Midnight Garden Cake.

       Back at the beginning of May, I decided to enter Karen's Tea Time Treats blog challenge as this month's challenge was 'Flowers'. The main reason was that I wanted to practice making lots and lots of sugarcraft flowers. Fast forward to the closing date and here is the final production, The Midnight Garden Cake, with its one sugarcraft flower lol. Oh the floral extravaganza that was going to adorn my dream creation! To be fair, I did make two flowers, but one, my first, was just seeing if I could make an Osteospermum 'Whirlygig'....

.... and it didn't come off too badly :) But it wasn't for this cake.

        Originally I was going to have more different coloured flowers round the edge, daytime sky (Mix the blue too dark did we? - ed.) and a cloud top that would be adorned with pure white 'flowers in heaven' type thing. This is why I don't bother making plans normally. So, that was my first attempt at a rose on the top. It wasn't bad, just have to work on getting it more 'delicate' instead of a hefty lump of a rose. 

        The cake contained a few other firsts that I wanted to do. This is the first time I've rolled out an icing covering using a pack of the ol' white Regalice. The second attempt was more relaxing after dusting the work surface with a bit more cornflour thus making it not stick like the frustrating arse first one! So finally I got it off the surface on a rolling pin, onto the cake and averagely smooth and tidy. Hooray! 

       There isn't a recipe for this as I used the chocolate celebration cake recipe Here, saving a bit of the buttercream to mix with green gel colour for the grass.

So I made this purely to try new things and also to enter this months #TeaTimeTreats being run by Karen over at Lavender and Lovage. and after having a month to do something, I'm now doing blog first draft with 11 mins left to enter! and I will finish the post tomorrow....goodnight :)

....and suddenly it's June 3rd! lol Anyway, a bit more info on the cake. After getting the rolled icing on, I used some blue blossom tint mixed up with some Rejuvenating solution to make the paint, and started doing the sky on the sides. I was going for a smoother covering of colour, but with the way the icing soaks up the paint I ended up with the brush-strokey look, which I kind of grew to like. Another case of practice will make perfect, or at least better. I did the paint on the top a day later which didn't work as well because where the icing had dried a bit, it got a sugary dust on it and this went into little lumps with the paint and also gummed up the end of the brush. I think it would probably have been ok if I'd buffed off the top a bit first. 

     Next I mixed up some green paint and drew on the flower stems, rolled out some white icing for the flowers and cut them out then pressed straight onto the side of the cake. Then piped some green buttercream through a grass/hair nozzle for the grass around the base of the cake.

     Then, the next day, I made the clouds using the marshmallow frosting mix that Ros used for her amazing Hi Hat Marshmallow Cupcakes. I did wonder how much the recipe would make, and it was, er, quite a lot lol About 20 times too much for my few clouds, and there's only so much marshmallow frosting you can eat straight out of the bowl lol I think I also either over whisked or left the frosting too long before I piped it as it didn't pipe as smoothly as I was hoping and so ended up with quite angular clouds instead of the smooth fluffy ones I was looking for, but they worked ok.

    Next I took some white flowerpaste and mixed in some yellow gel colour. This was for the 'moon' rose (I'm really hoping at least a few of you realised the rose was representing the moon! :D ), the stars and the side flower centres. There's plenty of rose tutorials on t'web out there for you to see. It is quite simple, even for me and especially making my big lummox of a rose. I pressed out the petals inside one of those clear flexi plastic A4 paper folders. Then I rolled out some thin and cut out the stars, then rolled little balls and pressed into the centres of the flowers. 

       And hey presto! Midnight Garden cake! :)

Some tunes for the garden.....starting with the flippin brilliant Miranda Sex Garden - Peep Show

Chill with The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds

The Creepshow - The Garden

I like a bit of the Levellers now and again and went to their brilliant Beautiful Days Festival in Devon last year. I don't really rate this from them, but it's cakey linked :D The Levellers - In This Garden

LOVE! This one though. The Levellers - 15 Years

Any excuse for some Manics - Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky

Ok, 2 more. First, All About Eve - Flowers in our Hair

and finally, The other good track from The Killers - Mr Brightside. Brandon Flowers innit ;)

Stay dark and floral people.

Critters Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Buttercream covering.

