Marzipan fruits

I made these Marzipan fruits on the same weekend as the fabulous Penguin Party- it was a serious sugar modelling weekend and my hands were stained all kinds of colours from all the food colouring! They look like my own little market stall :)

This fruit salad consists of bananas, apples, limes, clementines, lemons, cherries and peaches. They're not exactly to scale!

I think it's really important to get the colours and textures as realistic as possible. Notice how the lemons are a different, brighter, shade of yellow than the bananas. To texture the citrus fruits I simply rolled them against a real orange - what better way could there be to create the effect of the zest?! No fancy modelling tools here!

I diluted a bit of paste colour with vodka to make a thin paint for the bananas - one of the rare times a liquid food colouring is the right thing for the job.

I think the fruits made a cute Christmas present in this heart shaped box I bought in the local market;

Another Penguin Party

The original Penguin Party cake has always been my most popular cake. Whenever friends mention my blog it's always this cake that they find the most memorable. This year's Christmas cake, therefore, had a lot to live up to. I think I've managed to match the original festive fun!

My dear Nanna had kindly baked my two Christmas cakes a while ago and they have been left to mature (with plenty of added brandy of course!) However we only needed one cake this year so I decided to sandwich the two cakes together to create a really tall cake. I then gave the cakes the classic coating of apricot jam and marzipan using smoothers to ensure the marzipan had a very even finish which is a great base for the icing. I often mention my magic smoothers so I thought I'd take a photo to show you what they look like!

I find that it really helps to roll out an excess of sugarpaste when covering a cake - too little and it's hard to cover the edges without it folding or creasing. I lay the icing over the cake and using my hands start smoothing it down from the top to the bottom. I then use the smoothers again to ensure a really flat and polished finish. I always remember to follow my old teachers advice and clean the surface and tools between the marzipan and the icing as the oils in the marzipan leave a residue that could impair the icing.

Perfect! I could have just left it like this - but where would be the fun in that :)

When I was a child I used to make things out of Fimo, a kind of modelling clay that sets solid once baked. Making figures from modelling paste is incredibly similar.

The models themselves are just made from regular supermarket sugarpaste with added Tylo powder (CMC). Working this powder into the paste and leaving it to rest turns it from a soft and sticky icing into a very pliable yet strong gum that you can do fine work in and will also hold it's shape. This kind of work would be impossible without something like Tylo.

It's important to use good quality colouring pastes to get a really deep colour - liquid ones will just not work. I use Sugarflair colours. I did concede and buy the black paste, however, as I've found it's a pain in the ass to make your own truly black icing. I also use an edible glue to stick the different components together and reinforce them with dried spaghetti - everything you see is entirely edible - well except the ribbon!



I think I love the simple gold baubles and the fish shaped present the most. It's really the small details that make this cake what it is.

Merry Christmas Everyone! :D

It's the most wonderful time of the year

Ok, these are a bit 'home style'. I was a bit preoccupied with mulling wine and singing along to Christmas tunes instead of concentrating on baking the impressive biscuits that these really deserved to be. A couple of them are a little burned high bake - but on the bright side the mulled wine was delicious!

I first saw these houses on my favourite blog Domestic Sluttery and had to make them IMMEDIATELY! What could possibly be better than tiny gingerbread houses with icing, silver balls and a good cup of tea? However my hopes of instant gratification were dashed when I discovered there was no sugar bling in Tesco Metro. Why no silver balls, Tesco? Humbug, I say! I reluctantly concluded that chocolate chips were not an adequate substitute for glitter and postponed the the bake until I could acquire the requisite decorations.

The dough itself was fairly easy to make. I ended up chilling it overnight which made it a bit of a bugger to roll out. We had no trouble using some stiff royal icing to stick the different sections together. The doorways unfortunately closed over in the oven so they're not going to sit on a mug but they'll taste pretty good with a nice cup of tea (or mulled wine!) nonetheless.

Coming soon - stay tuned for Christmas cake 2012!

Sticky toffee salted caramel cupcakes

Last time my husband went away on business I did the shopping all by myself - never a good idea. That week the internet grocery shopping delivery consisted of bell peppers, padron peppers, roquito peppers, a jar of caramel and not much else. So I've had this caramel in the fridge for a while now and other than using as an amazing ice cream topping I haven't know what to do with it - until now!

