Deeply Dippy // Right Said Fred

I'm getting so excited about Christmas. The trees went up last weekend, so I made them some stained glass tree biscuits with the help of Jonny on Wednesday evening.


We're having a party next week, and the theme is red gingham (the only thing I'm allowed to be in control of, according to Jonny!) so I wanted these to fit, so I decided on heart shape, to only be filled with red sweeties, and to be hung with gingham ribbon.


I won't try and pretend that these are revolutionary biscuits, I think I've made them since I was very little, but they are stunning. This morning the tree was the only thing lit up in the house, and the way fairy lights glowed through the biscuit looked magical.


They are a little bit dark for my liking, I put way too much mixed spice in, so they raw dough was sort of brown rather than golden. And some of them caught in the oven, and they don't taste good, as to be expected.


But this was the first time I've managed to find a recipe where the biscuits did not spread in the oven. My top tip will be not to use any kind of baking or grease proof paper for cooking them on - the sweeties will stick.
Hoepfully they'll last a while on the tree. I've held some back in the tin just incase the giant mouse that lives there gets to any.

Earth Song // Michael Jackson

I was asked to do another allotment cake on the back of the Transition Town Cake . It was for the charity Eco Local for a celebration they were having, and was, thankfully, much smaller.

I was very pleased with the turnout of this cake. The icing was the best I've ever done, and it seemed ashame to put on the ribbon, and then all the mini vegetables on top.

But it looked grand in the end, and apparently it went down very well at the party.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow // Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Back in September was my friends wedding, I've posted about practice cupcakes for them.
I spent a day solidly baking, decorating and packing up an large amount of cupcakes, just over 150 to be precise. By the end of it I could barely stand up, I was exhausted.



I also did a large chocolate cake, with a Star Wars topper, made by my fantastic brother, Ollie - Glass Candle Grenades.



The day of the actual wedding was interesting, Jonny was official photographer so I was pretty much alone. His Mum, Rosemary shipped me and the cakes about, which I am so grateful for, it would have been very hard to do it on the bus!

There was a small issue of a tablecloth, which a swift jog along the river at Kingston solved, and then I got my own little peaceful trip on one of the Turks Pier boats up to Teddington, where I was met with more cakes at the Wharf.

Then back to get ready and off to enjoy the wedding. Everything was so beautiful and perfect and I got fantastically drunk.

China in Your Hand // T'Pau

I can't remember if I said before, but I've been asked to do some cakes for a friends wedding. Jonny has been asked to do the photography too. I always said that I wanted to steer well clear of weddings and angry brides. But this is entirely different. I can't imagine them stressing out too much about their wedding.

At some point in last week we took six flavours of cakes for them to taste. They said that they looked how they imagine they should, and the sprinkles went down well. Much to my happiness. Jonny had earlier disagreed on the sprinkle front.


We gave them 6 flavours. Chocolate, lemon, vanilla, sea salt caramel, carrot and orange and coffee. The flavours they chose (and probably the ones I would too) were chocolate and lemon, and another to be confirmed, which will either be carrot or vanilla. They're having a meal with 3 courses (including dessert) so the cakes can't be too sickly or heavy.

It was really nerve-wracking putting my cakes up for judgement like that, but they were very polite, and I think that if they hated them they wouldn't want them at the wedding and they'd tell me. I hope. They''ve asked for 150 anyway, so I best get planning.

I have a couple of obsessions, the first being obviously sugar and everything to do with it. The second is stationary. I can spend hours in paperchase touching notebooks and paper. I'm a bit weird. But these two obsession happily collided when Paperchase introduced a whole cakey range!! I bought as much as I could, including a completely useless minature tea set. And then I had to buy a new cake tin from lakeland so I could bake mini things to go on it. The results follow.

Letter From America // The Proclaimers

Libby made a carrot cake for her work. It had cream cheese icing which is delicious but once the icing was on we decided it needed something else to make it look more exciting. We didn't have any sugar paste icing to make an orange carrot so I made a stencil and we sieved cinnamon through it to make it quite plainly a carrot cake.


I was quite chuffed with my stenciling.

There's been a very detailed carrot cake in the past and this was made using the same recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery book.

It's Not Easy Being Green // Kermit the Frog

''Blaaarghh'' is the only word for me today. I've been feverish and poorly. I think people are suspicious it's a hangover after Jonny's birthday, but I am certain it's not. I have a horrendously sore throat and am all weak and pathetic.

Jonny's birthday picnic was a success. Isn't everything I have a hand in planning? We had to hold it indoors due to crummy weather, but other than that it was a really lovely day. And it was themeless. Which left me at a bit of a loss as to what cake to make. He'd muttered something about chocolate, but other than that I had no clue.

On Wednesday, his actual birthday, I went hunting for a picture to post on his facebook and had googled 'Kermit Birthday' and I stumbled across daveandraina's Flickr and instantly knew I had to make Kermit the Frog cupcakes. They fit in every way, firstly Jonny is a complete Muppets freak and secondly I was short on time.


