I am allowed to (finally!)* blog about this because even though no baking ingredients or oven are involved, it is still a baking-related project. And it’s homemade and everything! :) (And I make the decisions what goes on this blog and what doesn’t anyway. Hah. ;)
Husband and myself made our very own cake stand. I’d wanted to own one for a long time but I must admit that they always seemed too pricey in the end. Or I was too lazy in the end. Or something in the end. Fact is, I never bought one. Which is good, as it turns out, because when we were inspired to make our music-themed cake stand we didn’t have to throw a store-bought one out to make space! :)
Here’s a little making-of picture story for you – click on any picture to start the slide show:
* We actually made the cake stands way back in early January. Notice the plural? One was given to our music-loving friend for his birthday. Is it too much if I say it was an awesome present? Because I really think it was! ;)
You should know by now that I am a woman of refined taste. Especially, might I say, when it comes to cinema. I only watch really artistic films; life’s too short for anything less than … say …
LAKE PLACID!
For the uninitiated: shame on you. Watch this trailer and then go and buy the DVD so you can watch the whole film. Do it. Now.
So yes, this year’s feature cakes for our birthdays were actual feature cakes: creature feature cakes. :D I had more fun making them than should be allowed to have! :)
This cake’s a courgette cake, a family recipe and one of my all-time favourites. It’s very moist and lovely and slightly cinnamony. Yum. The croc is a toy, lazy me did not carve one out of marzipan or so … And the lake is made from water, sugar, food colouring and lots of gelatine. Not an easy feat for somebody with my capacity for patience but I pulled myself together and everything worked out nicely in the end!
However! Crocs are obviously not the only creatures who eat humans on the big screen.
Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, behold
SHARKTOPUS
Again, if you don’t know Sharktopus, your life is not as cool as it ought to be. Trust me. You know that you want to watch it.
The sharktopus is a vanilla biscuit rather than a cake but it looks cool and it’s yummy, AND it’s deadly on both ends! :D
I used my shark biscuit cutter and my octopus biscuit cutter for these cool little creatures, then cut off the biscuit dough shark tails and octopus heads and stuck the rest together before baking. A slightly tedious job, but it helps if you giggle maniacally.
You and whose army? – Me and my sharktopus army!
The third creature feature baking project was actually where the original idea for this theme came from. Last year I baked a snake cake together with a friend, so the only logical next step was …
Snakes on a Plane!
It’s actually called “Enough is enough cake” because I’m cool like that, dropping famous film quotes and all. :)
The plane is a lemon tray bake with LOTS of lemon sugar icing and seriously unyummy rice paper for the windows – but it was the right colour, and I think the taste is not strong enough to spoil the cake.
I baked a cocoa and coconut cake for the snakes and covered them in white chocolate cream cheese icing with lots and lots of added food colouring.
Right, that’s it for today. I’m off to plan next year’s birthday cakes… ;) All that’s left to say is:
For our birthday party on Saturday, I baked two different kinds of fairy cakes for grown-ups:
For the cappuccino cakes I used this recipe from BBC Good Food. I love coffee-flavoured cakes, and this is one of my favourite ones. And even people who don’t like coffee have told me that the cakes are nice! (And they’re weren’t just being polite. My friends don’t do polite. ;)
The mascarpone cream behaved strangely but I liked that the cakes looked all shiny, and I’ve used the leftover way-too-liquid cream to make cappuccino ice cream. Win-win! :D
The other cakes are cashew & lime. I adapted a recipe from a German cookbook. The original recipe is for pistachio cakes but I decided to make cashew ones because part of me just cannot bear to follow instructions. It’s a personal trait that doesn’t always make dealing with me very easy – but at least it also leads to yummy cakes!
Cashew & Lime Fairy Cakes
Ingredients (for about 16 cakes)
90 g cashews
250 g softened butter
140 g sugar
140 g flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp Greek yoghurt
2 eggs
4 tbsp lime juice
200 g icing sugar
zest of 1 lime
Method
Grind/chop/foodprocessorwhiz your cashews as much as you can. (It helps to project all your anger onto the cashews. If you don’t have that much anger, call me. I will be happy to help! ;) Then mix them together with 125 g butter, sugar, flour, baking powder and the Greek yoghurt. Beat your eggs a little (again, depending on your anger level), then stir them into the rest of your cake batter until combined. Spoon your batter into your muffin tin/muffin liners. Bake at 180°C for 20 – 25 minutes.
