I love creating the perfect birthday cakes for family and friends; whether it’s making their favourite flavour or a “novelty” cake tied into their interest, it’s all great fun.  This year I attempted both for Dave’s birthday…

Our weekends often revolve around The Three Cs: comics, coffee and cake.  We all pile into the car on Sunday mornings and descend upon the two comic shops in town.  And then, gleefully clutching our purchases, we hit Costa for coffee and cake.  We all love our little ritual, especially Dave, so I decided to combine all three into his birthday cake.

I decided that a coffee and walnut cake “cup of coffee” would be fun, so baked the batter in a Pyrex bowl for the appropriate over-sized cup shape.  Once it was cooled, I split it into three layers, soaked each with some espresso syrup, filled with espresso buttercream and then covered the whole thing with some white fondant.  For some reason the fondant cracked like a bitch so I wound up having to add the gold detail to hide a truly hideous chasm.  The latte ‘art’ topping is espresso flavoured royal icing, and if you squint, it might just look like a heart.

Dave had recently written and published his first comic along with an artist friend of ours, The League of Analogues, so I thought that it would be fun to bake him an edible first edition.  After a lot of trouble I finally managed to get the front cover of the comic printed onto an icing sheet.  For variety I baked a deliciously moist chocolate cake and filled it with leftover espresso buttercream before covering with fondant and nervously applying the print.  I don’t think I wet the fondant enough as when we cut the cake the print was quite obviously sitting on top and it was supposed to bond to the fondant as though it had been painted on.  No matter, though.  It looked the part and Dave was delighted

As a finishing touch I covered the cake board with fondant and painted it to resemble a wooden table for the full coffee shop experience.  I tried to create little sugar packets but they didn’t turn out so well, so I just left well alone.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

When I discovered that December’s Daring Bakers challenge was to make a gingerbread house, I was thrilled!  I’ve wanted to make a gingerbread house for years and I’d actually planned to make one with Lucas this year.  (Admittedly I was going to buy Lucas a kit from IKEA for insant gratification!)

After much admiring of gingerbread houses on flickr I settled on using a pattern from Ultimate Gingerbread.  I splashed out on their Pearl House pattern, purely because it looked like my dream house!  Doesn’t everyone want a house with a turret?!?  Extravagant (and completely unnecessary), I know.  I printed off the pattern pieces and then invested a happy half an hour for sticking them to card and cutting them out.

I chose to use the recipe that Y posted from Scandinavian Baking by Beatrice Ojakangas (recipe available on Y’s site). I own this book, so it was very handy to be able to take a book into the kitchen.  I did modify it ever so slightly by adding 110g of light brown sugar for sweetness as a lot of people had complained it wasn’t tasty, and I also used 2tsp of ground cloves instead of 3tsp.  The dough wasn’t quite as fragrant, but it did mean that it was more kid-friendly. Cloves are quite fierce and I wasn’t sure that Lucas would appreciate them as much as me!

Despite reports of dry, troublesome dough on the Daring Bakers forum, I had no problems with the dough.  All three batches came together easily; it was supple and easy to handle; and it smelled and tasted great.  I chose to roll out the dough between sheets of clingfilm before chilling since it was butter-rich and bound to set up like a rock!  This also sped up cutting out the pieces of the house, all eleventy million of them!

It was only when I started cutting out the pieces that I realised how huge this house was going to be!!  I’d paid scant attention to the measurements when I’d cut out all the template pieces and now it was too late to shrink it down!  I was sorely tempted to downsize but decided to persevere in the end; I could always invite people over to eat it!

The first pieces to be cut and baked were those for the main roof and porch roof.  I then made small cardboard moulds, a bit bigger than the trimmed pieces, and assembled the cap roofs, using a heck of a lot of royal icing that I had left over from the sparkling snowflake cake.  Baking the rest of the pieces took ages.  I was beginning to lose the will to live when I suddenly realised that I was done. Hooray!  I then crushed up an entire bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints and used them to create clear ‘glass’ windows in the house.  The double-baking of the main walls made me feel a lot more comfortable about constructing the house later on!!

Compared to the tedium of baking loads of small pieces, decorating hardly took any time.  I did most of it on Monday when we found ourselves snowed/iced in.

I copied shamelessly from the sample pictures provided by Ultimate Gingerbread and piped pale pink royal icing siding on to my house.  Each window had white frames piped on and an evergreen garland underneath.  Shiny silver balls were dotted on to the upper corners of the frames which looked very pretty.  Finally I piped a gorgeous wreath on the front door and left everything to dry overnight.

