Punk Jubilee Cake.

A little thing I knocked up for Coventry Clandestine Cake Club, and to celebrate Brenda's 60 yrs toiling away keeping the royalists happy. A vanilla sponge with a Damson gin liqueur buttercream and damson jam filling, Renshaw icing Union Jack, and flowerpaste, cake-smashing guitar!

   
     The lovely Renshaw people at Mybakes offered me one of their very-handy-for-Union-Jacks Great British Icing packs, so in my best Corporate Whore voice, I said Yes please! The packs contain 4 x 200g, 1 x Red, 1 x White and 2 x blue and are available from Asda, Morrisons, and Hobbycraft. I used 30g of red, 85g of white and 185g of blue for this cake, and one was very happy with one's results :)

Ingredients:

• 150g Unsalted butter at room temp
• 140g Golden caster sugar
• 3 Free range eggs
• 140g Self raising flour sifted
• 30g ground almond
• 1 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract.

• 150g Unsalted butter at room temp
• 300g Icing sugar sifted
• 1 TBSP Milk
• 1 TBSP Damson gin liqueur 
• 100g Damson jam

• Flowerpaste for the guitar
• Edible ink pen for doodling on it

Preparation:

• Preheat the oven to 180c
• Grease and line or cake release spray 2 x 7" round cake tins
• In a large bowl cream together the butter and caster sugar
• Add one egg at a time and keep mixing.
• Add the vanilla extract and mix in.
• Add the sifted flour and ground almond and fold in with a metal spoon or a spatula.
• Split evenly into the two cake tins.
• Bake for 20-25mins, until golden brown, and just starting to come away from the sides of the tins. Test the centre with a cocktail stick, knife, or cake tester and it should come out clean from the centre.
• Leave to cool for 10 mins in the tins, then tip onto a rack to cool completely.
• For the buttercream, mix together the butter, icing sugar, milk, damson liqueur together until light, smooth and fluffy.
• If you want a flat top to the cake then you want the bases of the sponges on the top and bottom, this means you may want to slice the dome'd tops off, then apply 2/3 of the buttercream to one and the jam to the other, then sandwich together.
• With a palette knife use more of the buttercream to fill out the filling gap and also apply a smooth thin layer all over the cake to help the icing stick smoothly. See photo 1 below.
• Roll out the blue icing on a surface powdered very lightly with cornflour. Measure the height and diameter of the cake, add at least an inch and then you'll know how big a disc of icing you need. I rolled out 400g and you can see from photo 2 once it was thin I had a little bit spare around the edges lol
• Roll out the white icing to the same length and cut the strips you need. I used a see through ruler and pastry cutting wheel for this. Wet the blue icing a touch just where the white strips are going to go to help them stick. I used a little brush for this. 
• Roll out the red icing, cut the strips, wet the white icing where the red's going to go and stick 'em on.
• Now it's destruction time! Yay! Cut away from the centre with a knife and peel back the flaps of icing.
• Dig out some of the sponge with a fork and mix with a small bit of buttercream to keep it moist. then put back into the 'crater'.
• Stick your very fine musical instrument into the middle of the crater.
• I then mixed up the last of the buttercream with some blue gel colouring and piped around the base of the cake to tidy it up.
• Eat in an anarchic way with the Sex Pistols playing loudly.

Deesstrooyyyy!

Jubilee tunage!

Kicking off with your eating music Sex Pistols - God Save The Queen

The majesty of Freddie Mercury! Queen - We Are The Champions!

What's that? You want to see prisoners dancing to Queen - Radio Gaga? OK...

Yeovil's finest! PJ Harvey - 50ft Queenie.

A lovely bit of QOTSA - No One Knows.

And finally, as Brenda smiles along with all the singing Sirs in a concert sorted by the no doubt future Sir Gary of Barlow The Subways - Rock and Roll Queen.

Stay regal people.