Chocolate Cake!

It's been another baking weekend in the Evans household. This time a chocolate cake. I think you'll spot the Cressida Bell influence again. I'm really loving her cake decorating ideas.

 

It was a good friends 50th birthday. He is trying to forget his age so of course I HAD to include it on the cake design. I'm a meanie! The cake itself was a plain sponge. For the icing I used a really rich Mary Berry recipe consisting of chocolate and butter. Sounds hideous, pours on like a dream, tastes divine. I left it to set for about 30 minutes before going mad with the decorations.

 



I uses a combo of chocolates including:
Marks and Spencers Giant Chocolate Buttons
Hotel Chocolat White Buttons
Hotel Chocolat Dizzy Pralines
Gotel Chocolat White Truffles
Galaxy Counters
Maltesers
M&Ms (Browns only)
Pearlised Sugar Balls
I also used white icing to pipe a few details.

 

The Giant Chocolate Buttons made a great plaque for piping the appropriate age on it. Tim also went to town with them on the sides of the cake and it covered up any wonky bits!

 

 

The cake went down a treat at the party. Happy Birthday PK!



PS. Loved the Bouncy Castle!

Clematis Cake

My good friend and colleague is retiring tomorrow so I've tasked myself with making her a retirement cake. She is a keen gardener and her computer wallpaper is this beautiful clematis she grew in her garden (I sneakily took a photo of her computer screen when she wasn't looking - ha). Soooo, that's the theme of the cake...

 

I'll admit here to being well out of my sugarpaste comfort zone with this project, I usually only do very simple cake designs. Luckily, I found this great sugarpaste clematis tutorial online and bought all my supplies from Imaginative Icing in York.

 

In the end I made five flowers consisting of seven petals each and wired the individual petals together with florists tape. I also made some loose petals - they were handy for filling in any gaps and also for hiding some of the bodges in the icing on the sides of the cake.

 

 

To get the right colours I used a combo of three craft dusting powders - Foliage Green, Pink and Dusky Pink. I used a paint brush to dab on the colours - Green for the centres, Dusky Pink for the tips and Pink for the petal centres and edges. You can be quite rough at this stage as the next step is to brush on pearl lustre powder and that really seems to blend the colours and make the petals look more natural. The stamens were bought. -  I wired a few together to create the flower centres and coloured them green with the dusting powder.

 

 

Happy Retirement Yvonne, I hope you like the cake!



Sally

xxx

Birthday Cake for Ben

It's my friend' s son's first birthday today. Me and Tim decided to make him a birthday cake to celebrate. His favourite thing is a stuffed toy zebra name Zambezi, so that's the design we've gone for. The cake is a simple Victoria Sponge, covered in marzipan and roll out icing. It's not perfect by any means but my lovely husband and I had fun in the kitchen together.

I'm particularly pleased with the zebra stripes, which we achieved by rolling out sausages of sugar paste in black and white, then rolling them together with a rolling pin. Here it is next to the toy. Snap!

 

 

Happy Birthday Ben!

Icing The Icing

I used icing sugar, a piping bag and a 1.5mm nozzle to add some extra decoration to the Icing Christmas Trees, that I'd cut out yesterday. I decided to stick with white icing as it really stands out from the green background. I also stuck the yellow stars on the top of some of the trees with a blob of the icing.

 

I didn't have any particular design in mind when I started to pipe so some patterns have turned out better than others. The overall effect is quite striking though so that's good.

 

 

Not so good - my hand is killing me from squeezing the piping bag for a couple of hours. Ow ow ow. Oh well, no pain no gain etc.



Icing Christmas Trees

I've made a start with the icing design for my Christmas Cakes and thought I'd share it with you. It's Christmas trees this year. Obviously.

I used flower paste for the design as it is so nice to work with, you can roll it really thin and it sets hard. The cutter and green food colouring I bought from my Imaginative Icing. Sorry about this next photo - it's food dye honestly!

 

I use the paste colours when dying flower paste as it stops the icing getting too wet and sticky and gives a much stronger colour than traditional liquid food colouring. I use the tip of a paint brush (never used for paint!) and dab a small amount onto a a third of the required flower paste. Working the dye into a smaller amount of the flower paste, then adding the remainder of the icing, helps achieve an even colour and avoids streaks. I then rolled the icing out on baking parchment dusted with icing sugar.

 

 

Then got cutting...

 

 

and cutting...

 

 

and cutting - Phew. I also cut some stars that I might use for the tops of the trees.

 

I'm letting them dry out this evening but I'll add a bit more decoration to the trees tomorrow.

 

Birthday Cake

It was Mum's 60th birthday recently so a serious celebration cake was required. I made flower paste roses in a delicate pink and yellow. I love working with flower paste but be warned it can be very time consuming. If you want to have a go yourself, there are loads of tutorials available on YouTube.

Here are the flower paste roses drying on tissue paper in an egg box, I suspect this is not how the profesionals do it. They look a bit bright at this stage but they do fade slightly as they dry to give a more subtle colour. I mixed two varying shades of both the pink and the yellow to give a more authentic rose look - the inner petals are a slightly darker shade than the outer petals. Ingenious.

 

This is the finished article, a Victoria Sponge covered in marzipan and roll-out icing. It was honestly one of the hottest days of the year so working with the roll-out icing was a nightmare. And yes, I am making excuses for the dint in the icing!

 

 

Yum yum, love you Mum.

xxx