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.

Baby shower cake

I was very pleased to make a cake for a friend's baby shower this week. The brief was to make a blue cake to fit with a book and alphabet themed shower. Searching for book cakes returns loads of gorgeous examples but I was quite pushed for time this weekend so settled for something I knew I could do well and quickly. Often cakes as simple as this can be harder to make than the more complex designs as there is no way to hide any imperfections! I think the simplicity is very effective.

Even though this is a well rehearsed design I did learn something new whilst baking this cake; always crack your eggs into a bowl before you add them into the mix! After spending a good few minutes beating the butter and sugar together, the first egg that I cracked straight into the mix was clearly bad. I had no choice but to throw all the mix away and start again. At least it was the first egg and not the sixth! In future I'll be certain to crack them into a bowl or cup first.

I'd made the baby blocks before for Jessica's Christening Cake. They are made from sugar paste with added Tylo to stiffen them up. The letters are cut out from a very thinly rolled coloured version of the same paste. I recommend leaving the letters for a few minutes to dry and stiffen before trying to separate them. Use a cocktail stick to remove any excess icing and a sharp knife to lift them off the board.

This is the first time I've used my new 7" round tins that I bought for the Tiffany cake but didn't get to use. They made a really good sized cake for this part with about 12 people. Slices were generous and there was plenty of cake left over to take home to hungry husbands.

That's all there is to it!

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.