When it comes to cupcakes I usually make a classic vanilla flavour, but my good friend Sarah is always more adventurous and I'm invariably impressed with the recipes she chooses from the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book. Hummingbird is absolutely my favourite bakery. Their cupcakes are always the lightest. I wanted to bake some cupcakes to take to a birthday party and choose these Sticky Toffee Cupcakes from the Cake Days book.

The sponge is flavoured with soft brown sugar and chopped dates that have been soaked and softened in boiling water. I went a bit off-piste with the icing and didn't follow the recipe as I already had some basic butter cream left over in the fridge from a previous cake. Essentially I just added a couple of enormous spoonfuls of the caramel and a little maldon salt to the plain butter cream to make a ridiculously tasty salted caramel butter cream. I quickly whizzed up some toffees in the blender and sprinkled the toffee dust over the top of the icing.

I've never really got the hang of impressive looking butter icing. It's just too soft a medium for me to have any control over. I do like the look of these - very homemade looking - but I don't think Hummingbird are going to invite me to join their team any time soon!

I still had plenty of the icing left over so today I decided to whip up another batch of the cake batter and use it to make this loaf - a loaf is so much easier to transport than cupcakes. This time I added a teaspoon of ground mixed spice to the batter hoping to give it a deeper, more autumnal flavour.

30th Birthday Cake

I baked this cake for my very good friend Matt's recent birthday.

I really need to buy another round 15cm cake tin as I keep having to bake the two layers in two separate batches! That's probably the reason I often bake a square cake instead of a round one! This cake was made with a four egg mixture (200g butter, 200g sugar, 4 eggs and 200g flour) so came out very tall at 10cm. I really like tall tiers as I think it makes them more special.

I usually struggle to think of ideas for cakes for men. So much of cake decorating is making pretty cakes that aren't really appropriate for guys. For my husband's last birthday I iced the tartan cake and used that for inspiration for this argyle pattern.

After applying the marzipan and sugarpaste I cut the diamonds out of more sugarpaste. A mix of sugarpaste and flower paste would probably have given a better finish as I would have been able to roll it thinner and it would have been less stretchy - but I've run out of flower paste at the moment so had to settle for the regular icing. The white lines were made with the tagliatelle pasta cutter. I made a template from the lettering on top by simply printing the characters onto A4 paper and cutting them out. I lay this on top of the icing and cut around with a sharp knife.

Happy Birthday Anna!

It's been a busy year and I haven't had the chance to bake many cakes. I'm very rusty!

Happily it was my friend Anna's birthday this week so I was able to dig out all my cake decorating equipment and bake a cake. It was to be a big birthday barbecue so I needed to bake a large cake but unfortunately only had 6" cake boards available. Not a problem though - since we couldn't go wider - we went taller! 

This was my first two tier cake and I must confess I didn't do it properly with dowel rods but it was sufficiently sturdy for a barbecue.

I made four petal flowers from royal icing using the directions in Peggy's book. It's been a couple of years since I last made flowers so I found it quite tricky. For some reason I find four larger petals a lot harder than five smaller ones.

Cherry Blossom

I've recently been admiring the spring cherry blossoms in Greenwich which inspired me to upload this photo. I'm a big fan of Japanese style and really enjoyed designing this cake for my assessment in cake decorating (NCFE Certificate in Creative Craft, level 1). 

For the assessment I used a cake dummy - a cake shaped block of polystyrene - which gave me time to work on the design over a number of days. The trees were piped from royal icing and whilst it was drying I worked in the realistic bark texture using a small brush.

The flowers were cut using a blossom cutter from pink flower paste and then shaped with a round icing tool on a foam pad. Before attaching to the cake I gave each blossom a light dusting of extra colour. I think this adds a pleasing variation between the individual flowers. The blossoms were painstakingly attached with dots of royal icing with an extra dot in the centre of every flower.

