Christmas Cake

The second half of the winter term on my sugarcraft course was taken up with designing and creating our Christmas cakes. We were to use patchwork cutters to create designs on the top so the first week we needed to decide what we were going to do. After much consideration I decided to create a robin and some snowdrops. 

The first step was to make the Christmas cake, I used Delia's Smiths recipe but I replaced the booze with orange juice. This worked perfectly well and the cake has lasted many weeks (mid october to Christmas). 

We covered the cake with marzipan, this was slightly more complex than I would imagine but wasn't tricky. We firstly coated the cake in heated apricot jam. We then rolled out a sausage of marzipan and stuck this around the top rim of the cake. Turned the cake over and pressed it into the board. This created a seal for the cake and held it firstly to the board. Once it was in place any air holes were filled with pieces of marzipan, I didn't have any so this wasn't necessary, and then the cake was coated with one piece around 5mm thick. The cake was then left to dry for a week. 

The following week we coated our cakes in sugarpaste. I decided to coat mine in a pale blue icing so coloured it slightly, rolled it to the correct size and stuck it on top. We used vodka to stick the icing on top of the marzipan, this is partly because it's sticky but it's also sterile and preservative. 

Iced Cake

By adding a small amount of water to the sugar paste we could create some piping icing and using this we could create an edge to the cake using a star nozzle. 

Piping around the edge

For the topping of the cake I used 2 patchwork cutters. The first was a snow drop cutter. 

Patchwork Cutter

This created flowers in several layers. The first was plain white. 

White layer for the bottom

Then I needed several layers of green to stick on top in various places. I cut out whole flowers but I only used part of these. 

Here you can see that I've cut off the flowers and just left the stems and leave. 

Green bottom layer

I wanted several layers of leaves so here are those cut out. 

Cutting out the green layers

Once the pieces are all cut out it's assembled and layered up. I made 3 layers of the flowers and so the whole effect was 3D. 

Finished flower

You can see that here. 

Side 3D view

I made several flowers for the top of the cake. 

Several Snow drops

Using the same idea I created a 3D robin. Once all the pieces were ready I made some snow by using some white royal icing and dabbing it on the top. Also using the royal icing I stuck the items on the top. 

Top View with the objects stuck on

Finally for the edges I made some plaques using an oval cutter and a smaller snowdrop stamp. I just marked it out on the icing, these were too small and fiddly to cut out just the flower. I then painted these so they were slightly green. 

Oval Plaques

This is the finished cake. 

Top View, Finished Cake

Side View, finished cake

Overall I thought the cake looked good and tasted nice. I could have done with smaller oval cutters for the plaques on the side as these were too large and had to be cut off. I am still not sure whether I like them either, I only made them because my course tutor insisted. The effect of the top was good and I liked how the cake looked. It's a fairly simple but effective idea. Next year I'll probably use some of the techniques I learnt this year on my cake(s) but will have to come up with some different designs. I'll probably end up making several cakes for various different gatherings. 

If you need a cake for any occasion, including Christmas, please get in touch and I'd be delighted to see what I can create for you. 

Diet Coke Can Chocolate Cake

I received an order for this cake as someone's birthday was approaching. The brief was to create a chocolate cake in the shape and design of a diet coke can. This is probably the strangest request I've had so far but I set about doing my research. First job.. send Gary down to the Co Op to buy me a can of diet coke to use as my guide!!

I decided that in order to create the tall cylinder I needed to bake 3 cakes in the smallest tin I had, this was a 6" tin. I had to work out the quantities from previous cakes and here is the list I came up with, this was slightly too much mixture for the 3 cakes but I preferred having a little left over as back up so I would stick with this quantity in the future.

Ingredients:

500g Plain chocolate

500g Unsalted Butter

500g Plain Flour

75ml Coffee

2tsp Vanilla Essence

1tsp Baking Powder

1tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

715g Light Brown Sugar

8 Eggs

426ml Soured Cream

Method:

Melt together the chocolate and the butter over a low heat. Add the vanilla essence and coffee and leave to cool slightly.

Mix together the soured cream and eggs.

Place the flour, sugar, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda in a large bowl. Make sure there are no lumps in the sugar.

Add the chocolate mixture to the flour along with the egg mixture. Stir it all together until fully combined.

