Snow White Princess Cake

I know, I know, I'm sorry.  Worst blogger ever.  Honestly though, I have been pretty busy with other things lately, and even considered giving up the blog altogether.

Instead, I have decided I am going to try very hard to post something more often - even if it's just a picture of the latest thing I've been baking (or sewing!).  If less wordy = less time consuming, then that's the way those posts will be.  At the end of the day, you'd probably rather just see pictures of cake than listen to me ramble anyway, right?  :o)

So anyway, this is a cake I made for a little girl's 6th birthday recently(ish).  She wanted a Dolly Varden style Snow White cake.  I've never done a Dolly Varden cake before, so it was quite interesting and fun for me to try it out.  Here's what I ended up with:

Snow is wearing her classic outfit, all made from sugarpaste (ie rolled fondant icing), including the bodice and sleeves, which I stuck directly onto the doll.  The only things that aren't edible are the doll itself, her hair, and her crown (this is a plastic one that came with the doll, so I figured why make work for myself when the plastic one is just as cute anyway - plus the birthday girl can keep it for her other dolls afterward).  You can't really see it very well in the photo, but the little apple next to Snow was completely covered in red cake decorating glitter - it was super sparkly and looked pretty cool, if I do say so myself!  :o)

The cake underneath the skirt was chocolate Madeira cake, and I baked it in two sections - one in a pudding basin (for the shape), and the other in a regular round eight-inch cake tin.  I then stacked the pudding basin one on top of the round one and trimmed them to become one cohesive skirt shape.  This gave the cake a good amount of height.  If I had just used the pudding basin alone, she would have been a very short and stumpy princess!  There is of course such a thing as a proper Dolly Varden cake tin, but I don't have one, and I've also heard that they're quite difficult to work with.  Anyway, I found this method worked just fine.

Not sure if the method I chose for covering the skirt was the best one, as it was a lot harder than I had expected.  But I think the end result was pretty good for my first try - and the birthday girl and her mum were Thrilled, which is the important thing!

Rainbow Magic Fairy Cake!

Phew, it's been busy around here!  Life is settling back to normal now though, with The Muffin back at school (she has just started Grade One - goodness my baby is growing up!)

The Muffin's latest obsession has, for a while now, been the Rainbow Magic fairy books, by Daisy Meadows.  For her birthday, she obviously wanted a Rainbow Magic fairy party.  I had plans to make a plain round cake and decorate it, but The Muffin had other ideas.  "Mummy can I have a Pot At The End Of The Rainbow?  With the fairies all in it?"  I warned her there would be a fair bit of black involved, which she was (somewhat surprisingly) fine with, and then we compromised on her four favourite fairies, rather than all seven.  In the long run, this was her cake:

I made a collage so you don't have to scroll through so many photos!  You're welcome.  :o)

The cake itself was white chocolate Madeira cake layered with raspberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream (The Muffin's choice).  All the decorations were made from sugarpaste with a bit of CMC mixed in.  The fairies were made naked, and then their clothing and hair was painted on with royal icing.

Amber would have looked better suspended on white florists' wire rather than green, I think, but I didn't have any strong enough.  It was less noticeable at the party, as it wasn't against the white background!

I was very pleased with my Bertram The Frog:

But in the end, I actually think this was my favourite bit of the whole cake:

 I had racked my brains trying to think how I was going to do the inside of the Pot At The End Of The Rainbow.  Obviously it couldn't be hollow (with furniture in it), because then there would be no cake in it.  But I didn't want to just do it black, either.  This was quite a black cake for a six year old anyway, I thought!  And then suddenly I had a great idea:  what would you see if you looked into a pot full of Rainbow Fairies?  Why, rainbow colours of course!  And lots and lots of sparkles, obviously (which once again Do Not show up in photographs).  I thought it was quite effective, The Muffin was thrilled - and it was Super Easy.  Win-win!

We also had cookies - I'll show you those tomorrow!

Merry Christmas... (& Sweets for Santa!)

