclination to make your own.
6. Piping nozzles
7. Piping bags
8. Sugar sprinkles
9. Sugarpaste - for rolling and covering cakes and the board.
10. Cake drum - to stand your cake on.
11. Lustre dust - to add an extra dimension to the butterflies and flowers.
12. Dusting brush - to apply the lustre to your decorations. 

If you haven't tried it already you might also be interested in Wilton's Bake Easy Non-Stick Spray. The recipe that comes with the pan suggests using a cake release and a light coating of flour in addition to ensure your cake comes out easily.

Disclaimer: I was sent the Wilton Giant Cupcake Pan free of charge but was not paid for this post. All opinions are my own and all other equipment and materials, I supplied myself.

Jaffa Cupcakes

I think I'm yet to meet anyone in life who doesn't like Jaffa Cakes...and as to whether Jaffas are a biscuit or a cake...in this case they're most definitely a cake. If you're interested, apparently the difference between a biscuit and a cake is that cakes go hard when they're stale and biscuits go soft! McVities claim that Jaffa Cakes are indeed cakes...the reason they are keen to define them as such is that you don't have to pay VAT on cakes!

I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery's new book 'Home Sweet Home'. It is a great recipe that I've used before and it gives a lovely soft and moist sponge. You can find the recipe here but this version is slightly different from the one in the new book. I've found previously with this recipe that the cakes actually taste better the next day after they're made.

As you can see from the pictures, the cupcakes also have a hidden centre. Once cooled, a little piece of cake was cored out from the centre of each cupcake and then filled with marmalade. I used Robertson's Golden Shredless and it really did taste like the centre of a jaffa cake!

As already mentioned the recipe for these Jaffa Cupcakes is from the new book by the Hummingbird Bakery 'Home Sweet Home'. If you'd like to know more about the book you can read my recent review here.

The icing is chocolate buttercream made with 450g icing sugar, 60g cocoa powder, 150g unsalted butter and 60ml of whole milk. All the ingredients bar the milk are mixed together until there are no large lumps of butter left and then the milk is added in gradually. This is a lovely light icing as there is comparatively less butter than usual and the milk loosens it up.

These cupcakes were easy to make and look cute with the mini Jaffa on top. They were also very tasty and I'd definitely make them again!

I'm entering my Jaffa Cupcakes into this month's Tea Time Treats challenge which is hosted alternately by Kate from at What Kate Baked and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, this month it's Kate's turn. The theme for April is Fairy Cakes, Cupcakes and Muffins.

Chirpy Chick Easter Cupcakes

Well Easter is nearly upon us, so I thought I would get my Easter baking underway this weekend as I'm going away for a week from Good Friday. For this reason I thought I'd stick with some simple Easter bakes this year and I also tackled Simnel Cake, Hot Cross Buns and Traditional Easter Biscuits last year.

I love these Chirpy Chick Cupcakes they're so cute and perfect for kids. You can use any vanilla cupcake recipe but I particularly like this one from the Hummingbird Bakery. You could also flavour the cupcakes, lemon would be good!

I piped a swirl of buttercream on top of each cupcake with a Wilton 1M nozzle. Buttercream is easy to make, it's just 500g of icing sugar to 250g butter or any 2:1 ratio. I also add 1/2-1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and a tablespoon or so of water if it needs loosening.

To make the little chicks on top I used yellow sugarpaste which was mixed with some CMC. CMC stiffens up the paste to make it a little more robust and it means that the circles won't flop when placed on top of the buttercream. I cut out the circles using an Ateco cutter a few hours before I needed them and then left them to harden for a while.

For the wings it is the same sugarpaste with CMC. Each wing was cut out with a heart cutter and then the cutter was twisted slightly to one side and the paste cut through again which gave the wing shape. The eyes are little balls of black flowerpaste and the beak sugarpaste with CMC which was cut out freehand. To finish off the chicks, little flowers were added. These were cut out of white flowerpaste which I coloured up and then PME blossom cutters gave the shape.

 

The design for these cupcakes comes from Seasonal Cupcakes by Carolyn White which is a very reasonably priced little cupcake book and I think the finished product is very effective. The desgin can also be modified to make a number of different bird cupcakes. I previously made some Christmas robin cupcakes which were similar.

These cupcakes are my entry into this month's Calendar Cakes with the theme being Easter Extravaganza. Calendar Cakes is hosted here at Laura Loves Cakes on alternate months with Dolly Bakes. If you'd like to enter you can find all the details here.

 

I'm also entering them into Utterly Scrummy's Easy Easter Baking Blog Hop.



Gingerbread Cupcakes with Salted Caramel Icing

These gingerbread cupcakes are getting me into the festive mood with the little gingerbread men and candy cane toppers, as well as some gingerbread men sprinkles. I recently made Nigella's classic gingerbread recipe but these will be a popular variation with the addition of a gorgeous, creamy salted caramel buttercream.

If you want to make a delicious frosting for any of your bakes then this caramel frosting is a good un! It's a regular buttercream with homemade caramel beaten in. It's got a lovely flavour and is great for kids without the salt or big kids with the salt! :-)



The cute cupcake cases and toppers are from Cake Craft World, as are the gingerbread men sprinkles. Alternatively you often see gingerbread cupcakes topped with a little gingerbread man biscuit. If you'd like to make your own gingerbread men, you can find a recipe here. They look really cute with a little royal icing decoration.

I'm entering these into our monthly baking challenge - Calendar Cakes. This month it's hosted by Rachel from Dolly Bakes and we host alternately. The theme is 'Go Crackers for Christmas'. If you'd like to enter you can find the details over at Dolly Bakes.

Ingredients

140g unsalted butter
200g golden caster sugar
60g black treacle
60g golden syrup
2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks
300g plain flour
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground nutmeg
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
240 ml warm milk

Salted Caramel Buttercream

125g white caster sugar
80 ml double cream
1/2 tsp salt (or to taste...I found this to be very salty)
1 tsp vanilla extract
160g salted butter
200g icing sugar

Pre heat the oven to 190c/170c fan/gas 5 and place the cases into the holes of a muffin tin. This recipe will make about 15 cupcakes.

Start by creaming together the butter and sugar together in a bowl, it should be light and fluffy and become paler. Then add the treacle, syrup, eggs and yolds adn combine thoroughly.

In a separate bowl sift together the plain flour, baking powder, nutmeg, ginger and salt. Add half the flour mixtue and half the warm milk to the butter and sugar mixutre. Combine well before adding the remaining flour and milk and mixing again.

Spoon the mixture into the cupcake cases and bake for around 20 to 25 minutes. The cakes should be risen and lightly firm to the touch. Cool on a wire rack out of the tin.

To make the frosting, first you must make the caramel. Heat the caster sugar along with 4 tablespoons of water. The sugar should dissolve but don't stir it, otherwise it could crystalise, you can however swirl it. When the sugar is dissolved, turn up the heat. The caramel should bubble and will thicken and turn a light amber colour after about 5 or so minutes. Take the caramel off the heat and immediately stir in the cream, sugar and vanilla extract but do take care as it may sputter. Leave to cool completely.

Mix the icing sugar and softened butter together for at least 4-5 minutes. Then add the caramel and beat it in. This frosting is then ready to be piped on top of the cooled cupcakes. Make sure you only put soft caramel into the frosting, if there are any set or crystalised parts they will block up the piping nozzle.

* Adapted from the BBC GoodFood Website