Spoon some of the mixture into a greased 6" tin until around 3/4 full. Place in the oven, 150oC, for 1hour30 minutes. The top of the cake should feel firm to touch and spring back slightly. If there is no resistence when pressing the cake needs slightly longer in the oven.

Leave to cool in the tin for several hours. Run a knife around the outside and  carefully remove.

Bake the remaining 2 cakes in the same way.

Once the cakes had cooled I made some chocolate buttercream and stacked the cakes up on top of each other. 

Stacked cakes

I then covered the cake in chocolate buttercream around the outside as well. I added a tiny amount of black colouring to some white icing to make it a very slight grey colour. This was the closest I could get to silver. I covered the whole cake with this icing. This step was challenging due to the size of the cake, when I tried to attached the icing it kept ripping and falling apart. In the end I had to do it in several sections and try and rub them together. It didn't create a great base for the cake and this is probably the thing that let it down the most. 

I printed off some logos from the internet and cut these out as templates for the lettering. 

Paper templates

Using red and black icing I cut out the letters and stuck them on the side of the cake. I also cut a white strip and place this up the side as well. 

Coke Lettering

Of course this is a diet coke can so I needed to cut out the D. I found out the easiest way to keep the shaping was to cut the letters and pull the outside icing around from the letters rather than trying to prise the letters out. 

D for Diet

The newest coke cans now have letters on them so to personalise the cake for the birthday lady I decided to put her name on the outside as well. 

Share with Wendy

To finish the cake off I painted some lines on the side to represent the small lettering on the side. There's no way I could write all the detail and hopefully this gives the representation of the ingredients etc. I also used some left over silver icing to create a rim on the cake and a ring pull on the top. 

Here are some pictures of the cake from all angles. 

Side 1

Side 2

Side 3

Side 4

Top view

I was fairly happy with the cake but as usual there is much room for improvement and many things I didn't think were great. I'm looking forwards to learning some tips so I can further improve my cakes and make them much better. 

If you're interested in ordering a cake from me, I'm currently doing them for just the cost of the ingredients (August 2013). This cake was £20. I can produce cakes for people in the Sussex area and also London if given enough notice. 

Iced Lime Traybake

I fancied doing some baking today, ichy fingers!! so with my mum's help we managed to shop for the ingredients and I mustered the energy to make these for dessert today. Several recipes in Mary Berry's book caught my eye but I fancied something lime so the Iced Lime Traybake, p 464, hit the spot. 

It is a very straightforward recipe, a basic sponge recipe flavoured with lime zest topped with a lime icing. For the sponge recipe I used marg instead of butter, cutting costs, but everything else was as stated in the book. It's an all in one recipe so this involves putting marg, sugar, flour, baking powder, 3 eggs, milk and some lime zest into a bowl then whisking it all together. 

Everything in the bowl ready to be whisked

Once it was all mixed together I placed it in a prepared tin and baked it in the oven. I just used baking paper to line the tin roughly so I was expecting the edges to not be very good. 

Ready to go in the oven

The cake took around 45 minutes to cook in the oven, fairly close to the time stated in the recipe. It came out looking golden brown and the inserted knife came out clean. 

Fresh out the oven

The cake was left to cool and then it was ready to ice. The icing was a simple mix of lime juice and icing sugar. However, I didn't have enough juice to make icing so I had to add a little water to moisten the icing up so that it was spreadable. The icing was then poured onto the cake and smoothed roughly, again I didn't take any great care with the appearance as it was just for us. As I didn't have any zest left to decorate the top I used some newly purchased sprinkles to decorate the top. 

Cake iced and decorated

The bake was then ready to be eaten, Gary cut the cake into squares and we dived into out squares. 

My slice of cake

The cake was a really lovely texture, it was light and fluffy, beautifully risen but unfortunately it didn't taste of lime. The same could be said for the icing, it just wasn't strong enough tasting. If I had wanted a plain sponge this would have been perfect, but I didn't. 

My mark out of 10 is only 6 as it didn't fill the lime requirement and for once Gary has given it a higher score of 7, so that's a total of 13. Both of us agree that the sponge is very nice but could do with a much strong lime flavour. 

This is something I'd like to make again but next time use more limes for flavour.