Here in Australia, it gets pretty hot at Christmas time.  Tomorrow is forecast to be 39 degrees Celsius.

So when it fell to me this year to make the dessert for Christmas lunch, I thought something made of icecream would be very welcome in the middle of the day!

Lately I've been a bit obsessed with gingerbread (oh yes, there has been a lot of baking going on.  Just not much blogging).  So I decided it would be rather nice to make a layered molded dessert of gingerbread and vanilla icecreams - mmm....  Ooh, and I could enter it into the latest Sweet Adventures Blog Hop!

Didn't it turn out pretty?  I was panicking a bit about getting it out of the mold before Christmas Day, but it seems to have gone back into the freezer with no problems...

If you're not thinking about licking that picture, with its chewy-crunchy gingerbread base, and deliciously frosty layers of vanilla and gingerbread creaminess, you totally should be.  Trust me.  But wait - it gets cuter.  This is what it's going to look like when it hits the table tomorrow:

Teeny gingerbread men and hearts, with a royal-iced gingerbread star, complete this treat!

So here's the recipe - and it might be too late to make it for Christmas Day, but you could definitely make either of these icecreams on their own just to eat from a bowl - the vanilla is really good, but I am very proud of the gingerbread - maybe I'm biased in favour of anything gingerbready right now, but personally I think it's sensational...

Gingerbread Icecream Tree

Vanilla Icecream
Ingredients
400mL cream
100mL whole milk
1 vanilla bean
5 egg yolks
125g caster sugar

Modus Operandi
Place cream, milk and vanilla bean in a medium sized saucepan, and heat slowly just until boiling point, then remove from heat immediately.  Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks and sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy.  Gradually add the cream mixture to the egg mixture, and continue to whisk until combined.  Transfer the mixture to a clean saucepan, and cook over low heat, stirring all the time, for around 15-20 minutes, until it coats the back of a spoon.  Do not allow to boil!  Refrigerate the mixture until cold (preferably overnight), before churning in an icecream maker.
Pour churned icecream into your chosed mold, and freeze.

Gingerbread
Ingredients
115g butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg yolk
300g sifted plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp grated nutmeg

MO
Cream the butter and sugar just until smooth.  Stir in the molasses and egg yolk.
Combine the dry ingredients and stir into the molasses mixture until smooth.  The mixture will be very soft and sticky - that's okay.  Wrap it in plastic, and chill for at least one hour.
Meanwhile, take a piece of baking paper and draw around the shape of the mold you have used for your icecream.  Cut the shape out, and put it aside.
Preheat the oven to 175C (350F).  On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to about 8mm thickness.  Using your baking paper template, cut the shape you will need for your base out of your gingerbread dough (in my case, a large Christmas tree).  Transfer the shaped gingerbread onto a lined baking tray (note:  you will make your life much easier if you keep the paper shape on the gingerbread tree shape until you have transferred it to the tray.  It will inevitably warp a little in the process, and having the paper template still there means you can smooth it back into shape before baking).  Remove the template and keep it for later.
Bake the large gingerbread in the oven until firm, and the edges are golden brown (the actual time will vary depending on the size and shape of your mold.  Mine took around 15 minutes).
Bake your small cookies for around 8-10 minutes.  Cool on trays.

When it is completely cool, move your large gingerbread shape to a board, and trim it back to the desired shape using your paper template.  Theoretically I imagine this would be easier while the gingerbread was still warm, but I wasn't game enough to move it at that stage.  Please yourself.  :o)

Gingerbread Icecream
Ingredients
600mL cream
Some of your Gingerbread cookies - I used about 90g of them (although I had some left over from my last batch, so depending on the size of your mold's base, you might need to make two batches of gingerbread if you want to decorate with them too.  Not sure... sorry.  But hey, who minds extra gingerbread around the house, am I right?)
6 egg yolks
150g light brown sugar
2 Tbsp molasses
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg

MO
Exactly the same as for the vanilla icecream, but add your gingerbread cookies to your cream mixture right at the beginning.  When you remove it from the heat, strain it through a sieve.  The cookies will have turned to mush - stir it a bit to help the liquid through the sieve, but don't force it all through.  Most of the cookie mush will go through the sieve easily - any that doesn't, discard.
Add the spices and molasses to the egg/sugar mixture just before adding the cream mixture.
When the icecream is churned, pour it into the mold on top of the vanilla, and freeze.

