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.

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.