Eggshell Green

Birthday cakes

I mentioned a while ago that I was making a cake for a friend’s little boy – I’ve realised that I never posted about it even though I said I would. So here it is.

Baby Godzilla at it again

It’s a bigger stumpier vesrion of the baby Godzilla cake that I made for the Threadcakes competition earlier. This time I made its teeth match the birthday boy’s – a total of six baby teeth :)

I also made a cake last week for our Plunket group’s joint first birthday celebration. It’s a wonky Jack in the Box, but it was lots of fun and so delicious.

Jack in the Box cake

His face was made from a few chunks of cake that I squished into a ball – lol. Hence, he looks like he’s suffered from severe acne.

Got to test my cutters, tools and lustre

I finally got to try out my edible lustre to make the handle look metallic, and then played around with the shapes on the sides to see how terrible I was at painting on sparkliness.

Playing with shapes

And yes, Jack’s body was also cake. Pieces of cake stacked on top of each other and skewered in place as he began to sag – I didn’t stack them perfectly because I didn’t want him to look “stiff”…

Jack has acne and a bad hair cut

We had the celebration at the Hataitai Community Centre play room. I had not been there before and only vaguely knew where to go. Luckily the hunch was right. Someone said it was where the Plunket was, and I found that ok. Problem was, when I went inside to investigate I disturbed a hypnotherapy birthing class. The instructor was not impressed. I explained what I was looking for and the group was nice enough to tell me I had to go down the stairs to the play room. I thanked and apologised. Whoops! (And because my previous phone broke, I found that all the contacts I needed that day weren’t in my new phone so I couldn’t call them!)

I have a cake to make every week this month. In three weeks it’ll be for Abby’s first birthday – yikes!

Tags: baking, cake, decorating

Mmmmmm donuts

After hearing about a friend’s mum making homemade donuts, and then seeing something similar on Food TV, I just needed to make some homemade donuts for myself.

So off I went to the Intertubes for some Googling, and came across a whole lot of completely useless recipes. Like the one that a lady said “was passed down from her grandmother and wanted to share with everyone”. And do you know what was in that “recipe” for Grandma’s Homemade donuts? A can of buttermilk biscuit dough! That is not a recipe! What was even more stupid was that people were commenting how amazing it was and giving it a high rating! Come on people – recipes are recipes. They are not instructions on how to fry premade dough.

Anyway, finally decided on trying Alton Brown’s Yeast Doughnuts. To be honest, it was the husband who did all the work as I opted to look after Abby (took the easier route).

Perfect homemade donut, fresh out of the fryer

These turned out perfectly. We sprinkled some with cinnamon sugar, and glazed the others with vanilla and chocolate icing. We had donuts coming out of our ears for the next couple of days, but I was not complaining!

The best thing to come out of our deep fryer. I love our deep fryer.

Ohhhhh yeahhhhh

Tags: baking

Mmm, cake

I’ve been up to my eyes in cake this last week!

First was an entry into the Threadcakes competition. I’ve been wanting to make this baby Godzilla cake, based on a Threadless shirt design, for a while and finally found the motivation (and time) to do it.

Cute and delicious

I baked a couple of test cakes and found a delicious madeira recipe (which I tweaked to make it an orange madeira cake) that was perfect – delicious, moist and something I could carve into. It was a lot of work, but I think I did well for my first sculpted cake. More details and photos can be found on my Threadcakes entry.

The other cake was for a friend’s grandaughter’s third birthday party. The wee girl wanted a yellow castle cake and I decided to add Rapunzel into the mix.

Yellow castle cake

Waiting for her prince

The main cake was a dense banana cake (I think I’ll use another recipe next time), and the skinny tower was a chocolate roll. Both are filled with a delicious butter cream. The skinny tower gave me troubles as it started leaning and sagging a bit – oh dear. The top tower was also a challenge to cover.

Just a bit of practice to better my cake decorating skills. I have lots to learn still!

Tags: baking, cake, decorating

Restaurant Review: Bordeaux Bakery

I can’t say I’ve been that impressed by Bordeaux yet.

We’ve only been when I have an Entertainment Book voucher to use up. Good thing because their prices are pretty high – $8.20 for a cheese/ham/tomato croissant!? I guess you shouldn’t expect normal bakery prices because they also trade as a cafe, but still, I think that’s pretty pricey.

I went in to the one on Thorndon Quay on Saturday to grab some lunch for the hubby and me. I didn’t think it would take 10-15 minutes to heat up a panini. It’s because they put it in the queue along with everyone else’s sit-in lunch orders. It’s pretty silly that they have two microwaves on the cashier side to heat up your pies (they don’t have readily hot pies either, boo), but they don’t have a panini press! So I stood there with my other goodies, including a hot pie, and waited and waited for my panini.

The panini (finally) was nice but nothing special. It was a bit of bacon, some mashed kumara and pesto. Not a lot for the $7.50 I paid for it. The hubby commented that his beef pie was “meh”, later clarifying that “it wasn’t good”. We also got a lemon danish and a custard square. The lemon danish was good but could’ve done with more topping. The custard square is better than most of the floury goop you normally get elsewhere, but not as good as the ones you can get from Aro Bakery.

I haven’t tried their sit-in menu so can’t comment on that. Maybe we’ll give it a go with the next Entertainment Book voucher… we’ll see.

Tags: restaurant, review