Alice in Wonderland Unbirthday Cake

I recently shared my eldest nieces Halloween themed birthday cake but I've not shared the one we made back in August for my other nieces birthday. When we first started making cakes for my nieces, we'd pick something they liked, like a favourite disney or cartoon character and it was pretty straightforward. I think what has now happened is that my sister leaves my nieces in front of google image search for a bit, and they look for the most difficult cake for us to replicate to see how far they can push us before we break. I never thought we'd be able to pull off the Alice in Wonderland cake for my youngest niece, especially as Ian was unable to help because he had lots of work to do. 

It was also tricky because we were attempting our very first topsy turvy cake. After much studying of you tube videos, I was confident I had an idea of the technique needed (you can get topsy turvy cake pans but we're always a bit last minute with these things!). Some careful carving and moulding of cake later, and we had the cake all covered (including a cheshire cat stripey bottom layer). 

Here's the finished cake in all it's topsy turvy glory. 

Again, the detail really made the cake - it's all there - the cheshire cats face (Ian took a break from his work to help with this one)...

...the tea set (non matching as I'd imagine all mad hatters tea sets are) along with the mad hatters hat itself....

...some playing card people (which we might have used non edible pen on because we only had a black icing pen - I don't think they were eaten but I'm sure it wouldn't have killed anyone if they were)

I'm really proud of my daffodil - the centre was really tricky to make and attach but I think it's clear what it's meant to be.

The daisy looks really happy to be part of the cake (and so it should!)

The eat me label on the entire cake was my favourite part (and one of the only things not on the cake picture we were working from).

Alice in Wonderland clearly isn't my nieces favourite movie as she was confused by the 'unbirthday' tag (this confirms my suspicion that she was just trying to test our cake skills!).

Halloween Birthday Cake

My niece was born very close to halloween. Consequently every birthday cake we make for her these days is halloween themed. This year we took inspiration from this cake here but she's now old enough to know what she likes so she made her own tweaks to the cake. Because we were working towards not just a picture, but her description of what she wanted, it was a bit daunting as we had to hope we'd understood the brief correctly.

She seemed pretty pleased with it - I wasn't there when she cut into it to reveal the colourful insides but I'm happy with how it turned out. 

Ian did a great job making all the skulls (he did get a bit bored because he had to make 8 of them all the same and that's not really his thing) - check out this close up of one.

The pumpkins were slightly more fun because we could give them each a personality of their own. I got to arrange them on the cake so of course my favourite ended up at the front.

He looks so shocked to be there - it makes me giggle. As does the goofy one.

But look at this poor one. I don't think he wanted to join the party!

It's definitely the little details that makes the cakes fun, and I think my nieces enjoy looking for them when the cake arrives. It turns a nice simple cake into something special. (Simple cake as it was, it still required 3 shopping trips and over a day of work!)

There's Nothing More Fun Than A Cake Challenge

Ian may not agree with the fun part, but we'll ignore that because he's stuck with me forever and he'll just have to deal with it!

It was our second meeting of our Clandestine Cake Club last night, and the theme was 'Jubilant Jubilee'. I couldn't decide whether to go for something decadent and fit for a queen, or something that looked impressive. I like a good challenge so I decided to go down the impressive looking cake route.

I was inspired by the humble battenberg cake, and was really excited by the idea of having a cake where every slice was a union jack flag. All my friends thought it was a challenge too far (and it nearly was).

I made two tray bake sponges, using a standard mix (the blue 4 eggs, the red only 2). I tried to find dark blue colouring to try and get a truer match to the flag, but I already had the darkest one my shop offered, so I mixed in a tiny bit of black to try and darken it.

You'll see that when you bake a blue cake, instead of going golden, it goes green! 

I tried to cut each length of blue cake into two, on the diagonal, which is not an easy task at all, and was one of the trickiest parts of the cake creation.

Once you cut into the cake, you realise just how blue it is - the green on the outside definitely fools you.

I measured up a bit of red cake to sandwich between the two bits of blue cake that I'd just cut, and was going to join all the bits with buttercream, but this was a fragile job, as every time I tried to spread the buttercream, it tried to pull the cake into bits.

The only way to get it to work was to use my hands, which was a bit weird, and involved a lot of hand washing because buttercream is pretty greasy stuff!

With all four corners of the cake made, it was time for bed, so it all got cling filmed at put in the fridge to harden the buttercream (yes, there's only three bits in this picture but trust me, I did make four!).

Making the cross to go in the middle of the union jack involved a lot of joining of cakes, and it definitely turned a bit jigsaw puzzley, but I was running out of time before cake club, and was a bit panicked so had to hope it would work.

Here's the cake all stacked and assembled - all it needed now was a nice fondant icing blanket to hide some of the joins. 

I cut off a small amount from both ends to give it a clean finish.

The cake was a lot larger than I was expecting it to be, but I achieved my goal of a flag in every slice (even if each slice had to be shared between two people because of the size!). 

I've got ideas for improvement of the process but I'm not sure I'll have much call to make another one!

This time last year....

I'd been up for hours making food ready for our Royal Wedding tea party.  I'd been struggling to make trays of uniform looking sandwiches (the bread wasn't square!).  I'd made shortbread myself for the first time, but I'd cheated and bought the scones. I'd made two types of sausage rolls (one with onion, one without).

I'd spent the evening before making last minute bunting as all our local shops were out - it was simple but effective and added a nice splash of colour to the room. 