For the topping, beat the remaining 125 g softened butter together with the lime juice until light and fluffy. Sift in the icing sugar and beat some more. Add the zest and stir well. Spread or pipe your topping onto your cakes; then eat at least one immediately before your friends devour them all!
It was my birthday yesterday, and I spent it the best way I could think of: baking. :D
It’s husband’s birthday today, and we’re having a party tonight. It has become a kind of tradition that for our birthdays, we’re forcing our respective circles of friends to sit together in one room. :D But we’re also providing large quantities of food and alcohol, so most of them cope with the situation quite well – and do come back the next year, so I’m assuming it’s not that bad for them. :)
And I must admit that this party is also one of, if not the baking highlight of the year for me. I have been planning the birthday cakes for MONTHS. Obsessed? Me? Nah. I’ve started work on my list of Christmas presents for this year. It’s all quite normal, I can assure you!
So I have baked grown-up, respectable cakes for my grown-up, respectable friends.
And I have baked … other cakes. For my other* friends. :D
I really hope the pictures turn out well; I can’t wait to show them to you! Wheeee!
Yeah, let’s talk some more about food photography, why don’t we. This picture does NOT do the cake justice. Not. At. All. Cutting it up and taking picture of a slice of cake would be a much better option but it’s for my friend and I can’t give her a cake with a piece missing. (Nobody would ever believe me that it was for photography purposes; they know me too well for that!) And call me undedicated to my blog but I don’t want to bake another cake just so I can take a nice picture.
So this is what you get. An underwhelming picture of an overwhelming cake, if I may say so myself! I baked this cake for my friend whose birthday I missed because I was knocked out by a mean jetlag. Yes, that was more than a month ago but I like to think it was worth the wait! :) It’s an lovely orange cake with poppyseeds and a fairly decadent chocolate sauce. Yum.
I printed the recipe off of the BBC Good Food website a while ago but it does not seem to be on there anymore. Shame! Guess I will have to give it to you on here because you definitely want to make this cake. And you want to eat this cake. And then you want to make and eat some more of it!
Orange and Poppyseed Cake with Chocolate Sauce
Ingredients
250 g softened butter
200 g sugar
3 eggs
250 g flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
juice and zest of 2 oranges
50 g poppyseeds
100 ml double cream
100 g chopped chocolate or chocolate chips
Method Grease a 20 cm cake tin.
Beat 200 g of butter and all the sugar in a large bowl until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beat well. Sift in flour and baking powder, and again beat well. Add the orange juice and zest as well as the poppyseeds and give the whole thing another good beating. Then spoon the mixture into your cake tin and bake at 180° C for 50 minutes.
Let the cake cool in the tin and make the chocolate sauce in the meantime: heat the double cream in a small pan. Take it off the heat and add the remaining 50 g butter and the chocolate (chips). Let sit for one minute, then give it a very good stir until everything is blended really well. Let cool until your cake is nice and cool, then spread it all over the top of it. If there is some sauce left, eat it with a big spoon and don’t hold back if you feel like groaning in enjoyment of all the chocolatey goodness!
You know, food photography is not easy. This is something I know from my own experience, and yes, I am aware that a number of photos on this blog also bear witness to this fact, thankyouverymuch. To be honest, I have had posts that never saw the light of day because I didn’t want to blog about something I’d baked without a picture – but neither did I want to publish really horrible photos. (You have NOT seen the really horrible ones, believe you me.) It bugs me that delicious food can look absolutely disgusting in a picture.
So it’s nice when you’ve got something that’s supposed to look a bit gross anyway. Kinda sorta like when you bake…
… intestines!
It’s a puff pastry strudel sort of thing with a hazelnut and chocolate filling, and the blood is red food colouring. Although I guess I could have used raspberry or strawberry jam as well. In any case, I’ve been told that it tasted nice.
For 15 monsterbake points, guess whether I baked this for our horror film group! :)
Now all that’s left to do is give you the link to the blog I got the idea from: The Knead for Speed. Here you go. That’s it from me for today. Good fight, good night!
Monsterbake 