Construction day dawned and I procrastinated like mad.  It just seemed too difficult, despite my earlier practice with the IKEA house!  I finally sucked it up and made a batch of white royal icing.

After laying out the main walls on my board (A1 foamcore sheet!), I piped a heavy bead of royal icing all around the bottom edge and the joining sides.  Then I stood up the back wall and propped it upright, inside and out, with a can.  From there, it was easy to get the remaining walls up and stuck properly.  I only left a can against them for five minutes and then they were stuck fast.  I reinforced the seams with plenty more royal icing and then moved on to making the bay window, then the leaning turret, and finally the right extension.  I let it dry overnight before enlisting Dave’s help to get the rooves on.

After all that, it just took an hour to ice the roofs and dress the board.  I wanted to make a little cluster of Christmas trees but I ran out of green royal icing so you can just see last year’s Christmas tree, planted out in the garden by the house’s occupants.  Dessicated coconut sprinkled over a smear of royal icing makes the snow look convincing, and I finished off by piping garlands around the porch supports and using flattened Jelly Tots as a welcome mat on the porch.  (Every gingerbread house needs some sweets, right?)

I want to say a BIG thank-you to Anna and Y for this fantastic challenge!  I had loads of fun making my house and I hope everyone else did too!

Merry Christmas!

I hope that each and every one of you, my readers, has a wonderful day.  Whether you’re celebrating with friends, family, or by yourself, may it be full of joy, fun, laughter, great presents and amazing food!

This gloriously festive stollen comes from the Christmas issue of BBC Good Food Magazine ‘08.  It was the cover recipe and looked so deliciously enticing that I just had to make it.

Unlike traditional stollen, this one incorporates jewel-like dried cranberries and jade-green pistachios.  It really is worth the bother of peeling loads of fiddly little nuts as they look so wonderful dotted through the crumb and scattered over the top of the finished stollen.  The cranberries also lend a slight sharpnes to the stollen which is quite refreshing and delicious, too.

It’s a welcome addition to any Christmas table and I’m sure that after one taste it’ll become a new family tradition.  Merry Christmas!

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This sparkling snowflake cake was my contribution to the Christmas Raffle at Lucas’s pre-school.  I was asked if I knew anyone who could make cakes, and without a shred of modesty I said, “That would be me!”  So having bigged myself up, I felt that I needed to make an extra-special effort which is why this cake is completely over the top and probably wouldn’t be out of place at a wedding.

I wanted to make a cake that would look like a snow shower, with glittery snowflakes  cascading down against a background of wintry ice blue; I love the Icy Christmas look and wanted to capture it in a cake.  So after sketching out a few ideas I set to work with  snowflake cutters, flower paste and edible glitter.

What really brings this cake together is the piping work.  I’ve long been an admirer of Mich Turner’s gorgeous piping work in her book Spectacular Cakes, and I quite fancied having a go.  So I piped some woefully uneven pearls around the base of each tier—I desperately need a turn table to bring cakes up to eye level, or perhaps I should just sit on the floor—and then started piping random pearls over the sides of the stacked tiers.  To get rid of any pointy ends I flattened them with a dab of my finger. (A small bowl of water and a cloth are very handy.)  It’s a very effective technique to have in your decorating arsenal and it’s really easy, too!

A Spoonful of Sugar has just passed its sixth anniversary!  It barely seems like a any time has passed since I typed up the fifth anniversary post.  It’s been a fun year… full of new food experiences and taste sensations.  I hope you’ll all join me for year seven!

“Hope you don’t mind… but I’ve… um… volunteered you to make a cake,” my friend Caz said.

It turned out that Caz had managed to draw the short straw of organising the “Guess the weight of the cake” competition for her school PTA Christmas Fair, and feeling somewhat panicked at the idea of doing the cake herself had volunteered me for the job.  Not that I minded, of course.  Cakes and me are best friends.

Christmas always equals fruit cakes, so my favourite “simmer and stir” recipe was a given.  Christmas puddings are always popular, too, so I decided to combine the two and make a Christmas Pudding shaped Christmas Cake!  Simples!

To make the appropriate shape, I baked the cake in a 2L Pyrex bowl.  I would have loved to bake it in a pudding basin, but I don’t have one and was very shocked to discover that they cost almost £10 in Sainsburys!!  Lining the bowl was pretty tedious to say the least.  I broke out a tape measure and measured the internal height of the bowl, along the curved side if that makes sense and then cut a sheet of parchment 6 inches bigger so that it would have sufficient height in case of unexpected rising.