I'd also made little union flags to adorn the cupcakes to make up for not piping the icing in a pretty manner (time was too short and I'd run out of disposal icing bags).

I'd not made enough flags so used skittles to decorate the remaining cupcakes. I'd also realised that my cupcake holder was too big, as there was only 6 people coming to the tea party yet we had 23 cupcakes!

I'd roped Ian in to help chop fruit for the Pimm's.

We had a nice afternoon in front of the telly watching it all, and even though my friends aren't really very royalist, we enjoyed the day because it was an excuse to get together and drink Pimms!

I'm back!

I've been quiet for a little while, no good reason really, I can only apologise and hope that you all haven't lost interest.

The longer you stay away from a blog, the harder it is to come back - you start feeling overwhelmed by all the things you've been doing that you want to blog about, and it's easier to go and do new things instead, but then you're just adding to the blog backlog and then there's guilt.  

Making the first post after a while is really hard - what do you write about to welcome back your blog - do you try and put all the things you've done in chronological order so it makes sense? Or do you pick your best topic and blog about that?

I'm going for both!

Back in January, our friend PG turned 30 and we used this as an excuse to do some extreme cake construction. We'd been looking for more things to do as a group at weekends, so making a bridge out of cake seemed like a good opportunity. 

We even drew out a plan for it, that's how geeky we are.   

 

Don't worry - the avocado was for something else!

 

Ian and I went shopping for supplies with my mum on the Saturday, I got up nice and early to bake the cakes and then we all got together in my dining room/kitchen to construct the bridge. 

We thought it best not to attempt to make a specific bridge, pulling it off well would be too difficult. We instead went for a 'cake bridge', where all bits were either cake or sweets. We had Swiss rolls for the uprights, strawberry pencils for the supports, cupcakes for the tops of the towers, melted chocolate for the road, with mini marshmallow white lines. The main part of the cake was to sit on a board, that was then supported above a larger board using cadburys mini rolls. 

We added extra little details -  a green bus and some cars to the road, lollipop street lights, and even little haribo people and a monkey that we pretended was king kong at the top of a cupcake tower. 

 

 

The bridge was a bit wobbly, but it looked pretty epic, and our friend was speechless when he saw it, I think it was kind of a crazy thing to find waiting for you at a tea break at work!

Halloween Birthday

My niece was born on 29th October, so her birthday always seems to clash with halloween celebrations.  This year she decided to embrace the closeness, and asked for a spider cake.  She was quite specific, a blue cake, with a black spider, so my mum and I set about making a sponge, and then covering it in blue butter icing.  Blue butter icing isn't an easy task, because the butter generally starts out yellowy, so the end result has a greenish tint to it.  We started with lurpak though, a pretty light, almost white butter, and this worked well.  

We found some glittery writing icing in Sainsburys which worked really well to make a glistening web on the top of the cake. We made a body out of black icing for the spider, and then used mikado (known as pocky in Japan) for the legs, adding some more icing to the joints of the leg for stability and to cover up the joins.  

My sister had requested two cakes, one for the family get together, and one for my nieces friends party, but we were a hand down (my mum just had a carpal tunnel op) and it seemed like too much work in too short a space of time for me.  So I suggested making small cupcakes to decorate the cake board, like the ones I did for halloween last year, and then we could eat those for the first party, leaving the main cake intact for the second party.  This worked pretty well, and considering we were going out for dinner for the main party anyway, noone really wanted a cupcake, so there were still some left to decorate the side of the cake on the second day too! 

I only differed in opinion from my mum once this time, she wanted to give the spider little boots, but I thought it looked better without (Ian agreed so I got my way!). 

Halloween Muffins

I went to a halloween party, and I did not have time to bake anything.  So, I bought some mini muffins, and some chocolate, and decorated them instead.  It was fun, although I almost missed my train and I had to leave the mess for Ian to clear up (ah, what a shame!).  They went down well at the party, but I think next time I'll make the muffins myself too. 

Not made by me!

Over Easter, my mum looked after my nieces so my sister could go to something or other (I forget what).  They had a fun afternoon decorating cakes.  My mum used the throwaway icing bags that we'd bought from Lakeland quite a few years ago, so they had several different colours to play with.  I thought the results were pretty enough to share with you all.

And if you look carefully at the next picture, you'll notice my tradition of always having one cake with a double case as the lucky one seems to have been carried on (not sure if this was intentional though!)

PS. My mum has just informed me that my nieces made the cakes too and even washed up!

Barbie Cake

Last weekend was my youngest nieces 5th birthday. It's scary how quickly they grow up. My sister never makes the cake, my mum still always does it. Since my first niece was born, I've always helped (unless the cake calls for marzipan, that's Ian's department!)

This years cake was one of those fun stick-a-barbie-in-it cakes. I like these because I get to rip the legs off the barbie! It's always hard work trying to get the dress to look right, and covering the cake with the icing without it ripping and then working out a way to cover the joins.  This year, barbie got a nice flowery trim to her dress.
 

My sister wanted to use the barbie cake for both the family party, and the school/other friend party so we made a second cake that we decorated plainly for us to eat.  I ended up spending about an hour putting the hearts in a pattern on the icing my mum piped.  To start with, I only did it on the top two circles.  

 

 

My mum suggested adding it to the bottom circle and annoyingly I agreed with her.  I don't ever want to see one of those hearts again! But I think you'll agree it does look better with the hearts on the bottom too.