So I thought, hmmm, what can I make my Sister for Christmas, I know! A cake with all her animals on! One text later I regretted this idea - 2 dogs, and now others had increased to 11 rabbits and 19 guinea pigs! (These numbers were out of date by the time the cake was eaten haha!)  Still, the modelling practice would be good, especially seeing as all modelling I had ever done in 41 yrs was, um, disappointing. So challenge on!

    I used the cake and buttercream recipe from Sara's Cooking Diary with the only change being that I used 23cm/9" spring-form tins as I wanted as much top surface as possible for the animals. It still made a plenty deep enough cake. I thought the sponge was just right for a large cake, not too light and fluffy, not too heavy, just about the right body and texture, and mixed with the buttercream it was very, very nice! I will be using this for a choccy cake again :)

Ingredients:

• 250g Dark Chocolate
• 170g Unsalted butter at room temp.
• 350g Light brown sugar
• 3 Large free range eggs
• 370g Plain flour
• 1 1/2 tsp Baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 500ml milk at room temp
• 2 tsp Vanilla extract.

For the buttercream:

• 175g dark chocolate
• 225g Unsalted butter at room temp.
• 1 tbsp milk at room temp.
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150g icing sugar

Preparation:

1.  Grease and line 2 x 23cm tins, or as I do now spray lovely non-stick spring-form tins with even lovelier cake release spray. 
2. Break the chocolate into pieces and melt in a bowl over a saucepan of water or in a microwave heating with 30sec bursts. Don't stir the chocolate while it's being melted. Allow the chocolate to cool a bit.
3. Preheat oven to 180c/170c fan/Gas 5
4. In a large bowl cream together the butter and sugar until pale and smooth
5. Separate the eggs, beat the yolks and slowly add them whilst mixing.
6. Add the slightly cooled chocolate and mix well.
7. In another bowl sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt.
8. In a jug mix together the milk and vanilla extract.
9. Alternately add a third of dry ingredients and third of the the milk to the chocolate mixture and mix well. Repeat until the dry ingredients and milk are all added.
10. Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks.
11. Carefully fold in the whisked whites to the mixture with a metal spoon until fully mixed in, be gentle, you don't want to beat the air out of the whisked whites.
12. Divide the mixture equally between the 2 tins.
13. Bake for approx 35 minutes, until risen and a skewer comes out of the centre clean.
14. Leave the cakes to cool for 10 minutes, then tip out onto a cooling rack to cool completely.

For the buttercream:

1. Melt the chocolate as above and leave to cool a while
2. I did the following in a food processor, but you're welcome to hand beat it. In a large bowl beat together the butter, milk, vanilla and icing sugar until completely mixed.
3. Add the slightly cooled chocolate and mix until creamy and smooth. If the mixture seems to runny, add more icing sugar.
4. I mated the 2 top sides of the sponges together so that the bottom and top of the cake were flat. Test the two sponges together and if necessary, trim off any bits of the mating faces to help the sponges sit flat.
5. Add buttercream to one surface and sandwich the sponges together. If you are icing the sides as well as the top then use about a third of the mix. If you're just doing the sandwich and top then use a half (It will be quite thick, which is fine :) )
6. Use a palette knife to apply the buttercream to the rest of the cake.
7. I found the buttercream to be quite solid at fridge temp but less so, but not runny, at room temp.
8. Eat! or decorate further.

Half the army of animals ready and willing!

Stanley Dog - The first animal I made and the only one I was happy with.

Rocky the Shug.

Now mothers, tell your children, not to doooooooo what I have done.... The Animals - House of the Rising Sun.

A single Animal doing his thing whilst Rita Moreno tries to sing Fever. Just brilliant!

And finally, I think there's enough animals for them to have a Carnival.... Saint-Saens - Aquarium

Finally, finally. Seeing as I made this for my Sister it's a fine excuse for slipping in some awesomeness from Groove Armada - Look Me In The Eye Sister.  I was thinking that i got carried away with Gingerbread Glastonbury until I saw this :D Just brilliant Vid!

Russian Honey cake.

 

     Ah now, this is probably the most impressive cakes that I've made so far. Technically and creatively challenging (For me) but I came out the other side with a cake that looked, and tasted bloomin luverly!