All you need to do next is butter the bowl, press the parchment into it and then make a series of cuts down the paper leaving an untouched circle about 2″ wide in the middle of the bowl.  I made cuts every inch or so and tucked and pressed the parchment in place.  After a lot of grumbling I ended up with a beautifully lined bowl and very buttery fingers.  I also completely forgot to take a picture of this masterpiece—sorry!

Make the cake as usual but decrease the oven temperature by 5C because glass conducts heat very well.  I took no chances and placed the filled bowl on a baking sheet before it went into the oven as I was paranoid about it shattering.  The one change I made was to leave pouring the extra brandy (or rum, in this case) over the hot cake as that would definitely have shattered the bowl.  I brushed that all over the cake once cold and fed it a similar amount of booze a couple of times before it was time to decorate.

For this cake I pre-prepared the Christmassy mouse and the holly leaves to ensure they’d be rock hard by the time I needed them.

You don’t need to buy special holly cutters, and if you do want to, I suggest buying them in the summer when there isn’t a massive rush for them!!  I had a couple from years ago, but had managed to lose the biggest cutters.  So instead I cut out ovals of modelling paste (50:50 blend of sugar paste and flower paste, strong, tastes decent and more pliable to work with) coloured a darkish green and scalloped the edges with the end of a piping tip until it looked right.  Draw in the veining with a knife and you’re done.  I dried the leaves over crumpled bits of foil to give them more shape.

The mouse was more difficult, but still relatively straightforward.  I used the same modelling paste recipe and coloured it cream.  The instructions I followed are from “The Essential Guide to Cake Decorating” but any mouse tutorial you find online would be fine.  My biggest tip here is that sugar glue is your friend.  Much better and stronger than water for sticking models together.  I am a complete convert!  After I modelled the mouse, I stuck in wire whiskers and allowed it to dry before painting.  I’ve got to say that I’m really proud of my little mouse!  I did intend to have him holding a Christmas card or carol singing sheet, but in the end I thought he was just perfect on his own.

In comparison to making the mouse and holly leaves, assembling the rest of the cake was really easy.  Apricot glaze, marzipan. Let dry. Rum, dark brown fondant. Let dry.  Glue on white splat-shaped sugar paste to make the sauce/cream on top of the pud and try your best to remove all the icing sugar that’s dripped everywhere.  Glue on blobs of black sugar paste to represent raisins.  Move to covered board and stick down with royal icing or sugar glue. Glue on holly leaves, holding each leaf in place until set.  (If necessary, stick a holly berry underneath to hold the leaf up.  The finishing touch is to roll some red sugar paste (or flower paste if you have some pre-dyed) into balls and stick them in place.  To really gild the lily, glaze the holly berries with a little piping gel.

And there you have it!  A Christmas Pudding Christmas Cake!!

Making birthday cakes for Lucas and Dave are two of the highlights of my baking year.  It’s really important to me that everyone has just the right birthday cake, whether it’s a complete surprise or an begged for cake.  I remember Mum making the birthday cakes of our dreams every year, so I happily carry on that tradition with Lucas.

Last week Lucas turned three and as he is a dinosaur-obsessed little boy, he asked for a dinosaur cake.  A few days later he said that he wanted a bouncy dinosaur cake, sending me into hysterical visions of carving a cake out of jelly and buttercreaming the whole thing!  Thankfully he eventually settled on a non-bouncy Triceratops cake.

I carved two double-chocolate pound cakes (1kg loaf, 1.5kg loaf) into the requisite shape, leaving a ledge all around the base to add grass, giving the impression that Triceratops was walking along happily.  The bulk of the detail was in the face, so I spent quite a lot of time making sure everything was symmetrical.  Little sausages of fondant glued on with buttercream were really helpful for making the face more realistic—that’s how I made the ridge above the eyes and added a bit more shape to the face.  The horns were made from cream flowerpaste that I allowed to harden before attaching.  The frill was really important to get right so I measured around the neck and cut out a strip of fondant/flowerpaste (50/50 blend) and pinched it into the right shape. After it had dried for a while I glued it in place and propped it with some wadded up kitchen paper.  The finishing touch was to pipe some tufts of grass all the way around Triceratops and randomly across the board.

Judging from Lucas’s reaction, it was a total hit!  I added the baby T-rex from his favourite bedtime book “Say Hello to the Dinosaurs” to the board and made a dinosaur nest  to complete the Cretaceous Period look.  (I love to decorate the cake board to set off the cake, it makes such a difference.)

This cake was such fun to put together and much easier than I’d anticipated!  It’s by no means perfect but I’m improving all the time and Lucas loved it which is all that really matters.  Speaking of the birthday boy, here he is in his alter ego of Batman!