The model of a woman was inspired by a couple of Eastern designs I'd seen in Squires Kitchen cake decorating magazine. The torso and legs are one piece of mexican modelling paste which has been draped in a fabric-thin layer of paste for the kimono. The arms were modelled separately and attached with edible glue. I particularly liked using a sugarpaste extruder to create strands of black hair which were then draped around the head into a bun. 

Since creating this design I've had the pleasure of visiting Japan. It's a really wonderful place that I highly recommend visiting.

Penguin party

 

This is one of my very favourite designs. It's a cake that I iced for a Christmas party a couple of years ago. I can't take credit for the cake itself as my Nanna kindly bakes our family Christmas cakes each year. The cheeky penguins are all mine though!

The fruit cake was matured with the occasional splash of cognac for a number of weeks. A couple of days before the party I added a layer of marzipan and then a layer of regular sugarpaste. As well as being tasty the marzipan is quite stiff and helps to give a really good base for creating perfectly smooth icing on top. I'm a massive fan of the PME icing smoothers to smooth and polish the sugarpaste. On a fairly plain white cake such as this it really helps to have the icing looking pristine. 

As usual when creating models I used Tylo powder to stiffen the paste to give an easy modelling consistency. Additionally edible glue was helpful to stick the different components together.

The penguins themselves were quite straightforward to make - being essentially based on two round balls. The flippers are a couple of smaller balls flatted out between thumb and finger. I used an edible ink pen to create the pupils of the eyes which helped to create their expressive and cheeky characters. To keep the penguins standing upright I inserted dry spaghetti into the model and down into the cake. You can't quite tell from the picture but the fish has been dusted with some edible gold lustre to give it a shimmery fish skin effect.

Hoppy Easter

Happy Easter from the Wee Greenwich Bakery.

Here's a quick and easy 4" cake from a couple of years ago. I really like to make models - I spent a lot of time playing with FIMO modelling clay as a child and I think sugarpaste is a very similar, but more delicious, medium!

Lord of the Isles

This is the cake I baked for my husband Stuart's birthday. I baked this in a rush in just one evening as a surprise for Stuart to take to work.

This is my own design and I'm rather pleased with it. The design is based on Stuart's kilt tartan; the 'Macdonald Lord of the Isles Hunting Ancient'. I had the idea to make a tartan cake after using the pasta machine to roll out sugarpaste ribbons for the delightful present cake.

I bake a lot of square cakes in my fantastic Silverwood  adjustable cake tin. It gives me the flexibility to make any sized rectangular cakes I like - or up to four 6" square cakes at the same time. In our tiny kitchen this multi-functional tin is a great.

To start I iced the sponge cake with regular sugarpaste that I had coloured a dark green. I then added Tylo powder to some extra paste to stiffen it to a gum and added the colouring. The pasta machine was used to roll thick ribbons of the blue icing which was simply sliced using a ruler and sharp knife. Then the tagliatelle attachment was used to make the black and white ribbons and the spaghetti cutter for the red ribbon. I interwove the strands and glued them onto the layer underneath with a dab of clear alcohol.

The cake was very well received in Stuart's office and I'm looking forward to trying other tartan designs in future!

A birthday present

I baked and iced this cake for my friend Robyn's birthday party at Kettner's in Soho. It's based on a design from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes which is one of my favourite cake decorating books. The original design uses a green bow and pink spots but I much prefer these more grown up shades of purple.

The bow is made from regular supermarket sugarpaste with some added Tylo powder to make it stiffer. In fact it was so stiff I struggled to roll out the paste and resorted to using the pasta machine - which was actually really effective at creating a ribbon of consistent thickness. The ribbon is dusted with some edible lustre dust to create the shimmery effect.

Cakes on a plane

Last week I made a Patchwork cake based on the design in Sugarcraft 3 as a surprise for my Mother-in-law's birthday.

I've been wanting to bake this for a while. The design uses the Patchwork Squares cutters to cut and emboss the patchwork design out of stencil paste. I really like the texture and femininity of the cake.

I was running short of time to finish this before our flight to Scotland, but next time I'd like to try dusting parts of the design to add a bit of colour variety. We were very pleased that the cake made it from Greenwich to Glasgow unscathed!

Looking forward to trying some more needlework and fabric designs :)