     This is a recipe from the wonderful Mary-Anne Boermans Time to Cook Blog where Mary-Anne has written a lot more about how the cake came about, and it's wonders. Again, pretty much like all my recipes here, Mary-Anne will show you how to make the cake properly, and the following is how I stumbled through it. It is actually good fun to make, even when you're throwing crumbs at the side of it at two o'clock in the morning! Anyway...

Ingredients:

• 3 Large Free Range Eggs
• 225g Caster sugar
• 3 tbsp Honey
• 100g Unsalted butter, cubed
• 1 tsp Bicarb
• 450g Plain flour
• 1 Litre Reduced-fat Creme fraiche
• 3 tbsp Icing sugar.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 200c/180c fan/Gas 4
2. Weigh an empty bowl so you know roughly the final weight of mixture later on.
3. Place a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and add the honey to the bowl.
4. Add the eggs, butter and caster sugar and whisk until the sugar is dissolved and the mix smooth.
5. Add the Bicarb and whisk for another minute.
6. Grease and line with baking paper up to 4 20cm x 30cm tins. 
7. Remove the bowl from the heat and gradually mix in the flour.The resulting mix can vary between putty and rollable dough. Mine ended up a kind of very sticky toffee (Possibly my eggs weren't large enough as not graded ones) and I struggled to spread the mix thinly enough in the tins, and as it cooled more it got thicker and I ended up spreading between 3 tins. But whatever mix you end with, aim to split the dough between 3 or 4 tins. Possibly leave the mix over the saucepan of water, but off of heat to keep it more malleable, or maybe a hot palette knife would spread it easier. 
8. Bake for 3-4 mins (Maybe 4-5mins for a triple layer cake) until golden brown. Then tip out onto a cooling rack to cool. (If you happen to bake each tin to a slightly different colour, don't worry, you get a more colourful cake ;) )
9. While they're cooling, put the creme fraiche into a bowl, add the icing sugar and mix well.
10. When the cakes are cool, stack them together and trim off the sides to make them all the same shape.
11. Put the off-cuts in a processor and blitz until crumbs.
12. Place one layer of cake on a cooling rack and spread about a 1.5cm deep layer of the creme fraiche mix over it. Place the next cake on top and repeat, then the next...
13. Then spread creme fraiche mix over the 4 sides of the cake so the cake is now totally covered.
14. Place the rack and cake into a large baking tray and press cake crumbs into the sides of the cake.The way i ended up doing it was to have a handful of crumbs up to the side of the cake and push them against it with a knife or palette knife. Excess crumbs will fall into the baking tray and you can use them again. Continue this until the sides are coated. Mine ended up with some crumbs on the top as I started off throwing the crumbs at the side lol, so I added a few more on top to make it look deliberate :)
15. Cover the cake and leave, preferably overnight, as this allows the moisture from the creme fraiche mix to soak into the sponge making it moist and tangy. So sometime later, you end up with something, like this... :)

8th April 2012 ...and here's a little one I knocked up for my first Clandestine Cake Club meet in Coventry yesterday. Pimped up a bit for the Easter theme. I used 3 9" x 9" tins for this one, but still the same ingredients. I'll make the sponges as thin as they're meant to be one day :D

Right, Honey cake, Honey, Honeyz, Laydeees all the laydeees (Otherwise known as female humans, or women)
4 layers of some kick-butt all female action starting with the much underrated Call the Shots from Girls Aloud! (Oh come on, it could have been the Spice Girls :p )

Blimey, must be hell for them living their entire lives in slow motion! Anyway, next....

Back to the 90's for a fantastic trio from Minneapolis. Not their best song, but they're pretty thin on the ground on uToob. Jackals by Zuzu's Petals:

Thirdly, and O.M.G!!! I just found this little rarity. Death by Crimpers - Obsessive. The world famous 5 piece from Oxford! Now, I know what you're thinking, this single version's not as good as the demo, and yes, I agree, but I was at the Jericho for this video shoot, so this will do nicely :D

For the final layer I was going to put up Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love video, until someone pointed out there was a man in the video!?! Who knew? So I decided to end this gnarled 90's triple-play with a bit more Riot Grrrl action in the form of the magnificent, shadow-casting gloriousness of Babes in Toyland - Sweet '69