I used, again, Hummingbird's vanilla cupcake recipe, and vanilla frosting recipe both with healthy dollops of green colouring gel. I seem to know this recipe very well by now and ended up making the cakes in very little time, which meant I could watch Ashes to Ashes while making the mento-eyes.

Some of the cakes were a little low in the case, which meant I ended up using quite a lot of frosting on some, and hardly any on the other. I need to work on this. I also wasn't very happy with the eyes. I had to use blue food colouring to draw them, and let's face it, I've never been one for any kind of artwork.

But they looked like Kermit, and I think most people liked them, and the actual cake being green was a nice surprise. And Jonny got to do his Kermit impression, which is always a crowd pleaser.

Township Rebellion // Rage Against the Machine

I wasn't very inspired for the title of this one. The MP3 wotsit chose for me.

A while ago I posted that my lovely friend had asked for a bit of assistance with a very large cake she'd been asked to make for Transition Town Kingston's Big Launch Party.


We had a little planning meeting (chips in the pub) and came up with a lot of ideas, the best being an allotment themed cake. It fits with the ethos you see. I can't quite remember what size we considered, but after reporting back we discovered that it was to be much, much bigger. To feed 200-250 people.

So we re-planned.

We ended up making 3 big sheets of cake, just a bit bigger than an A4 piece of paper. Which was less than requested, but any bigger would have been a lot harder and a lot messier.


We made one chocolate, one vanilla and one lemon. We started after work on Friday and ended up in bed at three o'clock. But in that time we did the three cakes and most of the modelling of sheds and vegetables and tripods for the decorating, and I had covered one cake in sugarpaste.


So after oversleeping a little we got back to it at around twelve. Covering the cakes in sugar paste was hard as they were so huge. So they all got a bit of patching in the end.
Putting the bits on was fun, there was debate about whether the chickens were to scale.. I said no, but I was wrong, they looked great in the end.


Then the nervous car journey and unloading. Then the praise and admiration. I hate that bit. I would have quite happily run away, but did the brave thing and got myself a tad drunk over the course of the evening.


They struggled to get rid of it all, one was donated to an allotment AGM, another to Kingston Horticultural Society and I took half of the rest for the lads at work - I think they'll eat anything put in front of them so they shouldn't mind that it was three days old.


I am glad that it's over, it was such a huge project and I enjoyed it a lot, but I struggled a bit with not having the original vision in my head to work to so was a little behind with helping and at points wasn't as helpful as I could have been.

Comfort Eagle // Cake

A second lot of cupcake practice for the big batch. It's this weekend! Eep! I'm starting to think I must be mental for agreeing to make 75 cupcakes.

This practice went well. I didn't overfill the cases and they rose beautifully. This time we were organised enough to remember to put vanilla in the frosting.
Jonny doesn't really get my frosting style. But I don't like to put loads on and I don't like it to look like we've slathered it on with a hot knife. Even though we have.
I can't explain why. I just prefer them to look a little rustic.

Enjoy the following cupcake porn!

Billy Brown // Mika

Yesterday was the birthday party of one of our best friends, Will.
We managed to keep it a complete surprise from him, and I think it was a total success in the end, well he seemed happy enough.


When I make cakes for people I like to put some thought into them, make them a bit more personal. I had two ideas for Will.. wine and guitars.
We decided against making a replica of his beloved bass, as it's beautiful and a cake would just be a charicature of it, and its imperfections would have probably annoyed him.
The other idea, wine, needed practice and I ran out of time and didn't fancy taking the risk of errecting a cake held up with wine bottles without knowing if it would work or not.
So I had to re-think. Will is one of my only friends who has an interest in proper chocolate, he thinks the darker better.
So I gave myself the challenge of making the chocolatiest cake in the world.

I made the actual cake on Thursday evening, using James Martin's cola cake recipe, the only chocolate cake recipe I trust to work now.
I planned to fill it with a dark ganache and top it with Helm Magical Icing and then put as many chocolates as possible on top, all bought from William Curley.

I'd asked my dad to buy some 70% chocolate for the ganache, as Will would approve but it wouldn't be so dark everyone else would hate it.
So I happily made the ganache but when I tried it.. bleurgh.. it was bitter and unpalatable. We checked the packet and it had been 85% chocolate. It could not have gone in the middle of the cake, and I had to get back to the office.
It was decided we'd take the risk of adding sweetened cream cheese, in an attempt to keep the perfect consistency but make it a bit more edible.
It worked, sort of. It solidified in the cake, so wasn't the gooey filling it should have been, but it was still tasty.

Helm Magical Icing is a mixture of butter, cocoa powder, icing sugar and evaporated milk. It makes a silky smooth covering that you can just pour over the cake, and it gives it a lovely shiny coating.


Then the fun bit of covering the cake in chocolates, cinder toffee and nuts. We were quite pleased with how it looked in the end, and I think everyone at the party liked it, even if they didn't manage to finish the Libby-sized portions I dished out.