To construct:
Take your icecream out of the freezer, and whilst it is still in the mold, press the gingerbread base firmly onto it.  Return to the freezer until it is time to serve.

At serving time, flip the icecream tree out onto your desired serving plate (it's a good idea to freeze that, too, to stop the icecream from starting to melt quite so quickly!)  Decorate as desired.


Wow, that was kind of long.  But trust me, it's totally worth it!  And after all, we all deserve to be a bit indulgent at Christmas, right?

I really hope that you and yours have a wonderful, fun, peaceful holiday season - and do check out the other Sweets For Santa at the blog hop below - this month it's being hosted by Christina over at The Hungry Australian - she did an icecream dessert too, and it looks amazing!

Fish Cake

My dad had his 60th birthday over the weekend, so as he is a keen amateur fisherman, I decided to try my hand at making him a fish cake.

My model was this photo of a Western Australian Dhufish, from the Department of Fisheries website.  This large fish is only found off the coast of Western Australia, and is a very popular eating fish here.  The distinctive black stripe across its face made it a ideal model, as my dad recognised it straight away!  Hoorah!

As per usual, I was running late getting the cake finished, so my photos aren't brilliant.  As soon as it was finished I bolted outside with it to catch the last of the natural light (above).

But I've included a couple of night-time photos too (taken at the party), as I think they show the shadows and shiny highlights off better:

The fish was all cake, apart from the small bottom fin (near the head), which was solid RTR fondant.  The cake itself was lemon cake, filled with lemon curd and lemon Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  It was covered in the same SMBC, and then in pale grey RTR fondant.  I then made the scale pattern using three different sizes of little cutters (two leaves and a cloud, if you're interested!).  Next came the colour & fishy pattern effect, which I achieved by covering my entire house in black food colouring painting the cake with dry silver lustre dust and powdered black food colouring.

The Muffin made the eye, and was very proud of herself!

I must say I was Very Extremely Happy with how this cake turned out - it's always nice when things go according to plan!  And Dad was thrilled, so that's the most important thing.

Once Upon A Time...

...there was a beautiful, clever, funny little princess. Her mummy called her The Muffin, even though that wasn't really her name ('cause that would be weird).

And this year, she turned five.

For her first ever "friends" (or kids') party, she wanted a Princess Party. She chose this theme approximately 50 weeks ago, after having spotted the photo on the box of my Wilton's Romantic Castle Kit. Yes folks, she tailored her entire party theme around her choice of cake, and has been planning it all year. This Is So My Child.

In fairness, she is also a big Cinderella fan, so I'm sure that helped her decision somewhat.

We decided on purple, pink, white and silver as the colour palette (unoriginal, but Oh So Princessy)...


There were savoury foods, obviously, but really who knows (or cares) what they were? Let's be honest: it's all about the sugar.

I was pleased with how the cookies turned out, even though I didn't notice until JUST NOW that I failed to add the white outline to one of my shield/coat-of-arms cookies! But as far as I'm aware, neither did anyone else, so I am choosing to believe that.

There were also cupcakes, simply frosted with raspberry buttercream, and each topped with either a silvery-purple sugarpaste crown, three sugarpaste blossoms, or a Wilton's princess cakepop pick (they work well on cupcakes!).

I almost always make fruit skewers for parties, as they provide a healthy option whilst generally still being hugely popular. This time I wanted them to be a little prettier than usual, and I must thank my mother for stepping in and cutting all the little flowers and things out (even though the whole time she was saying "This is taking For Ever", and "I still don't really get what these are supposed to be"). In the end I think they looked great! (Thanks Mum!)

