Thursday 19 August 2010

Grandmas Cake

I wanted to do something a bit more traditional for my Grans birthday. As a present my friend brought me a decorating kit with different cake tools in it, including a piping bag with lots of attachments.

I had done a bit of practicing with different attachments to see what effect i like, and for this cake i chose to do a weaved effect around the edge of the cake. I wanted at first to do the basket weaved effect in a brown coloured butter icing, but decided on pink in the end because it makes it look different and more appealing.

So once i decided what design i was going to do on the cake i started making it. I used a yoghurt cake recipe and used mango flavoured yoghurt's to get a fruity flavour cake. I made 2 cakes with the intention of sandwiching them together. I wanted to keep the mango flavour for the middle of the cake. So i mashed a fresh mango - once it was fully mashed it had produced a lot of liquid as well so i decided to wring it out in a tea towel to try and lose some of the moisture.
Once I had wrung it out enough i mixed it in a bowl with some icing sugar, then used this to sandwich the 2 cakes together.
I covered the entire cake in vanilla butter cream and then covered it in white fondant. I mixed up my pink butter icing and used the weaved tip to make a basket effect around the entire cake.

As soon as this was done i had to put it in the fridge as the butter icing was warming up. Whilst it was in the fridge I made a selection of flowers from fondant icing. and then arranged them on a section of the cake.

I finished the cake off with icing writing on the top and i dusted a few of the flowers with edible glitter.

A simple and effective cake! Lets hope she likes it!!

Winner!!

Yay I won the competition! was very pleased with myself!

and the cake was auctioned for £30. Not to bad!!

Thursday 29 July 2010

Competition!!

There is a food and wine festival up in Hull this weekend... and there just so happens to be a cake decorating competition.
So of course I want to enter!
not that I think i've got much chance! but you never know...
the cake competition is running for a charity called 'Love you 2' and the only rules are it has to have a theme of love you 2...
So after having a brain storming session I come up with an idea....
I decided to do a 2 tier circular cake.
On the lower level I covered it with white icing, and using red and purple food colouring I dyed some more icing which I used to cut out different sized and shaped hearts. I placed these hearts around the lower level as a boarder.
For the top tier I covered it in icing to seal the cake, then covered it in vanilla butter icing and put love heart sweets all ove
r.

I was really pleased with the final result! so fingers crossed!!