King of the Mountain Cycling Jersey Cake

My dad's favourite hobby is cycling, and when it came time to make a cake for his birthday we knew that it needed to have a cycling theme. I've unsuccessfully tried to make bicycles from sugar before so quickly ruled out designs that needed any kind of bicycle. In the end I settled on this more achievable jersey\t-shirt shape.

This cake was very much a family affair - made in collaboration with my mum with even some decorating assistance from my husband. We settled on the template style from this blog which seemed to both minimise the amount of off-cut wastage and also involved joining few pieces so the cake would still have some structure.

The left image below shows the template and how the jersey can be cut from a 12" x 10" cake - the largest we could make in a 12" adjustable cake tin. The right image shows the proportions on a 14" cake board.

Mum baked the two massive sponges and soaked them with syrup before allowing them to firm up in the fridge overnight. This step was really important given the cakes were to be carved. They needed to be cooled properly or would have been be too crumbly. The next day she sliced the cakes into layers and filled them with jam and buttercream. Mum then cut around the template and rounded and softened the edges to make a less angular shape and finally coated with a generous layer of buttercream.

I decorated the cake whilst Mum got on with preparing the rest of the food for the family barbecue.

As usual I covered with a layer of marzipan then a layer of sugarpaste. As the shape was weird this didn't go around the arms smoothly but with a bit of trimming, coaxing and polishing then it eventually looked good.

I've struggled in the past to make really deep black or red icing so to keep things simple I bought Squires Kitchen ready coloured icing from the supermarket. I added some Tylo powder to the coloured icing so that it could be rolled really thinly. For the black decoration I simply wrote out 'DAD 50' in a word processor and printed that out. I used scissors to cut out the letters as templates that I placed on the icing to cut around with a knife. The circles were cut using a round cutter. After cutting I left the shapes to dry for 10 minutes to firm up before transferring to the cake and sticking down with edible glue made from more Tylo.

Mr Bump

I've been wanting to make a this cake for a while so when a slightly accident prone friend, with a thing for Mr Bump celebrated his birthday I jumped at the chance to give it a go!

At its heart this is a simple 6" sponge cake but the difficult part was making the limbs which were carved out of another cake. The trick was to chill the cake down to make it more solid before carving. I then added a layer of butter cream and chilled again.

When the limbs were properly solid then covering the limbs with marzipan and sugarpaste was quite straightforward.

Just to prove there really was cake inside!

The bandages were made from sugarpaste with added CMC to allow the paste to be rolled really thin for this nice layered effect. 

I'm quite proud of this cake. It was quite tasty too - even if I do say so myself!

The music man

Can you keep a secret? Sssshh. Come closer and I'll tell you; the Wee Greenwich Bakery isn't in Greenwich anymore! 

Much as we loved our wee Greenwich flat we had outgrown it and longed for outside space and more room to keep all our cookbooks and cake tins. Mr. M wanted a piano and a vegetable garden and I wanted a rabbit so we moved out of London and into a little house last year.

Well this week Mr. M finally got his piano. It was partially a birthday present and partially paid for with some kind wedding present money that we'd set aside for something really special.

To celebrate the occasion I also baked him a piano themed birthday cake. It was all a bit of a rush - I had about three hours after getting home from work to bake and ice the cake from scratch for Stuart to take to work the next day. This certainly isn't my best decoration ever but not bad for an evening's work! The cake was much appreciated and was apparently very delicious :)

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.

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!