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.

Vintage Bird Cage Cake

It's been one of my cake decorating ambitions to make a bird cage cake...and now I have! Last Sunday I attended a course at The Cake Parlour in Wimbledon Park (yes I know...another one...I think I'm addicted to courses!). The Cake Parlour is owned and run by Zoe Clark who makes the most beautiful cakes, Zoe has also released a range of cake decorating books.

This cake started life as a 12 inch slab of vanilla sponge. In order to create the shape we cut out three 6 inch rounds from the slab. To create the rounded top, an upturned cake baked in a hemisphere tin was added. Each layer has buttercream and jam in between and the whole think was then crumb coated before being covered in sugar paste.

All the bars were rolled by hand and stuck on, as were the swirls at the bottom. To create the bird an outline of royal icing was piped on acetate and was then flood filled, I'm sure you'll agree that the bird really brings it all together.

The pink flowers are rolled roses and the white blossoms were made using a cutter. To give them a bit more depth they were then dusted with a pink colour. Finally, to tie everything in we piped small green leaves around the flowers.

I love the finished effect and as usual was very loathe to cut into it but in the end the lure of cake to eat won out! :-)

I really enjoyed my course at The Cake Parlour and if you've got a minute or two to spare, I'd definitely recommend checking out Zoe's cakes.

3D Dinosaur Cookies

I've been looking forward to making these 3D dinosaur cookies for a little while now and with a long weekend upon us, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I bought the cutters from Folly Home, I made the stegosaurus and the T-Rex but you can also get a brachiosaurus and a triceratops!

These do take a little bit of time to make but the end result is worth the effort. They would also make a lovely gift for a little boy!

Each set comes with several different cutters, you need to make each of the cookies and then when they're cool you can fit them all together to make your 3D dinosaur. I used this basic biscuit dough from the BBC as I couldn't find my usual recipe. The cookies tasted great but they were quite fragile so it is important to be really careful not to break any of the pieces. Another tip is to ensure that the little slots on each cookie are suitably opened before baking, if they're too close when they go in then the slots will be too narrow to fit the cookies together. To avoid the cookies spreading too much when baking I put them in the freezer (already cut out) for 5-10 minutes on the baking tray to firm up the butter.

 

One top tip I would recommend is using a cookie spatula. By using the spatula you can easily pick up your cookies without altering the shape, as sometimes the cookies can become misshapen. Also after using a cookie cutter, you may end up with some slightly rough edges, to give a neater finish, pick up the cookie and gently pat down these edges or run your finger around the edge...but be careful not to change the shape again.

You can leave the cookies undecorated but I like the idea of lots of different coloured dinosaurs, so I decorated them using royal icing and the flood filling technique. If you want to know more about how to do this, I previously briefly outlined the process when I made Love Heart Cookies. Once the royal icing on these dinosaurs had set over night, I secured the legs on with a little more icing.

I'm entering these 3D dinosaur cookies 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 Karen's turn. The theme for May is Biscuits and Cookies.

Snowy Chocolate Cake Cottages

 

These cottages are really cute and so wintery and they're also a little festive with the wreaths and Christmas trees. 

These were a bit of a labour of love to make, they took a while especially the piping but I was really happy with the result. The first stage was to make a dense chocolate cake. The recipe specified a 6 inch square tin which I don't have so I used some foil backed parchement and tried to reduce the size of an 8 inch tin as you can see above...and it actually worked quite well. If you wanted to make something similar you could use any dense chocolate cake recipe.

Once baked and cooled the cake went in the fridge overnight to firm up so it was suitable for carving. The 6 inch tin produces four cottages.

I carved two types of roof on my cake for a bit of variation. This is also useful if you have different flavour cakes so you can tell which one is which. Another potential cake recipe for the cakes was spiced ginger cake.

Once the cottages were carved they were covered in marzipan to create a smooth base. A lovely chocolate ganache was then poured and spread over the top with a small cranked palette knife.

Warning, the next part will give you hand cramps! This was quite fine piping and I used royal icing in a piping bag with a 1.5 nozzle. I also used an angled turntable to pipe on the sides more easily. First up the roof tiles were piped and some were given extra icing to show a build up of snow. It doesn't matter if they're not perfect as the whole thing gets a dusting of icing sugar on top. Also add some icicles as a finishing touch.

Once the roof was complete it was on to the doors and windows. The snowmen were created by pressure piping a small circle for the head and a slightly larger circle beneath for the body.