We had really pretty Paper Eskimo "Princess Girl" balloons, (but not the spotty ones, because I used those for the Spotty Party last year) and I even went all Martha Stewart and made these big tissue paper pompom thingies:


And can I just say: So Much Easier than I thought they were going to be! Instructions at yes, you guessed it, Martha Stewart. I see a lot more tissue paper pompom thingies in my future...

And oh yeah, here is the cake:

This was made with the Wilton Romantic Castle Kit, so there is significant plastic. Also as you can see, the design is fairly simple. I had originally planned to pipe little green leaves around the flowers, and a leafy border around the bottom of the whole castle, but I just ran out of time. Funnily enough though, in some ways I think I'm quite happy I didn't add anything else - I think it has a kind of pale purity that might have been lost by the addition of another colour. (Yes, that is my story and I am sticking to it). Plus my little princess and her friends all LOVED it.

The little flowers were cut from sugarpaste with a blossom cutter, each with a tiny silver cachou in the centre. The little crown over the doorway is a candle. All the other pink and purple bits are royal icing sprinkled with sanding sugar.

On arrival, the kids all decorated their own crowns (the templates for which I found here).

This is The Muffin's finished result:

The little princesses (and one very handsome prince!) played musical cushions, pass-the-parcel, and Find Cinderella's Lost Slipper. When the time came to leave, they all took home a loot bag filled with lollies, Disney Princess lip gloss, a castle hair clip, princess stickers, and a pretty eraser (and no, I didn't give the boy lip gloss! He got a toy horse, eraser, and knight-and-dragon stickers instead).

My little Muffin had the best time! I'm sure that in years to come, she'll be wanting parties at the newest coolest party place, or wanting to hire hundreds of dollars worth of party entertainer, but I love that for now she is just so happy to eat pretty cookies with her friends. Happy Birthday, sweetheart!

A great big cuppie, and a teeny tiny one...

For my birthday last week, I decided to use my Wilton's Giant Cupcake tin for the first time. I had also decided on a red and white colour scheme, so this is what I ended up with:



I'm not 100% happy with the finish on it - it was my first time using this tin, and I couldn't quite figure out how to extend the white icing down so it went under the red "cupcake liner" icing without creating a bump in the red icing. Yes, I could have made it thinner around the edges, I do realise that. But I made the ganache pretty thin on this cake, so I couldn't press too hard on the icing whilst it was on the cake, or it would have squished in. And frankly in the end I was all a bit "meh, whatever" by the time I got to that stage anyway, so a bump is what I got. I daresay this makes it Not The Most Professional Job Ever. But I figured it's my birthday cake, so I can do it however I want. Including Lazily.

I was however very happy with the swirly effect the top half of the tin gives the cake (which is why I didn't do the ganache very thick, because I didn't want to lose this effect).

I also made normal sized cupcakes in red liners with white swirled icing and a jaffa on the top of each, to mirror the look of the big one.

Anyway, with all the week's family birthdays over, we arrive at Sunday, and Mother's Day. I won't be seeing my mum this Mother's Day, as she's away on holiday, so today we are going to be having a lazy day watching Fantasia (which I got for my birthday, and which we will have to skip the scary bits of, as they would Freak The Muffin Right Out), and eating soft serve icecream from another one of my birthday presents - an awesome Cuisinart Soft Serve Icecream Maker!! Yummo. And all this after a huge breakfast cooked by my lovely Husband this morning - eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, croissants! Hmmm... maybe not the healthiest day ever... Who Cares. :o)

Oh, and the teeny tiny cupcake? That was my Mother's Day present:


Isn't it cute? Love! The necklace was from Diva (I know, 'cause I've admired them there). The little pillow was also part of my gift (it's a pincushion) - it was chosen by The Muffin from the Mothers Day stall they held at her school before the end of last term.

Hope all the mums are having a lovely day! What did your kids do for you this year?

Pirates & Princesses (something for everyone...)

I know, two posts in two days - what can I say? I've been busy.