Happy birthday, wee man. Mummy loves you!

Happy St. George’s Day, everyone!!

St. George is the patron saint of England—of George and the dragon fame—and his cross forms the flag of England.  It’s only in recent years—as far as I, as a Scot, can tell—that people have wanted to celebrate St. George’s day, so there isn’t really a traditional celebratory meal.  So, to help celebrate… here are some double-vanilla St George’s day cupcakes!

Spending three days making a birthday cake is my idea of a good time.

You can’t beat sitting down and having a really good think about what sort of cake someone might like.  What sort of things they like to do, eat, listen to, whatever…  My brainstorming session was actually pretty short this time as I stumbled over a set of dessert (Rice Krispie) sushi on Flickr and ye olde neurons in my brain woke up and started firing.  Dave loves sushi and I knew he’d be really amused by the idea of sushi that was actually a cake.

Oh yes, I should probably have mentioned earlier… it’s Dave’s birthday cake! Happy Birthday, Dave!

I spent some quality time with Google and eventually decided to push the boat out and make an adaptation of the ultra-realistic sushi cake from The Confetti Cakes Cookbook by Elisa Strauss. For once, the library came up trumps with a copy of the book, so I saved a little money which I then ploughed straight back into cake decorating equipment.  After years of saying “I must pick up an offset spatula,” I now own one!  And I have a fondant-smoother which is just awesome.  Ridiculously simple in design for the amount it cost, but the results are oh-so worth it.

I loved making this cake.  I made the little soy sauce bowl and the chopsticks last weekend to allow them as much time as possible to dry and I painted the cake board on Tuesday.  Yes, painted.  How I cursed as I laboriously drew out the grid on the fondant.  First my pencil was too sharp and dug into my beautifully smoothed surface and then I discovered that my ruler was too short, so I wound up using the side of a cereal box.  Note to self: buy long, metal ruler for next cake.  Still… it doesn’t look too bad from a distance!

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…your husband offering to cook you anything you want for Valentine’s Day.

I’ve never been one for going out on Valentine’s Day.  For one thing, prices suddenly go up up up.  For another… being surrounded by loads of couples billing and cooing at each other, does absolutely nothing to create romantic feelings in me.  So I was thrilled by Dave’s very sweet proposition.

My first stop were my collection of Weight Watchers cookbooks, but when Dave caught me, they were firmly set aside as this was a special occasion and I could spare the calories.  That was me told, then.  So I flicked through book upon book, discarding recipes as being either too mean to inflict upon him or too every-day.  And then this month’s Delicious magazine dropped through the letterbox.

There, in handy serves 2 proportions, was a menu full of food that we both love.  Scallops, pancetta, steak, mushrooms.  Perfect!  My only change was to swap the suggested vanilla panna cotta for an Italian chocolate trifle from the next menu, as what is Valentine’s without chocolate?

My part of the deal was simple.  Leave Dave to it (and buy a nice present). And this was way harder than it might sound.  My natural inclination when I smell food is to gravitate in its direction, and I find it hard to resist offering advice.  So I wound up tucking myself into bed and reading Batman R.I.P. in an effort to avoid being tempted to interfere.

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Over the last few weeks whenever I’ve mentioned that I was planning a Burns Supper, I’ve been met with a host of blank looks. As a proud Scot, this left me quite flabbergasted on a number of occasions, especially when talking to people who have actually lived in Scotland or are half-Scottish.

So, what is a Burns Supper?  A Burns Supper is traditionally held on (or as close as is practical) to Burns Night, which is on the 25th of January each year.  Burns Night and the celebratory Burns Supper are held to celebrate the life of Robert (Rabbie) Burns, the national poet of Scotland.  Still none the wiser?  He’s the bloke who wrote Auld Lang Syne.  You know… “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and ne’er brought tae mind“?

Burns was born on the 25th of January 1759 which makes this the 250th anniversary of his birth, and thus a rather special Burns Night.  It seemed fitting that this year, of all years, we should make a bit more of a fuss and invite friends round to celebrate with us.

I’ve organised quite a few traditional Burns Suppers in my time, and I knew that the full-on event just wouldn’t work in a dinner party setting.  A traditional Burns Supper is a rather formal affair, with many toasts, speeches and poetry readings.  For the speeches to work, everyone needs to be in a bawdy and raucous state.  And let’s face it… few people are going to get up and read poetry at the dinner table unless they’re being egged on by all their drunken mates

So, we decided to make things much more casual, and instead of speeches and toasts I explained to our friends G & S all about Rabbie Burns and why we have Burns Suppers.  Which was jolly nice.

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