Finally, some of the white icing was mixed up to create green, red and yellow for the wreaths, window decorations, Christmas trees and snowmen. The Christmas trees are 3D as the first layer was piped on by zig zagging from side to side with the lines gettting progressively longer to create the shape. When this was dry a slightly smaller zig zag was piped on top and then a final third layer. A star and Christmas decorations were then added to finish the trees off.

Lastly, royal icing was spread over the boards around the cottages and a ribbon added. I think these could even make cute Christmas presents next year! The idea is from the most recent Squires magazine and is by Ayako Saida.

England Footballer Cookies

To celebrate England's 3-2 win over Sweden on Friday night I have immortalised the team in biscuit form. The only downside to the win is that I can't make a joke about my biscuit team playing better than England do!! If you look closely there's also a mysterious new member of the team...

This is my second entry into our new Calendar Cakes Challenge...my first being these Lime and Vodka Russian Doll Cakes. I'm co-hosting the challenge with Dolly Bakes, so check out her blog for more info on this month's theme: Euro 2012.

To make these cookies, you can use any cookie dough recipe such as this one from BBC GoodFood and the cookie cutter came from Cakes, Cookies and Crafts. These cookies would also be great for a young football fan's birthday, they could be decorated in any team's kit as required!

Once the cookies are baked, you just need to make some royal icing which is fairly stiff. This can be used to pipe an outline for your footballer. The icing should then be made a little runnier by adding water. To flood fill the cookies, put the icing in a small piping bag and snip off the end, fill the outline with icing and use the end of the piping bag to push it out to the edges...simples!

My First Wedding Cake...

Last weekend I was tasked with making my first wedding cake...and I have to say it was a rather nerve wracking experience as you want the cake to be perfect for the bride and groom on their big day!

We started off planning to make cupcakes...and this eventually ended up as a four tier open stack wedding cake! I'm really glad I had the opportunity to make a cake like this as it was a big challenge as you never know how it will turn out...but in this instance I was more than pleased with the result!

The cake itself is sponge which was cut and shaped out of 12 x 19" slabs of cake. I used the appropriately sized cake boards as a template and to ensure the layers of cake were the right depth, I used a cake leveller...there's 3 layers in each tier. It's a 5, 7, 9, 112 cake and the top tier is a dummy, as it's lighter and easier that messing around with a small cake.

Each cake is covered in celebration ivory sugarpaste from Regalice. There's 6kg of icing on this cake...it was extremely heavy!!! I covered each layer twice as it gives a really nice finish and to sure an even roll I use 4mm spacers to run my rolling pin over.

A few weeks ago I saw a top tip for making sure the pearl swags are nice and even. The book suggested using a necklace hung over the side of the cake to give the perfect draped shape to pipe around. However, I tried this and found that it slid of the side and also left marks on the icing as it was too heavy. So instead I used a piece of cotton thread which was perfect for the job. The dots were piped with royal icing using a size 3 nozzle. Once they were dry I then painted them with an iridescent pearl lustre dust which really makes the piping look like a real string of pearls!

The cakes were stacked at the venue on the day but I put the dowels in the day before. The bottom 11" layer has 5 dowels which come 2" out of the cake to give the open stack effect. The next layers are all doweled too and it is important to check they are all level otherwise you can end up with a wonky cake, which was my biggest worry! To avoid this, use a spirit level to check as they go in.

The final touch was the flowers, they are non-toxic varieties. The top posy is held together using a mini oasis in a little plastic holder. For the flowers in the stack, the ends can either be taped with florist tape or you can use water tubes...just make sure they don't leak on your cake!!!

I really enjoyed making this cake, it really was a test as I've never made anything like it before at home...all in all it probably took 20 hours plus to make! I'd definitely make another one...but maybe not for a while! :-)

Spooky Halloween Cookies

To celebrate Halloween I made these easy biscuits with royal icing. Once you've baked your biscuits, mix up some royal icing and pipe an outline around your design as in the picture... it doesn't look pretty at this stage but the final product is a really great looking biscuit, or cookie if you will! Once you've edged your biscuits cou can then make your icing slightly runnier by adding a bit more water and then flood fill the biscuit using a piping bag with the end snipped off. You can use this to push the icing right up to the edging. If you want to make your biscuits even more special you can pipe contrasting colours on to the base layer icing and they blend in to each other like the eyes on the ghost!

Why not try some spooky cupcakes too! There are loads of great cupcake toppers available if you want some quick and easy decorations... team them with bright orange and green icing! These are some mini cupcakes from Lola's which a friend had for her Halloween party.