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!)

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!

‘Tis the season … of the Walking Bread

 

Deck the halls with undead folly

Fa la la la la la la la la!

 

For this year’s advent I baked cute little gingerbread zombies. I used this recipe from bbcgoodfood.com for the dough, plus food colouring, royal icing and my beloved skulls-and-bones sprinkles.

 

     

     

     

 

 

Some of them are unhappy. I think it’s because they’re always hungry. That’s one of the things I would hate about being a zombie.

The ones who have just eaten tend to be a bit happier.

 

     

 

Also:

Black Sheep.

 

And:

zombie shark.

Because I can.

 

Don we now our slowly rotting apparel

Fa la la la la la la la la

Troll the ancient zombie carol

FA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!

Volcano Scenery Cake for Dissertation Origami Dinosaurs

This last weekend, we had a double-barrelled party. It is not usually my style to combine two occasions into one party; I am much more likely to have multiple parties for one and the same occasion of course!

But. Life is what happens to other people while you’re busy planning your cakes, as the old saying goes. Also, life gets in the way. Two and a half weeks ago, it was my birthday, but I was living la vida poca at the time and therefore couldn’t celebrate properly.

And then a second party occasion had unfolded in the meantime. I finished the work on my dissertation, which left me exhausted, confused, and in possession of about 700 pages of text printed for proofreading purposes.

What does one do with all that paper? Why, make origami dinosaurs of course!

Raptorus Dissertationis

 

Origamosaurus

 

And then you have to bake a cake volcano so they feel at home. Obviously.

The ground is a white chocolate sheet cake with a dark chocolate cream, green desiccated coconut for the grass and some blue vanilla pudding for the lake.

The volcano is a lovely courgette and hazelnut cake with chocolate icing and orange vanilla pudding lava. (E numbers are your friends, remember!)

 

Getting the volcano shape right proved too difficult for me, as you can see. But it takes all sorts, I have learned, and why shouldn’t this apply to volcanoes as well!?

On the plus side, I had bug-shaped sugar sprinkles to add some more (and also edible) wildlife:

All in all, a cake worthy of the occasions, methinks!

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!!