Penguin Engagement Cake

Yesterday Cindy and I teamed up to make a cake for an engagement party for friends Craig and Bec. Craig loves penguins and they both have fake penguin themed names on facebook and so I though it was fitting to put something penguin related on top.

It was a much more pleasant experience decorating a cake with someone else, there was none of the usual swearing, frustration, tears and stress. It also helps that Cindy has a very steady hand and was quite brave and quick in her icing abilities. It did however take about 4 trips to the supermarket because we were not particularly organised but I was really pleased with the finished picture:



Taste wise, it was a slight let down. I chose a vegan mud cake recipe that looked and smelt quite rich but was not very sweet and kind of bland. We used the same technique that I used to make the stumpy dog cake to decorate the cake. So basically using toothpicks/skewer to make dots around the outline. Although, in this case instead of tracing the picture, Cindy drew it onto baking paper free hand because she is super awesome. For the icing we used a black icing pen to do the outline first and then coloured in the white bits with a basic 'butter' cream and then added pomegranate molasses and vegan food colouring to make the other parts pink. The darker parts that look black in this photo were actually brown and made from melted chocolate. Cindy and I have gone halves in a 2.5kg bag of dark chocolate from here so we had plenty to use. We then used the icing pen to do the eyes and to go over the outline again. Unlike the stumpy cake we didn't pipe the icing just used teaspoons to smooth the icing into place after roughly piping it in some places. It resulted in a much finer texture and look which I preferred but would have been quite timing consuming if I was doing it myself.

Here is Bec with a piece:

Stumpy dog cake and adventures in caramel icing

It was Lidia's potluck birthday party today so Mr T and I decided to bake her a cake that looked like her dog stumpy. I got a pic of Stumpy from one of Lidia's old blog posts:
I then cropped the pic just around his head and enlarged it so that it fit on A4 paper. Mr T then traced the outline onto baking paper and I then placed the baking paper over the top layer of the cake and used a toothpick to make lots of holes around the outline.

We made kittee's chocolate cake but figured that Stumpy's colouring is properly closer to the colour of caramel than it is to chocolate, and I remembered that Lidia loves caramel. So last night we make caramel icing based on this recipe on recipezaar, it was perfect and soft but then once we put in the fridge overnight and it hardened up so much that I couldn't use it. We did still use it in between the two layers of cake which was probably a mistake but it just seemed so wasteful to throw it all away.

Then this morning we decided to have another go and I learnt that caramel goes very quickly from nice caramel to burnt caramel. So we decided to go on the side of caution and made caramel where you could still actually feel some of the sugar. It was way too gooey though and I couldn't put it in my icing gun and it was the biggest pain to do a picture with. Luckily I had Mr T to help me.

I used vanilla frosting from vctotw for the white parts though and that worked well, I then also made a blue outline using the vanilla frosting and blue food dye. And I used black writing icing for the nose and inside of the ears.

Probably the biggest problem apart from the caramel was the eyes, when I put the second layer of cake on top of the first layer cracked right down the middle where the eyes needed to go. So I piped some vanilla icing into the hap and then put the black eyes on but it just looked creepy so we played around with them so much that they still look kind of weird.

Still I'm kind of proud since it is my first decorated cake that I made with regular soft icing as opposed to marzipan even if it does look a little like a horse or some sort of other animal instead of a dog.

I really think I need to get some sort of cake decorating book or the women's day cookbook though to help out with the next one.

Taste wise, the chocolate cake was ok but I think I prefer her vanilla cake (without vinegar) and the caramel icing was kind of sickly sweet but that's just caramel, right?

Mr T's bike cake, or my most depressing baking day

I think maybe the universe is trying to tell me that I should stick to cupcakes, because I had issues with the scrabble cake, but the attempts for Mr T's birthday cake were almost heart breaking.

Mr T's had drinks to celebrate his birthday on sat night. A groups of our awesome friends had all financially contributed so that two friends could build him his very own bike. So I decided to bake him a bike cake to match his bike.

There doesn't appear to be many instructions online for bike cakes, so I just made it up. I decided to make the bike out of white icing and it was an absolute bitch to make. I had to redo the writing, wheels and several parts and when I tried to move it it kept falling apart even when it had hardened. But I eventually got it done, even if it looked a bit like a 10 year old did it.

1st cake attempt: I made an oreo cake using the vctotw recipe x 3. I baked two square cakes, put icing in the middle and all over the sides and had it looking pretty good and then tried to move the cake into a container and it all broke and fell to a thousand pieces, I wanted to cry because I had spent two evening and one whole day to get to this point and was running out of time. Around this time, all of my family members came over one by one, each seeing what had happened and tried the crumbly mess and told me how delicious it was. Which was great but at this stage I had started to make a different cake.

Failed cake #1 looked something like this:


For the second attempt I made a vanilla cake because it didn't require going to shops to get more oreos. I used kittee's vanilla cake recipe because I know she is a cake goddess. When it was in the oven, I thought something might be wrong because there was quite a strange smell. I had already made the icing though and thought maybe it was just me. So I iced it by cutting it half and put jam in the middle and then chocolate icing all over. The chocolate icing was awesome and surprisingly doesn't need any soy/rice milk. Anyway I then noticed that there was a tiny bit of cake that I could try, so I had it and realised that it tasted sour, I then realised that I must have put apple cider vinegar in it in place of the oil. So I had spent all day and then all evening making two failed cakes. I just wanted to crawl up in a ball and cry but had to go home to Mr T. I considered staying up to midnight to bake a third but just realised it was crazy. So I decided to take the iced cake to show him and everyone and explain that it wasn't really edible.


But somehow, with 24 hours and a hell of a lot of icing and jam it was edible. It still smelt weird but all the sweetness of the jam and icing seemed to compensate for the weird cake.

Here is the cake:




and here is the bike:

I think I need a rest from cake baking for a while :-)

Scrabble Cake

My friend Bec celebrated her birthday with a scrabble party and her boyfriend thought of making a scrabble cake. So I jumped at the challenge, I've never really decorated a themed cake before. It took us ages and I struggled a little with lots of small things like getting a proper red colour but am really pleased with the finished look. Her surname is hale in case you were wondering.

So how did I do it? I got white icing ruled off squares, and then used paint brushes to paint on food dye on to the squares and made tiles and a little holder out of the icing and stuck them on with a little bit of water. It sounds easier that it actually was though, well for the novice me. The dye kept leaking on to other squares, and even though I made a little diagram on which colours to paint where I stuffed up and I kept smudging the writing.

We made the scrabble board first and then made the cake on the day. We made the easy vegan choc cake and the chocolate frosting from vegweb. I wasn't overally impressed with either but that could just be our errors like overcooking the cake. The cake was moist but didn't seem sweet or chocolately enough and the icing was unlike any that I made before because it was cooked and the texture was a little like pudding. In the middle, we put mashmallow icing which I will discuss in more detail next.


The funny thing was Bec's sister turned up with a scrabble cake too.