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… :)

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!)

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*

 

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.

New Year’s Monsters for Good Luck

Happy New Year!

If you haven’t spent most of January asleep and/or hungover, I don’t want to be you.

So the new year has now finally officially begun in monsterbake land, and this is why it’s time to post the monster cakes I baked for New Year’s Day.

In the German-speaking world, it’s custom to give people little pigs for good luck on New Year’s Eve, and to regift the ones you’ve received on the first days of the new year. This year, however, I spent New Year’s Day with such nice people that I really wanted to bake good-luck charms especially for them.

Problem: I cannot bake little pigs for good luck. Or for love or money.

So instead I did what I do best I am less rubbish at. I baked monster cakes. Little monsters with a hint of orange, and dark and white chocolate decoration.

If your new year hasn’t started with little monster cakes, I really don’t want to be you. :-Þ

Have a monster 2016 everybody!!

Backen für Wacken II / Wacken baking 2015

By very vocal demand of a single person, I had to bake poppyseed cake for this year’s Wacken Open Air again. Last year’s seems to have gone down even better than I’d thought! :D

This year, however, I made muffins rather than a sheet cake for logistics reasons.*

Unfortunately, I did not have the time for intricate poppyseed cake decoration this time, so I made use of my lateste acquisition: food colouring pens!

In theory, you can use them to draw and write on your food without a problem.

In practice, sugar icing will break if your drawing and writing is not exquisitely tender. In addition, the colour will bleed out and blur a little over night, so you should have taken the pictures just when you were done decorating the muffins. Grrrr.

 

* Our driver banned fresh fruit or vegetables, as well as cakes, from his car, because he says neither are Heavy Metal. This is rubbish, of course. If these muffins are not Heavy Metal, I don’t know what is! \m/ So, anyway, I had to pack the muffins into boxes to pass his luggage inspection and smuggle the muffins on board.

As is usually the case when I break the rules, it was definitely worth it! The muffins got our gang through some very tough and very muddy times at the festival!

Big Hairy Spider Cake for my most favourite arachnophobe’s birthday

 

It was a very special day yesterday. I do love birthdays, or any occasion for a party, as long as I have a say in the guest list. But of course my man’s birthdays are always especially special! :)

Now this man of mine happens to be a serious arachnophobe. The only thing he might fear more is having to get up early in the morning.

I want you, dear reader, to believe me that I baked this cake in order to alleviate his phobia. Because it would be really cool if somebody believed that!

 

 

The mouse in its almondibles (hee!) was a last-minute flash of inspiration; I think it’s a very nice detail. For a given value of nice, of course.

As for the cake, it’s a chocolate cake with a cherry and cream filling and chocolate frosting, not quite a Black Forest gateau, but a bit of a Black Forest wannabe. :) I cut the cake twice, horizontally, right as it came out of the oven. Then I put the top layer into a big bowl lined with cling film in order to get the shape of the spider body.

The rest is history. And lots and lots of chocolate.

 

 

Flowery Apricot & Coconut Roulade

 

 

 

Yesterday was not a good day. By the later afternoon, I was seriously annoyed with … well, everything.

This everything included the fact that I had not tackled any serious baking projects in a while, and with a special birthday coming up, I felt I really needed to get into the game again!

Among the things I had never made before were roulades, mostly because I am not a big fan of them myself. But, well, somebody likes them…

The other reason to make a roulade was the cake pattern thing I’d read about. I am not sure you can see it in my pictures, but the flowers are not on top of the roulade but baked into the cake instead. What you do is make a very small batch of batter, add food colouring, pipe shapes onto baking parchment, freeze it, and then pour the regular batter on top of the frozen batter pattern.

 

 

 

 

I think the shapes turned out quite nicely. A tad too cute for my taste, but what can you do!? ;)

I did not want to use cream for the roulade filling because of current temperatures, so I made a sort of coconut pudding and added apricots. I think the combination works rather well.

Did my mood improve when I made the roulade, you ask? Well, food colouring usually helps. :D

Little Green Monster Cake

The best thing about a February Friday the 13th in a non-leap year is, of course, that there is another Friday the 13th coming right up!

I had about a thousand grand ideas — well, two. But hey, that’s not too bad!

And in any case, the universe, it seems, was not too excited about me having my way. Which is strange because it should have learned by now that only good things ever happen when I have my way…

Long story short, the only really nice thing that came out of my Friday the 13th baking was this little green monster cake. It’s a white chocolate cake with melted white chocolate, green food colouring and candy eyes :)

The rest of the cake had to be turned into a trifle, and the little green monster cake sat on top of the bowl. Resting on heap of crushed fellow monsters. That’s how I like them.

 

PS: Due to special circumstances, no St-Patrick’s-Day baking happened this year over here at Monsterbake. But since I am so late posting all this, the little green monster cake should count for both!

Fischbrötchen-Kuchen

I call this preemptive cultural acclimatisation:

as the leaving dos continue, I have moved on, mentally at least, to my new city, which is famous for concert halls under construction – and fish sandwiches.

So being preemptive as usual, I have baked Fischbrötchen-Kuchen, fish sandwich cakes.

They are easy to make: you simply take

 

diminutive breads (= Brötchen)

 

and fish (biscuits)

 and then add ersatz tartar sauce (i.e. white chocolate cream cheese cream) –

and you get

Fischbrötchen!