Alexander's Christening Cake

This cake was a christening gift for our friends' baby Alexander. His mum had asked for a two tier blue and white cake with rocking horses, bunting and baby blocks with his name. 

I considered making a 5" and a 7" tier but that didn't seem substantial enough for the big party so I settled on a 6" and 8" tier for a truly massive cake. This is the first two tier cake that I've made since we bought a new stove. It seemed a great opportunity to try out the side oven, in which, I'd been assured by the salesperson, I could bake four tiers at the same time and they'd all cook evenly. This oven had only been used for cooking many frozen pizzas so I was certainly pleased to put it to a more worthy use. In this case I'm pleased to say that the salesperson was correct! They look a bit sunken in the picture below but I think that was more to do with me shaping the batter in this way before they were baked.

I followed all the usual processes for making each tier as I've mentioned before; slicing, layering with buttercream and jam, covering with buttercream then marzipan and then sugarpaste icing.

The letters and rocking horses are cut from a modelling paste made of sugarpaste and CMC. If there's a way to use the cutters to cleanly cut out pieces such as these then I do not know it! This time I've found that the easiest way to use them without distorting the letters is to cut each letter but not remove them from the surplus icing until they have been left to dry overnight. I then needed to use a scalpel to carefully neaten up the edges; a time consuming but ultimately rewarding task.

I fashioned a template for the bunting swathes from a piece of greaseproof paper and used a scalpel to etch a line onto which I could glue the bunting triangles and pipe the rope. I haven't practiced piping royal icing in over a year and it does show, but I'm reasonably satisfied with the overall result.

The rocking horse on top of the cake is made from two cutouts glued together only in the top half. The bottom halves were then held apart as the model dried. Finally I added a saddle made of modelling paste and piped eyes, a mane and tail.

Nanna's Birthday Cake

This is a cake I iced a few years ago for my Nanna's birthday. I was studying cake decorating at an evening class at the time and was keen to practice my skills with royal icing and this was certainly a big test! The design is from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes book.

I made the flowers well in advance as they keep indefinitely. The pink flowers were the simplest to make. I used a petal nozzle to pipe a single petal onto the flower nail using a stiff peak royal icing, I then rotated the nail by 1/5th and piped another petal and so on. After the flower dried the yellow centres were then piped on top. The other flowers are all variations on the same theme. I particularly liked the violets which had two different colours of icing and used a black edible pen to accent the petals. After the cake was decorated the flowers were stuck down with more royal icing and pretty green leaves piped on randomly for added effect.

Jessica's Christening Cake

I was proud to be asked to bake a cake for our friends' baby's christening. They knew how they wanted the cake to look and gave me a couple of pictures to work from. This is the first time I've made something based on a design someone else has chosen and it was a nice challenge to work on something I wouldn't normally choose myself. I was tricky to just work from pictures without any instructions - but I think I did OK :)

I used my trusty adjustable cake tin that I've mentioned before. You can see in the picture to the left how it can be adjusted to make a cake of your preferred dimensions - in this case a whopping 9 inches! I was feeding a hungry bunch of Northerners after all!

Unfortunately I only have one of these tins, and even then only one would fit in our tiny oven, so I had to bake the two different layers separately. I haven't baked many large cakes in the oven of our house and didn't know there is a nasty hotspot and consequently the first tier didn't come out very evenly baked. I had to slice off quite a lot of cake to get it to sit flat so in the final cake there are only three layers instead of my usual four.

I started working on the decorations for this cake during the week so that they would be nice and dry by the time they were needed today. I used modelling paste to make the extremely cute teddy bear. He's essentially made of a ball for a body, another for a head and sausages for arms and legs. These modelling tools were great for shaping the ears, eyes and the cute seam down the middle of the head. Couldn't you just hug him? (Or bite his head off?!)

I also used modelling paste for the stars. I simply cut these out of paste and inserted some florists wire which is normally used for the stems of sugar flowers. Unsurprisingly modelling paste was also used for the building blocks and cut out 'JESSICA' letters.

The stars and hearts were all dusted with edible lustre to give them a nice pearlised sheen.

I'm well out of practice at royal icing lettering so I'm pleased with how well these letters came out. Next time I'll be sure that I mix up a colour that has more contrast to the icing so you can better see my handiwork.

The cake was extremely well received by all! I'm quite proud of it - even if I do say so myself :D

Now to relax and treat myself to a well deserved gin and tonic.

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 :)