So this year I decided to do something a bit mad. I entered a cake into the Royal Show. Not a wedding cake, because I'm not completely insane. In the Amateur Novelty section, because I decided it would be More Fun. But it did mean it had to be carved out of fruit cake. Now this is something I was very stressed about, as I've made fruit cakes before, but never carved them. In the event, whilst certainly more trouble than carving mud or madeira cakes, it was doable.

And here is the finished product:

And again, from another angle:

The cake was covered first in black sugarpaste, then in brown (which I then "woodworked"). With the exceptions of the window frames and the seaweed (piped royal icing), all the bits and pieces (including the masts) were made from modelling paste. In the case of the masts, this did not turn out to be the best idea, but more on that later.

And check this out:

I was awarded a "Highly Commended" certificate! Woo hoo! Very chuffed about this for my first show entry! And yes, you may also notice that in this photo (post-Show), one of the masts has parted company with, well, the rest of itself. This mast had developed a terrible case of "brewer's droop", as my mother so charmingly put it, by the time I visited the Show, and by pick-up day it had snapped. Oh dear. Note to self: learn how to make pastillage. But still - Highly Commended!!

But wait - there's more! Just in case I didn't have enough to do, I entered in the Decorated Cookies section too, with my usual lemon-scented sugar cookie recipe, done in princessy shapes:

And I won!!How awesome is that? Very exciting.

So a big thankyou goes to Husband and the Muffin, who have had to put up with the house being taken over by sugar (again), and also to anyone else who has babysat/chauffered/sat through lengthy explanations of Why It Is Important To Have The Correct Size Board (and other equally fascinating topics).

And congratulations to everyone else who entered the Cookery competition this year - there are some amazingly talented people out there in Perth. I was in awe of some of those cakes.

Now, what shall I enter next year???

My Little Pony Castle Cake

The Muffin has turned three!

And, as she is currently completely obsessed with ponies in general, and My Little Pony in particular, this year we had a Pony party, which of course meant a My Little Pony cake.

Other things were also made for this party - there were decorated cookies (ponies, of course), sparkly unicorn horns, Twinklewish Jellies (jelly jigglers set in heart shaped moulds, with pink edible glitter sprinkled on afterward), etc. I actually didn't get photos of everything, but my mum did, so I'll put some up when I get them (and if they turn out well).
But, as usual, the cake was the big deal, and that I do have photos of.

Now, I will just say that I've done something here that I don't normally do. Some time ago, I received the Wilton Romantic Castle kit as a gift, and have been itching for a chance to use it. A Pony party was the perfect excuse! The thing is, this kit involves applying icing to plastic, and I also decided early on in the design stage that my daughter would rather have plastic ponies she could keep and play with, rather than icing ones that would be eaten or thrown out. So for the first time ever on this blog, what you are seeing here is a cake that contains significant non-edible components. Even so, I am still pretty proud of this cake, and after all not everything is plastic. Apart from the towers, door, windows and ponies, everything is edible (my daughter was very pleased with the teapot, which she devoured complete with cups. And table).

One interesting thing about this cake: it is my first ever attempt at ganaching a cake (using the Planet Cake method). In the past I've always worked with buttercream, but I wanted as much stability as possible with the castle kit, so that the towers didn't just fall over. And when it's summer in Western Australia, buttercream doesn't stay terribly solid for long. The night I ganached the cakes it was 30 degrees Celsius at 9pm (yes, in our airconditioned house - we have evaporative), so even the ganache was fairly soft. Luckily the weather was a bit more reasonable the following day, so I was able to ice over the ganache with no problems.

Anyway, I've been wanting to try this method out for a while now (ever since my darling husband bought me the Planet Cake book - big kisses for him!). And wow. Don't get me wrong - I still love my buttercream, and I'll still be using it. But not under sugarpaste. Ever again. The ganache was actually easier to work with (which I was not expecting), and did indeed enable me to get slightly sharper corners than usual. I didn't make a huge effort with the edges on the bottom tier, as I wanted that to look a bit softer, as the green is obviously supposed to represent a grassy hill. But I was quite pleased with the edges on my round cake. I mean okay, they're not super-sharp, but it was my first attempt, and it was fairly warm.

