Finishing a cake with buttercream petal icing

Although I work in a school, I'm not a teacher.  I teach cupcake decorating as a paid hobby, and really enjoy it - so was thrilled to be asked to demostrate a finishing technique to a senior class of Cake Decorating pupils in the Home Economics Department.

I thought I may as well make the cake fun to eat, so coloured the dough and attempted the zebra interior again, this time in pink and white.  I wasn't sure who exactly would eat it, but they may as well enjoy it, right?

I took the cake into school baked and cooled and with just the crumb coating on, to allow the pupils to see how I filled the piping bag and did the technique right from the start.  I was a little bit nervous, as though I recognised some of the students from previous years, I was in a different class with a different teacher - and very aware that my method of information delivery was not a qualified-by-the-general-teaching-council one...

Nonetheless, the pupils seemed eager to have a go themselves, as with the amount of practice I've had at this particular finish, it probably didn't look that difficult to them.  Until it was time to do it themselves - and didn't they do a great job?  These are 16-17 year olds who have had a term or two of cake decorating and were becoming more and more confident with their skills.  

We talked about how well they did, and if they didn't feel that they'd done as well, how they could fix that problem.

And when photographed from certain angles, no customer would notice the piping work that troubled them.

Hubby took the cake in to work the next day and by all reports it was demolished at morning tea and lunchtime!  So success all round I would say, wouldn't you?

Hubby remembered to take a photo of the interior for me, so I could see if the zebra pattern worked - I don't know, what do you think?  It's kinda hard to tell...  :)

Zebra print for Zoe, part deux

Zoe's mum is similar to me, in that she fully understands that a birthday is the perfect opportunity to go a little crazy and spoil your daughter with cake.  Lucky Zoe had a fabulous cake for her family party, and was having matching cupcakes for her friends party.  

I came across some Wilton Sugar Sheets in zebra print and thought they'd be the perfect match for her theme.  I had purposely kept back some of the purple sugarpaste that I'd used on her cake so that everything would match.

Happy birthday again Zoe!

Zebra print for Zoe, part 1

I don't normally tell you the names of people whom I write about, in order to protect their privacy.  I suppose I could just 'change their names to protect the innocent' like they do on tv or in magazine articles, but I never remember to do that.  However in this instance, I really hope Zoe doesn't mind me using her name - the alliteration between it and the requested zebra print was just too wonderful to pass up on.  

I had the privilege of doing Zoe's birthday cake last year, and was thrilled to be called on again.

This year her mother sent me an image, and asked if I could make a similar cake.  However the colours were to be different, as purple is Zoe's current favourite colour.  No problem I thought, as I'd really enjoyed making this type of bow on a cake, and was looking forward to trying a different style.  I had two options for making the zebra print, and had tried to do the type where you lay out a huge area of white sugarpaste, then lay the black on top and roll over the two to sort of flatten them both.  It kind of did and didn't work, but...

I'm pleased to report that Zoe was blown away by her birthday cake, and they all loved it!  Happy birthday big girl!!

Happy birthday to our darling Mini-2

Today is our darling daughter's birthday.  That'd be Mini-2 I'm talking about, as we're lucky enough to have two darling daughters (darling son is always loved, never forgotten, but not with us any longer).  Not always darlings, but always lucky to have them.  I had seen a really cool image of a decorated-by-a-child cake a few weeks ago that we all loved, so I bought the requisite food colour pens and was just waiting for the day.  I also wanted to try a couple of other new things, so found out her favourite colours from a limited selection and set to work.

The cake itself is a vanilla sponge with strawberry jam and orange coloured vanilla buttercream in the middle, but the cake is (hopefully) purple and white zebra striped.  Now, you'll see in a moment that their artwork is nothing like as good as the little girl in the above blogpost who decorated the other cake, but our girls had a lot of fun.  And isn't that what birthdays are all about?

The naked cake - you can see little brown marks underneath the white sugarpaste - that's the bigger chunks of Oreo cookies that I didn't macerate quite enough with the mortar and pestle ;)

 They look just like normal markers, don't they?  We'll have to be sure to keep these out of the art box

 You can see that the icing was too soft, by the deep indents made by the pens.  Ah well, lesson learned for next time.

Two very happy crafty girls!!

 

Zebra print inside the cake

As mentioned in a recent post, I had seen animal print effects inside cake and wanted to try it out.  And what better time than for family - they'd be more forgiving than a paying customer.  I had thought to do this as a surprise for Mini-2's birthday cake, because I was planning to cover it in white sugarpaste so the interior would be a surprise when the cake was cut.  

I had bought myself the newest Lorraine Pascal book, after watching and enjoying some of her tv series, and she had a recipe for the zebra print in there.  Hers was for vanilla and chocolate, and a larger cake tin than I had planned to use, so I ended up using my normal sponge mix and colouring half of it purple (well, I don't have black food colouring and that was Mini-2's preferred colour from a limited list of options). 

So here's how it goes.  You put a scoop of one colour into the tin, then directly on top you place the other colour.  There's no need to worry about exact placement because the second and subsequent scoops of mix displace the initial scoop so that it squashes outwards to fill the tin, as above.

Here you can see how I've scientifically scooped correct amounts each time, ha ha.  Looks good though, doesn't it?  However I came upon a slight problem - my mix wasn't scooped in large enough amounts, so that I didn't end up with perfect lines because of this.  I would probably need to double the amount of mix in each scoop to ensure that I stopped scooping when it looked like above, not had to continue to use up all the mix.

But the overall effect was pretty good for a first go, we thought.  Do you like it too?