You can do wonders with just puff pastry, caramel (premade stuff in a jar or can) and bananas – well, you can do one wonderful thing: Banoffee Tart.

Looking good already

Cut, slice, spread, assemble and bake at something like 210° C for 20 minutes… I can’t remember but they should be puffy and crisp, and delicious. A sprinkling of cinnamon and/or chocolate before baking makes it look and taste a little fancy.

Busy-mum banoffee tarts

Here you kiddies – now mummy needs a drink.

I was asked to make a simple elegant cake, with a bunch of flowers on top. Sounded like fun – I was looking for an excuse to practice making sugar flowers so was quite excited.

Sugar hydrangea in the making

The cake was three tiers: the bottom was a 12 inch chocolate cake, and the 10 inch and 8 inch tiers were a very delicious fruit cake speckled with dark chocolate bits.

Assembled hydrangea and rose

First drama: Burnt fruit cakes

The last time I made fruit cake was for my own wedding. From that I learnt that the ‘classic bake’ function on our previous oven is a very handy thing. It means that only the bottom element is turned on and when baking for 3 hours it helps prevent the tops from burning. Our new oven doesn’t have this function so alas the tops needed a bit of ‘levelling’. Tasted fine in the end though.

Sugar bouquet version 1

Second drama: Broken bouquet

After hours of labourious intricacies, the hubby accidentally knocked over my completed sugar bouquet, smashing half of the flowers. Luckily I had enough time, and experience by then, to whip up the replacements without too much bother. Luckily for him he was helping me roll fondant and it was indeed an accident. (My husband tells me that I have to mention that “In hindsight I should’ve put them in a better place and not teetering on the edge of the bench”. Who’s writing this post huh!? :D )

Third drama: Squished cake

Well bad things seem to come in threes. During transportation to the venue, a friend’s hands moulded into the sides of the top tier while he held it in the car. We got there and the round cake looked more like an hour glass. NooOoooOO – why now!?! Not now!!! I kept my cool, which is surprising for a pregnant lady, and luckily (yes, luck was the saving grace for this cake) the icing was thick and soft enough to mould back into shape. It wasn’t perfect but it at least it was round (mostly) again!

The finished cake, repaired and displaying the second version bouquet

Plenty of lessons learnt from my first commissioned cake and it was worth it all in the end to see how happy the bride was.

You can view the gallery of my cakes on the Cakes page.

A sweet and simple cake

Rolling it can be a little tricky – sometimes I get a great roll, sometimes it cracks and flattens, but it still tastes great!

Oh, and a word of warning – don’t leave it on the coffee table where your dog can reach it. I came back to one once that had the cream from one end licked clean out of the roll as far as Fez could reach!

Chocolate Sponge Roll

Makes 1

The original plan was to make gingerbread ones because I know the gingerbread recipe I have is delicious. However, we experienced a bit of humidity ourselves here in Wellington and my trial cookies turned into cake. They became so soft that they fell apart if you tried to pick them up! So we went for a simple sugar cookie by Alton Brown which proved hardier and still yummy.

100-something cookies

After several test runs of different icing colours and patterns, the final product was a heart flooded with light pink icing, and piped with blue and dark pink criss crossing. I have to say the hardest thing about all this was the piping. I almost gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome again from the hours of piping to achieve the stripes – my hands ached and started tingling that night.

The iced wedding cookies - not bad for a novice

But it was worth it. They looked really nice on the tables and tasted pretty good too.

The table layout

He must’ve had an epiphany or something, and said “Ooh! I know what we could have – you know that furry monster thing on the motivational poster about God killing kittens whenever someone masturbates?” – ok, maybe not an epiphany but he decided that’s what he wanted (because of the Internet meme association, not because of the fate of kittens). We’re talking about Domo-kun (we weren’t geeky enough and had to Google for that).

The Domo cake

He also wanted a red velvet cake and ended up baking the cake himself (yay) and I decorated. Things worked out really well because the cross section of the cake looked as if we had given Domo an autopsy.

