Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Easter basket…

This is my Easter Bunny Shark, and I absolutely love her. :)

I am not going to complain about how hard life has been because we’ve been really lucky, with our safe jobs and safe home and very few cases of illness among our friends and families. But I am at the same time going to use the pandemic as part of my excuse why I haven’t been baking. It’s just so much less fun without any people to feed around.

So, anyway, I hope you’ve had a happy Easter, as much as this is possible!

We had a massive Easter brunch yesterday, just this one household of ours, with enough food to get us into trouble if there had been police checks on the distancing rules… Who would have believed we weren’t expecting a big group of guests?

My personal highlight was the Easter Bunny Shark Cake:

After last year’s Easter Bunny Dino Cake, it should come as no surprise!

The shark is an iced biscuit with white chocolate details and a sugar eye. She lives on top of one of my most favourite cakes ever: double poppy-seed & apple.

I do love a cake without a lot of cream or frosting, and I really think this one doesn’t need it at all, but the Easter Bunny Shark needed something to swim in, and the other part of my household loves the cream cheese frosting, so there I went. :)

Speaking of going: I am going to get another slice… :)

Beerthday Cake

Happy Birthday to my favourite beer drinker in the world! :D

We couldn’t go and a have birthday drinks at our local micro brewery’s taproom as we had planned because … well, it’s 2020 and therefore all your plans are laughable.

But we still had beer. And cake. So yay!

It is a chocolate & stout cake (Nigella’s recipe), slightly adapted because I will never be able to follow instructions and I LIKE ME LIKE THIS. And I didn’t use the topping, obviously, but dark and white chocolate.

For the crown cap I used silvery sugar sprinkles, which worked better than anticipated. Take that, 2020!

I like to think that my cake contributed to an overall fun birthday for my man, and we are appropriately groggy today. We appear to be old enough now that this is a good sign. Now excuse me while I go and lie down for a bit.

Easter Bunny Dino Cake

For reason that need no explanation, obviously, this year’s Easter decoration theme in our house is dinosaurs dressed as Easter Bunnies.

So if I was going to make a cake, of course it would have to go with that theme as well.

Please meet:
Easter Bunny Dino!

She’s a biscuit Bunny Dino, made from one of my absolute favourites among my grandmother’s recipes.

I used a dinosaur biscuit cutter, cut the ears out with a small knife and then pinched the dough together, and it worked (almost) perfectly.

(Yes, I did make four bunny dino biscuits, and yes, only two of them survived the baking and icing process. Still: result!)

My Easter Bunny Dino lives on a yoghurt & apple cake, where she is very pleased with her Haribo Easter eggs.

And with the fact that she is an awesome green Easter Bunny Dino!

Of course.

PS: This has been so satisfying, finally baking a cake like this again, and blogging about it (even though I still find fairly little to say about my cakes than most other bloggers…) I shall try and keep it up! (Please don’t mistake this for a promise though!)

Gasp!

Has it really been more than a year since I last posted!? I am shocked.

Not that I don’t know that I haven’t baked anything blog-worthy in a while but …

There is only one possible explanation for this. I am getting old and boring and unimaginative in my baking.

Or I am lacking baking occasions. Second possible explanation.

Or life keeps getting in the way.

I should stop counting my possible explanations.

Anyway. If you’ve missed me: sorry! I am planning something for this weekend, so there may be a new post coming up.

HePPY NeW YEuAr!

Just before New Year’s Eve, as I was trying to plan our dinner with friends (grown-ups, so I felt I had to respect their special needs in terms of the absence of blood and gore when it comes to their food … SIGH!), I learned that the U.N. have declared 2019 the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. (It’s true!)

I thought this should be the cake theme.

(2019 is also UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages which would have been cool as a theme, too, but that would have required some research, and I didn’t have enough time. Grrr.)

And then I realised that a periodic-table-of-chemical-elements cake would be a lot of work.

I don’t like a lot of work.

(Nah, that’s not entirely true. At least not when it comes to baking. But I was preparing a rather big fancy dinner which was going to keep me busy in the kitchen for a whole day anyway.)

So I decided to incorporate the theme in a different way.

Step 1: an orange quark cake. (Quark! Get it!? Hee!)

Step 2: Periodic table bunting.

I had to cheat a bit because the letters used in the periodic table were not accommodating (which I find quite rude, to be frank!)

So … HePPY NeW YEuAr, everybody!
May the periodic table of chemical elements be with you.

Gin & Tonic Cake for a Big Birthday

 

It was my friend Anne’s 30th birthday yesterday, and for some reason she decided not to hide in a hole to contemplate her old age but opted for a celebration instead. Each to their own, I say!

As our friendship is largely – not solely, but still – based on drinking G&T together, I thought it was the perfect occasion to bake this cake. I’d found the recipe on BBC GoodFood, as ever one of my go-to places for new recipes.

But I added a twist: rather than deciding not to follow the instructions exactly, this time round I simply … screwed up a little bit. Because I am subconsciously creative like that.

As a consequence, the texture was not ideal. But I was really pleasantly surprised that the cake actually tasted somewhat of Gin & Tonic! And I loved how a number of people at the party were really confused by a cake with cucumber decoration. :D

I am definitely going to make this cake again, although I am not a massive fan of the icing. I didn’t use all of it, and I still thought it was bit much, and a bit too sweet. Maybe I’ll experiment with cream-cheese based stuff the next time.

…

This is the point where I’ve run out of mildly interesting things to say. I hate having to come up with closing words.
Er…

Hang on, I’ll think of something in a moment …

 
*scarpers*

 

Star Wars Day 2017 – Vader Beetroot Brownies

May the Fourth Be with You!

Star Wars Day 2017 – Asparagus Lightsabre Tartelette

 

Happy Star Wars Day!

Spring Flower Meadow with Anthill Cake

I am late blogging my spring cake!

…

But then, spring is late too, so screw that.

Anyway! I baked a spring cake. A Spring Flower Meadow Cake with Anthill, to be more precise:

It’s a white chocolate chip cake with a cream cheese icing, green coconut and marzipan flowers.

I made it for my friends at work. One of which is a bit complicated. They are all a bit complicated, to be honest, and I can be frank about this. Because none of them read my blog. :D

Anyway, one of the Intended Cake Recipients is complicated in terms of coconut. So I had to find a reason to include a bit of meadow without any grass.

The only sensible solution:
an anthill!

I loved that I got to use my wonderful bug sugar sprinkles again.

That’s all. I’ve done it. I blogged my spring cake.
The ball’s in your court, spring.

Happy 2017!

Happy New Year, everybody!

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions but I believe in cheese bites with poppyseed numbers on them.

This year, let’s continue to bake the world a better weirder place!