Cups and Cakes // Spinal Tap part two

Libb is napping on the sofa, she just told me to stop distracting her from the nap. I blame her day of sugar and cake for this afternoon nap. Up to now she has eaten:

• Weetos
• Hazelnut Hot Chocolate
• Blueberry Muffin (skinny)
• Carrot Cake
• Cheese and Pickle sandwiches
• Cupcake trimmings
• Frosting
• Carrot Cake
• Marmite Rice Cake
• Coffee Cake
• Cupcake (with frosting)

She also had two apples which apparently makes it all ok. Thats just under 50% of all things eaten today containing the word "cake". I'm surprised she's not eaten any cups if I'm honest.

Anyhow this extensive cake eating is half due to lots of birthdays at work and also training for her 75-cup cakeathon thats coming up at the end of Feb. She brought round 6 of the trial cupcakes at lunch and we set to work making the frosting; butter, loads of icing sugar and a spot of milk, unfortunately libb had got "goseberry" food colouring but thought that gooseberries were yellow not green so we ended up with a pastel green icing instead of the pale yellow she'd planned for.

The frosting was lovely, firm but still mouldable for easy decorating. We were working against the clock as Lib only has a 45 minute lunch-break, and quickly discovered that you need a big bowl to make this icing as most of the sugar ended up on the floor when first combining it with the butter.

We popped the icing on top of the cakes and shaped it with a hot knife but I found it very tricky to get a rustic heap of icing, Lib says I smooth it all too much, anyway this was just a trial run right?

Anyway with the base of yellow (oops I mean green) frosting on we added the finishing decoration. Blue, pink and white sugar balls where accompanied by sugar dolphins, Hearts and stars respectively so we ended up with two blue, two pink and two yellow (the stars were white & yellow). It was immediately apparent that the green didn't really go. A pale cream/yellow base would have allowed the decoration colours to stand out much more clearly but at least this time there's a next time and I think there's some powder yellow in Libbs' cake toolbox so I'll remind her of that when I bring her a wake up cup of tea.

Sugar Daddy // Tom Jones

Christmas Cake # 3, 4, 5 and 6

A marathon day of cake decoration. I managed to convince Jonny that he really wanted to stay and help.
A good day overall, though a brief nap was needed. I don't want to go into too much detail, as 12 christmas cakes is bound to become boring very soon.

3 - A bit too pink!



4 - All white - Couldn't outline the leaves as planned but I think it went down well.



5 - Becci's cake - snowscape. Nut free!



6 - Corporate order.. my work asked me to do a cake for our best customer. The problem came when the template Jonny had made was two inches too big. This was my fault. I got the cake size wrong. The design is our business logo, with a festive twist. I was willing to leave it as just the logo, but Jonny and my Uncle, and my Mother in fact, said it needed something more.

Swinging on a Star // Big Dee Erwin

Christmas cake #2

I was left in the house alone to decorate the second cake, which is my present to my Uncle, who is staying for the night.
Having the house to myself allowed me a bit of time to rock out, then get down to the cake dec. I was very relaxed about this one... and it went very well! The marzipanning and sugar pasting were the best I've ever done.
I was quite shocked by this and remained completely uninspired for the detail until J arrived.
And look at what we made!!!



I'm so immensely chuffed. It was so satisfying, removing layers of icing, filling in, removing, filling in. I imagine I'll repeat this design for one or two of the other cakes I have to do, the only change I'd make would be to put less colouring in so the blue is more icy.

Sugar Coated Iceberg // Lightning Seeds

Christmas Cake #1

I am half way through icing my first christmas cake - number one of twelve.

Started by levelling the top off - which I am always too generous with. This means that I end up with space at the bottom of the cake which will need generous stuffing with marzipan to level it up. I guess this is a good thing for those who love marzipan.
I got in from work and the decision to start icing tonight was spontaneous, which is leading to problem after problem. Firstly I don't have any apricot jam, only some kind of conserve - which I know is the same, and I'm being fussy.. but I like to have a cheap apricot jam so that there aren't any fruity lumps under my icing.



The fact that I had very little marzipan left meant I couldn't put the base on quite as well as I hoped. I can handle this, along as it is a comparitively smooth layer for the sugar paste, I don't really care what it looks like.

The final problem so far is that as my kitchen is stupidly small, I have all my cake dec equipment in tool boxes in my bedroom. This means that my room is getting messier and messier as I rush in and out.
I think I'm getting stressed out by nothing.

The next few stages should be a doddle as this cake is a gift, it doesn't need to be fancy, and they like a bit of ribbon bunged on. I'm a firm believer that ribbon shouldn't go on a cake unless it's completely ballsed up. So this gives me some space to go wrong...



...which I did. I was sort of gun-ho and just went for it and slopped my beautifully rolled sugar paste on to the wrong bit of cake, panicked and ripped it. In the end the patch up wasn't so obvious, but it got a bit jammy.
I had great fun using my new icing gun - a bit of a risky gadget. I'm using it to make ribbons for the bottom of the cakes, as I've decided royal icing and piping is too much of a faff. It works very nicely, but it's quite hard work on the arms, and I need to work out a way to block up the holes so I only get one ribbon.....



Finished with a simple glittery star and some silver and black ribbon - not much effort at all. Which is just what I needed to get me back into the swing of cake decorating.