Pass that Dutch: Mean Girls cake.

Sebrina Miller has just celebrated her first UK based birthday in SIX YEARS! To celebrate, I made her a Mean Girls cake - one of our favourite and most-quoted movies ever. To put the cake in context, this clip is essential...



She just has a lot of feelings! The challenge was set - I was going to bake a cake full of rainbows and smiles and we would all eat it and be happy. To do this, I mixed up my cake batter and then divided it into five bowls. To those bowls I added red, orange, yellow, green and blue food colour and mixed until it was evenly coloured. I then dropped the mix into lined baking tins; a big blob of red first, followed by orange on top, then yellow, etc, etc. I did the same but reversed (starting with blue) for the other tin. I gave the tins a little shake to even and fill out the tins, then popped them in the oven for 25 minutes.

Voila! Having never tried this before, I had no idea what they would turn out like, but I was excited! Then I decorated...

I covered the cake in pink sugarpaste and then shaped five faces out of flesh coloured sugar paste. I added detail (hair, clothes, spinal support frame, etc) using more sugarpaste that I coloured myself. Karen is wearing her Halloween outfit ("I'm a mouse...d'uh?") Regina is wearing the sabotaged vest that sparks a school fashion craze and Damian is in his disguise, of course! 

I stuck the figures onto the cake surface using edible glue (I found it online, it's awesome!) and then added the speech bubbles, writing the quotes with my (favourite!) food colour felt tip. I went round the speech bubbles using a green icing pen (just to tidy them up) and then made four sugarpaste candy canes, labelled to Glen Coco ("Four for you Glen Coco, you go Glen Coco!")

If you don't recognise the figure on the right, that is OF COURSE Danny Devito....

I took the cake to Birmingham for Seb's birthday meal (it survived the journey, amazingly!) and the nice lady at Waga brought it out. She didn't understand what was going on and thought, upon reading the speech bubbles, that I had made a RACIST CAKE to celebrate a birthday! Quickly set her straight on that one.

When Seb cut into it, it was FULL of rainbows!

Absolutely bonkers. Perhaps not the MOST appetising-looking of cakes, but it tasted good!

Happy Birthday Seb!

Isle of Wight Cake: we love Steephill Cove!

For my Mum's birthday - Sue Mann, huge IOW fan - there was only one choice for her birthday cake...



As Mama is gluten intolerant, I made the cake with rice flour substituting for regular self-raising flour in my sponge recipe. I was a bit worried it would taste funny (the cake batter certainly did!) but when baked it was actually fine. I still would have preferred to use Dove Farm gluten free self-raising flour but sadly my local Tesco was out of stock when I went shopping for my ingredients so rice flour was my emergency back-up!

I baked a rectangular sponge and then, when cooled, shaped it into the IOW shape. I covered in green sugarpaste, then used white royal icing for the cliffs, green royal icing for the land surface, and blue for the sea. To create the swirled sea, I mixed a batch of darker blue royal icing and used a cocktail stick to swirl it into the lighter blue sea which produced a marbled effect. I made the coast with a sprinkling of golden caster sugar, but you can also use crumbled up cookies (make sure they are gf if you are making a cake for a coeliac!) which would look better - my sugar got a bit absorbed in the sea!

I then added The Needles and Steephill Cove Lighthouse (where we celebrated Mum's birthday!) and finally a Red Funnel ferry coming into East Cowes from Southampton. Generally a very easy cake to make, and Ma loved it! :)

Bon Voyage Tbay!

Tim Baker (Old Bailey clerk extroadinaire) has left freezing cold London and fled to Barbados...sensible! Barbados marks the start of his travels all over the world, and just in case he forgets his route I decided to put it on a cake for him...

The cake was a Victoria Sponge full of icing and jam, covered in blue sugarpaste, with green sugarpaste land (with added glace icing and turquoise glitter to make it fun!) I then made a little airplane, destination markers, and linked them all together using a fantastic black food colour felt tip I got from the Jane Asher shop in South Kensington - probably the best cake decorating aid I've ever had!

To finish off, I put it on a gold cake board, added detail and writing with a purple glitter icing pen and then an obligatory cocktail stick speech bubble....

Bon voyage, Tbay! Have fun!