Mmmm meaty

And the cake was delicious. I hadn’t tried red velvet before, only heard about it, usually in the form of cupcakes. We tried the Waldorf Astoria Red Velvet recipe – it’s a perfect density for decorating and the bonus is that it tastes good and isn’t dry (and pretty easy to make).

Will definitely make red velvet cake again – just got to remember to get lots of red food colouring each time!

The three cupcake flavours

I made three flavours which I was told were all delicious. I was too full by the time I had any, and could only handle a taste of the chocolate ones (I blame the bump taking up all of my valuable food space).

The first was Chocolate Cherry with chocolate fudge cream spiked with cherry liquer, and sprinkled with real chocolate hail. I would normally make them as Black Forest cupcakes with fresh cream but it was a bit too hot to do that in advance.

Chocolate cherry cupcakes

Then there was a Lemon Vanilla with a lemon buttercream and fruit jube on top. The little lemon wedges were candy I bought from the UK – so yummy and perfect as decoration.

Vanilla lemon cupcakes

Last was Lime and Coconut – though I completely forgot to put lime juice in it (just used zest), whoops! These were topped with Malibu buttercream, toasted coconut and a giant marshmallow

Lime and coconut cupcakes

The girls froze the leftovers and I’ve been told they defrotsed fine. I made myself some chocolate cupcakes yesterday and having them cold from the fridge today was not bad at all. Good to know I can keep iced cupcakes for when I have a random cupcake craving!

Abby with mum

For some reason Abby’s been extremely clingy these last few days, and will cry at things that normally don’t bother her (like leaving her to play). I’m guessing her chest infection, combined with teething and the large number of people around have something to do with it.

Cupcake cake, of course

Anyway, at least mum got the party she wanted for her baby and caught up with people she hadn’t seen for ages (I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted with everyone, so apologies).

Abby enjoyed her presents, and loved the cheerios and chippies. The cake was yummy, even Abby got to have some.

Mmm cake

Thankfully the weather was summery enough for people to be outside – even too hot for most of the day, but the main point is that it didn’t rain. Abby wore a cute gingham dress that grandpa picked out while in Sydney.

Lots of work, but lots of fun. Maybe next year she’ll be a bit more social! And I’ll be able to drink!!

Oooh presents

In the end I decided I wanted a cake shaped like the Mad Hatter’s hat, with a tea party happening on top. This is the result:

My Mad Hatter cake in all its glory

This beast is made of three 8 inch chocolate cakes split into six layers to make the hat, then a smaller madeira cake to make the table and pedestal, also layered. I used lemon buttercream as the filling because it’s easy and delicious.

It’s hard to tell from the pictures but it’s quite a large cake, and damn heavy! Should feed around 60 I say, depending on how big you like your slices.

Some details close up

Our good camera is being fixed which annoys me because I couldn’t take proper photos showing the details. The flash on our backup seems to bring out some of the shine and smaller details, but ruins the colour.

Stitching and some shine

The hat has stitching details around it, some fan patterns pressed into it, and painted with golden lustre for a shine. The ribbon’s also got some pink lustre on it but it’s quite subtle.

Topsy table caused the tea to spill

I created some pastillage mushrooms, teacups and miniature roses to decorate the table tier. I still hate working with pastillage in that it dries so quickly and cracks. The mushrooms were easy but the others were hard. My teacups ended up looking rustic, but hey, anything goes in Wonderland!

Tea and cake anyone?

I tried quite a few things on this cake, including piping patterns with royal icing. That was fun, but I really need more practice with piping on vertical surfaces – the numbers on the hat ticket were a bit squiggly as I didn’t know how to keep my hands stable at that angle.

Anyway, it was great practice for Abby’s first birthday cake – something that I haven’t decided on yet and the party’s next week!!

By the way, the gala’s on tomorrow Saturday 20 November 2011, 11am to 2pm at the Greenacres School at 60 Raroa Terrace, Tawa. If you’re in Wellington, drop on by. You can buy raffle tickets to win this cake there :D

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!

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