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

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

Stuff I Luff

• Lazy weekends
• Pink grapefruit juice. I could never have grapefruit juice while on the pill so this is one thing I’m taking advantage of while pregnant.
• Watching Fez sleep. He’s the cutest when he’s fast asleep, snoring and having puppy dreams
• Good yum char
• Nanna naps
• Sunny summery weather in Spring
• Knowing this is my last week of work!
• Making cakes. I made Ms Constantine’s birthday cake and it was so satisfying to see the finished product all pretty and ready for surprising (though I’m terrible at surprises).
• I also love eating said cake

White chocolate mud cake with Malteser-Baileys cream and white chocolate ganache... mmm!

Cachous and pale pink sugar crystals complete the cake

Tags: baking, cake

I’ll have my cake

So it’s morning tea time and I go into the kitchen and pop in a piece of fruit toast.

Then I notice there’s carrot cake on the table, obviously a help-yourself situation. (Turns out it was a thank you morning tea from one of the managers for some feedback workshops we’ve had.)

I want carrot cake, but I have boring plain fruit toast on the way.

The result? Carrot cake without the icing, and fruit toast with the carrot cake icing. Yum and yum.

(I also later have a big piece of caramel slice. I was going to take some home for the hubby, but it was not to be.)

Fruit toast with carrot cake icing, with carrot cake on the side

Tags: cake, pregnancy