This Week In Cakes

This week I had two cakes to make, luckily they were in my favourite form - giant cupcakes! I could make these in my sleep now and you can do so much with them so I love them.

I hadn't done a really girly one in a while so I was really happy when I got an order for a 21st birthday one. Lots of Love Hearts, pink buttercream, stars and even a cute gingham ribbon. The cake itself is Victoria Sponge with jam on the bottom part and more pink buttercream in the middle. I used chocolate brown Sugarflair colouring paste to make the case part, and claret Sugarflair paste for the icing. These really do give off the nicest colours and a little goes a long way. Both the number and the buttercream were made from the claret one, this just shows how deep you can get it by simply adding a bit more.

The next cake here is for Swavesey Primary School Fete to go into the raffle to win it. It's nice to help out where you can and there is no better way than with cake. The theme was 'treasure island' so I thought this was a good representation of it. Because the surface are isn't that massive on top there is only so much you can put on it before it starts looking silly, so I went for of course a treasure chest, made from fondant coloured with melon yellow and chocolate brown, I added some yellow stars to look like the brass studs and make it look a bit more special, I then added some random pieces of decoration to look like treasure. I also added some fondant coconuts, an 'X marks the spot'  and even a palm tree. I discovered making a palm tree out of fondant was almost impossible, so I just made the trunk out of fondant supported with cake wire. And for the leaves I stripped green liqourice, flattened the green cut offs, cute them into palm leaf shapes and stuck them on top just slightly going through a piece of cake wire to keep them together. It was a bit of a mission but I love how it looked so it all worked out. Oh yes and the sand, I mashed together a bag of Malted Milks until they looked like fine sand and covered the top in them (which was subsequently covered in vanilla buttercream), this cake was also made of Victoria Sponge and the bottom was covered in baby blue Sugarflair paste with a few extra stars to give it a treasure feel. Pin It Now!

Old School Post Of The Month - Lemon Drizzle Cake!

OK so I thought I would set up a regular post as I see a lot of bloggers are doing, I really want to try more old school recipes so I thought this would be a great way to inject some retro tastes into my blog.

I have done this particular lemon drizzle recipe a million times, I love it - it made me fall in love with lemons. I wasn't sure how a cake without icing would work as I'd never had a plain loaf cake as such. However this was in one word - incredible. I also love making it in the summer as it just instantly makes you feel happy that you don't even think about calories as you tuck into another slice! Don't be fooled by it's simple look, people will probably wonder what the fudge you are serving them, but when they try it...game over - no other lemon drizzle will do.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• 240g caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 180g plain flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 70g butter, salted
• 100ml double cream
• grated zest of two lemons - please, never use artificial flavourings, use real lemons people!

Drizzle

• 100ml water
• 80g caster sugar
• juice of one lemon

Method:

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees. Grab a mixing bowl and slowly whisk your eggs, now slowly add the sugar, flour, salt and baking powder. Grate the zest and add to mixture,  melt the butter and add that too along with the cream and whisk. Grease and line a loaf tin, pour in mixture and bake for 45 minutes... I find mine needs about 15 minutes more! But every oven is different.

About 12 minutes before it's done make the drizzle. Boil the sugar and water together at 140 degrees (measure with a sugar thermometer), add the lemon juice and let boil for 10 minutes. When you take the cake out of the oven immediately lacquer on the drizzle, use all of it too, it will sink in.

Once it's cool -if you can wait....eat! Nom! Pin It Now!