Tiffany Pearls Cake

I've been meaning to make this cake for ages but it's a complex one so I needed a really good reason to bake it. This week was my dear Mum's birthday so I thought it would be the perfect occasion.

The cake is based on this Peggy Porschen design from her Cake Chic book. Peggy's version is a Wedgewood blue but I've done it, more properly in my opinion, in Tiffany green by mixing some Holly Green and a touch of Navy food colouring into sugarpaste.

I wanted an impressive cake with a 7" and 5" tier but I couldn't find any 5" tins on my local high street. Any bigger would have been far too much cake for our small family party so I had to settle for 6" and 4" tiers.

A two-tier cake really needs support to stop the top-tier sinking into the bottom one. You can buy special supports for this but I already had some cake-pop sticks which I just cut down to the right height. The sticks are meant to sit about one millimetre above the top of the icing. The board for the top-tier should sit on the supports and not the cake below so as not to squash the cake and make sure the structure is stable.






I'm massively out of the habit of decorating with royal icing so I'm quite pleased with how well this has come out. I did a practice version completely free hand and learned that I just don't have the skills to do that! On the real cake, as recommended by Peggy, I scratched a straight line into the top tier and used that as a guide line. For the bottom tier I hand drew some swathes onto a piece of paper that I then traced onto the cake and used that as a guide line. After piping on the pearls I left them to dry and then painted then with edible lustre to give them the pretty pearlised sheen.

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!