So the cake itself? The bottom tier was lemon madeira cake, layered with lemon curd and white chocolate ganache, iced with the same ganache and then covered with green sugarpaste (or rolled fondant). The castle was dark chocolate mud cake, iced with the white chocolate ganache, and covered with white sugarpaste. The path is made of "Fizzers" lollies. The icing on the turrets and around the windows was royal icing coated with coloured sanding sugar, the leaves/plants were piped in royal icing, and all the other edibles (balloons, flowers, presents, ponies' hats, etc) were modelled in sugarpaste.

As for attaching the towers, I took the excellent advice of someone on a forum somewhere, and used a hot glue gun to attach a flower nail to the bottom of each tower. The kit suggests "gluing" plastic dowels onto them with chocolate, but I just felt that was not going to work here in February... Anyway, the flower nails worked a treat, and I actually found this whole kit very easy to use. Also fun. And it was worth the time it took to see the big eyes and delighted smile on my little girl's face.

To boldly go...

...where yes, okay, lots and lots of cake decorators have gone before. But it's all good fun nevertheless.

Some weeks ago, I said to my husband, "So what would you like for your birthday cake, honey? Keeping in mind I'm going to have just finished a wedding cake, and I am so not going to be in the mood to do anything too full-on?" He said, "How about the Starship Enterprise?" I think he was joking. At any rate, my answer was "ha ha". But it got me thinking... Then my husband (who, by the way, thinks he is not a geek) announced that it had to be the original model, not the 1701-E or anything (because they are just soooo last week...) I started to wonder if it was possible to do sort of a half-hearted attempt without it just looking rubbish.

Then he said "Hey, what about a croquembouche?" I gave him the evil eye, and a choice: he could have a "normal" cake and churros at his party, or he could have a croquembouche. And no churros. He chose Option A. And "normal" for me meant, you guessed it, the USS Enterprise.

Anyway, here's the result - judge for yourselves! I'm sure that if I had devoted weeks of painstaking sculpting to this project, I could have made something a little more true to the original, but that just wasn't going to happen this time I'm afraid. So one evening and one Saturday morning later, this baby was ready to be beamed up. And everyone knew what it was. And my husband got to have his cake, and eat churros too - smiles all round.

(by the way, sorry for the dodgy pics - I forgot to take a photo of the finished cake before the party. You can't really see it at all in the photos, but the bridge section (ie the big round bit) was actually elevated a bit, to a) create a "floating" or "flying" effect, and b) because it's supposed to be higher up than the bottom section of the ship. The board was covered in black sugarpaste, dusted with silver lustre dust to look like distant stars.)

Exterminate... exterminate...!

Aaah, yes. The Dalek cake. This was made for a friend's birthday last September - she is, as you may have guessed, a Doctor Who fan of tragic proportions. This cake is the current undisputed titleholder of "my most time-consuming cake ever" - it took fourteen hours to decorate. All the panels, knobs, switches, iris, "ears" and weird bath plunger thing (which I've never been able to see a use for, by the way. I do watch the new Doctor Who, and I must say I've never seen a Dalek try to unclog a toilet), were individually handmade from sugarpaste, then dusted with bronze shimmer dust (where appropriate). The only non-edible parts of this cake were the rod supporting the iris (wooden dowel), the rod supporting the bath plunger thing (slightly thinner wooden dowel), and the laser, which my darling husband manufactured for me in his shed using a soldering iron (and yes, it was cleaned thoroughly before insertion!).

If I did this again, it might not take quite as long, as there was some experimentation involved. But it was definitely a labour of love - I had such fun making this, it was so exciting and different! Anyway, I'm sure there are some bits of it that aren't absolutely perfect, but I was really happy with the end result. And so, I think, was "Astrid".