EXTERMICAKE! EXTERMICAKE!

It's a bit messy in places (I had some issues with buttercream squishing out the bottom of the head piece) but I'm still pretty happy with this. I think if I had to make it again I could easily iron out any problems.

So how was it done? Well, I baked a giant cupcake, inverted the base and torted it. I then baked a 5" x 4" sponge. I trimmed a little of the side of that to make it wedge shaped, and then took the cut offs and stuck them to the front of the inverted cupcake to make the Dalek shape. I inserted dowels into the cupcake and then put the smaller cake on a 5" board and placed it on top. I covered the lot in buttercream and fondant. Then I put dowels in the top tier and put the head on top. The head was made of two cake round and the top of the giant cupcake. I cut them to size with a cookie cutter and covered in buttercream and fondant.

The studs on the body are silver buttons from www.ukweddingfavours.co.uk They were attached with edible glue. The... what on earth do you call them? the eye? the plunger? the twiddly bit? I wrapped fondant around skewers to make them.

Perfect for any 36 year old brother, especially if he's been drinking wine before he sees it (Happy birthday Pete!)

Archery Club Cake

The heatwave is over! I'm sad to see the sun go and the rain return, the baker in me is rejoicing as it's just warm enough for butter to come up to room temperature in a reasonable amount of time, but not so warm that I'm ready to have a nervous breakdown as everything goes wrong.

My cousin asked me to make a cake for her archery club's barbecue. I can't take credit for the design, she found a picture and showed it to me. I think the original was a Disney's Brave inspired cake.

This went pretty smoothly, with the exception of the archery butt. I originally tried to make it out of black liquorice shoe laces and Mikado biscuits (the little chocolate stick kind, not Jacob's Mikado which is an entirely different animal - if you're of a certain age I'd put money on it that right now you're singing "Kimberly, Mikado and coconut creams, someone you love would love some mum!"). Anyhew, it didn't work. The chocolate melted at the slightest touch and I ended up swearing loudly and then eating the rest of the box, just to get revenge on them.

In the end I covered some skewers with fondant. I didn't get the elegant construction I was going for, but it'll do the job! I hope....

So here it is. I'm quite proud of this one as I think both my icing and fondant covering skills are coming on a bit. I didn't tear the fondant once while trying to put it on, possibly for the first time ever. Now I just have to work on getting the cakes dead centre on my cake board.... whoops.

Murphy's Law Cake

I have learned a lesson this week - baking in a heatwave is an unholy nightmare.

I agreed to make a cake for my aunt and one for my best friend's engagement party. I was forward planning as usual and baked my cakes in advance, freezing them in preparation for decorating, but then I realised I hadn't baked enough to so I had to make more. This meant late nights or melting afternoons in the kitchen. Then I had to deal with the nightmare of attempting to ice and cover cakes on hot and humid days.

Oh my days, seriously! I need air con. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. My icing wouldn't stick to the cake, or it was just too melty. The fondant was sticking and falling apart everywhere. When I attempted to give one cake a dusting of lustre it just clumped and stuck to the fondant. I dyed fondant which was supposed to be a nice duck egg blue but ended up looking like blu tac, then I ran out of it and tried to dye more but try as I might I could not get the same shade.

I genuinely thought I was going to cry at one point. I followed my best friend's advice and opened a bottle of wine. After two glasses it didn't seem like so much of a disaster.

The first cake is okay I think, the engagement party cake is.... well, it's a bit wonky, I had to improvise when I couldn't dye the fondant the right colour, I have to pray no one notices the disaster that s the lustre covered tier. I shall be relying on poor lighting and lots of alcohol to cover for me at the party tomorrow night. I have basically ignored my children for the past two days (thankfully the husband has been off on holiday from work).

So here they are. They are an abject lesson in baking in a heatwave, over-stretching yourself and trying too many new techniques at once.

Fondant Roses

I've gone a bit crazy buying cake equipment this week. I called into TK Maxx a couple of nights ago and came away with £40 worth of kit (some new tins, a flower mat and ooooo! a dye organiser!), and then this morning I took delivery of a set of rose petal cutters and some polyfoam wired buds. I've ever tried to make fondant flowers before, beyond the kind you can do with plunger cutters. My best friend recently got engaged and she's having a party soon to celebrate. I've said I will do a cake for it as a present and I'm keen to decorate it with some beautiful roses.

It was a little bit of a learning curve, but I think they have turned out okay for a first attempt. I could explain how I did it, but it's much easier to tell you to watch this video 

So here they are. I think I'll crack it completely on my next attempt

DIY Bake Even Strips

I was reading a cake forum earlier this week when someone mentioned that they tie a strip of wet towel around their cake pans to ensure an even rise when baking. This piqued my interest as I hate levelling cakes. I have a cake leveller from IKEA that does the job fine, but if I could sidestep it (and the little cut-offs that more often as not make their way into my mouth lately) I would be a happy person, of course I'd still have to torte my cakes but that is easy peasy and far less messy.

Wilton make these things called Bake Even strips, basically (and I'm going here purely on pictures I've seen on the internet) they are strips of fabric (I think heat resistant?) that you soak in water and then pin around your cake pan. When you put a cake in the oven, it cooks from the outside in. The sides of the pan get hot and cook fastest, this limits the rise on the rim of the cake, the middle part cooks more slowly and so continues to rise long after the outside has stopped, thus you end up with a domed cake that needs levelling.  Bake Even strips keep the outside of the pan cooler and allows you to achieve a more even bake. They also cost around £9.

The cheaper option is to make your own. Today I decided that I would try to give this a go. First I cut a strip of old tea towel, soaked it, squeezed the excess out (not too hard, you want to thoroughly wet, just not dripping) and secured it around my tin with some safety pins.

The cake came out pretty well, I got a better rise than I usually do, but it still needed a little bit of levelling.

I have a lot of cakes to make this week so I decided to try again, this time I would cut the strip wider.

It rose magnificently, right to the top of the tin and quite uniform across the top but then it all collapsed. I took it out and cut it to see what had gone wrong. An inserted skewer was coming away clean but once cut I could see that, in the words of Paul Hollywood, "it's basically raw."

The lesson here? DIY cake strips added around 20 minutes to the baking time of this 9 inch by 2.5 inch cake. Third time worked a charm. I got an excellent rise, and an uniform top. I could be anal and level it a teeny bit (which I probably will) but there's no doming to deal with. I'd say I got a 1/4 to a 1/3 more rise on this cake than I usually do.