Russ on a Bus!

For Adam Moon, a celebration of our favourite poem!

For this I used ready made red and black icing (mine always comes out pink/grey when I try to make it!) which worked really well! I always love putting a steno machine on a cake.

Chris Hull loves crisps...

...so I made him a Skips cake!

I just iced a square marble cake with yellow icing and then used red and pink sugarpaste to do the packet design, easy! Those are real Skips...not sure how well they went with the cake? Chull will have to report back on that one!

ELBOWS!

Fad can't get off a chairlift without sticking his elbows out and knocking down the unfortunate person either side of him, this is a fact of life. For his birthday I decided to put this phenomenon on a cake!

I baked a square marble cake, covered it in white icing and then made a chairlift out of sugarpaste and white chocolate Mikado biscuits (they worked amazingly!) I then made Fad, April and myself out of sugarpaste and  positioned on the cake, affixed with edible glue.

The skis are more Mikados (coloured with blue food colour paste) and the ski poles are spaghetti strands coloured black! Very easy.

The face detail was done with my black felt tip food colour pen. I added icing sugar and snowflake sugar decorations to give the surface a bit of texture.

I made Fad out of sugarpaste and then stuck him to a cardboard backing to keep him upright. The elbows were easy to keep in place - I just joined them to the chairlift!

Knit fast, die warm.

Cat Kelly's knitting cake! Inspired by this design:

This was the finished cake:

I baked two sponge cakes and sandwiched them together with butter cream icing and strawberry jam. Then I carefully carved a little off each side to make the cake oval shaped. I was going to invest in an oval shaped cake tin but the chopping method worked just as well!

I covered the cake in blue sugarpaste to start.  I then mixed up a big batch of butter cream icing, divided it into two and coloured one green and one blue. I used a piping bag with a small nozzle to pipe on the lines of yarn, green first and then blue in between.

Then I cut a rectangle of white sugarpaste which I attached to the middle of the cake, and then wrote "Knit fast, die warm" using my black felt tip food colour pen, then decorated with sugar balls (from cakecraft.com)

Finally, I made some knitting needles out of cookie sticks with a bit of sugarpaste on the end and put them through the cakey ball of yarn, then transferred it onto a silver cake board....

Sadly it got so mashed in transit, but at least I got photos when it was still pretty!

Kilimanjaro Kim!

Kim Smith climbed Kilimanjaro - an amazing feat that definitely deserved a cake! I didn't get round to creating one until a year and a half after her climb (!) but got there in the end!

I started by baking two small round vanilla/chocolate marble cakes. My marble cake recipe is just a basic sponge (6oz caster sugar, 6oz Stork marg, 6oz s.r. flour, 1.5 tsp baking powder, 3 eggs) divided into two bowls; flavour one with a tsp of cocoa powder and one with a few drops of vanilla extract. Try not to use vanilla essence unless it's all you can get - extract is natural and essence is a by-product of the paper industry, which is pretty nasty! But they both do the same job of flavouring the cake so it doesn't make a huge difference.  

When you have your two cake mixes, drop a spoonful of vanilla into the cake tin and then follow with a spoonful of choc on top. Repeat until you've used all the mix and then bang the tin on the work surface to make sure the mix goes up to all edges (BE CAREFUL IF YOU ARE USING A LOOSE BOTTOMED TIN!) Then bake for 25 mins at 180, it might need a little longer, when a skewer comes out clean (no gunk) it's done.

When the cakes were cool, I covered one in grey butter cream icing to make the base of the mountain. I then chopped the other cake into square cubes, covered a few in sugar paste that I coloured a light grey and stacked them on top to make the top.  I used a bit of grey butter cream as a sort of glue to hold it all together, and also to give the mountain a more rocky effect. I drizzled some white glace icing on top (and some white sprinkles!) for the snow. 

Then I made Kim....

I just used coloured sugar paste to make her clothes, backpack, face and hair and attached it to the side of the cake with edible glue. Very easy! I drew on her facial features and other detail with my black food colour felt tip pen.

Finally I finished the cake off by writing a message in blue icing, mounting it on a small cake board, adding some green glace icing for grass and attaching some animal decorations I found in the Jane Asher shop...

Jambo!

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! :)