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!!

Are you in Halloween mood yet?

What do you mean, I’m late? Monsterbake is never late. Or early. She blogs just when she intended to.

Or something like that.

 

In fact, it’s been so long since this cake was made, and consumed, that I cannot remember what kind of cake it was at all.

I can tell you it had chocolate icing.

And little sugar skulls and bones.

Not bad, eh?

 

Ah, Halloween. Don’t you just love it?

 

Happy holidays! :)

Evil Lemon Shark

This is not a blog post which is going to be filed in the category ‘cute’.

For the shark is eeeeeeeeeeeevil. – I hope you can see that! :)

I realised the other day that the one cake I’d never made for my film group mates is a proper shark cake. How could I have let this happen!?

So I baked another lemon shark. It’s a light lemon sponge cake with lemon sugar icing, and this time I used chocolate for the face.

Sadly, we didn’t watch a shark film but an Italian 80’s zombie film instead. So bad it was serious fun. :)

Black & white sesame seeds cake with honey

GRRRRRRRR.

I’ve just spent literally minutes (!) writing my blog entry about my black & white sesame seeds cake with honey, and then something went wrong and now everything I’ve written is gone and I am annoyed.

I refuse to write another lovely blog entry. I’ve used up all my loveliness for today. (For this month, actually!)

I like black sesame seeds, though. They look cool, and they are almost as dark as my soul.

Brain Cakes

Yesterday was the third (!) Friday the 13th this year, and the second one we “celebrated” in our film group. We watched Friday the 13th Part 2, of course. Yay for Eighties tackiness! :)

After my first Friday the 13th cake earlier this year, it was obvious I had to bake another theme cake. Also: I wanted to. :)

The white chocolate cream cheese topping I made for my strawberry fromage frais muffins inspired me to make brains. I thought the texture of the stuff was perfect, and with the help of a little black food colouring I hoped I could get a nice brain hue. :)

The cakes, both for the bases and the brains, are simple sponge cakes. I added a dash of rum, some melted caramel chocolate and chopped crunchy caramel sweets. Yum.

I baked two small round cakes and two small hemispherical cakes. The bases were covered with dark chocolate. I am quite pleased with the look of the chocolate dripping down the sides of the cakes and the pools at the bottom. Try not to think of congealed blood. :)

Piping on the brains was not an easy feat, and I am not one hundred percent satisfied. But I never am. So. Meh. (Wow, I am so eloquent today!)

No, all in all the cakes looked brainy enough. And my mates liked them, and all the cake was gone rather quickly. Result, I say! :)

Cheeseburger Cakes

Two occasions this weekend: it was zombie film night last night, and it’s a friend’s birthday today. We needed manly man cakes! :)

I have this really cute little baking tin which makes a tiny round cake for two people or four people who want really small slices (or one me!) :) – and the other day a very sizeist (!) person mistook one of those cute little cakes for a hamburger. Grrrr.

On the plus side, this incident inspired me to make burger cakes.

The buns are regular light sponge cakes with some sesame seeds sprinkled on top. For the meat burgers, I baked smaller cocoa sponges and covered them with a mixture of melted dark and hazelnut chocolates.

Marzipan (and some food colouring) was used for the cheese slices. Then I cut up some jelly sweets for the salad/cucumbers and tomatoes. Finally, I made some white chocolate ganache, coloured it with food colouring, and thus it became mustard.

I am very much in love with the result, I must admit. May have to make them again some time!

UEFA Euro baking: St George’s Cross Victoria sandwich

Well, what can I say. You should not be surprised that I am rooting for England in tonight’s match. Not that I don’t like the Swedes, but in this case – sorry guys. If it’s any consolation, I will be baking lots of Swedish stuff for next year’s Eurovision Song Contest party! :D

I had  considered making shortbread for my England-themed UEFA Euro baking but I just loved the idea of the strawberry cross on top of the Victoria sandwich too much. BBC GoodFood did a similar thing for their Jubilee-themed cake; this is where I stole the idea got the inspiration from.

For the uninitiated: the classic Victoria sandwich consists of two layers of light sponge cake with whipped or vanilla cream and raspberry or strawberry jam in the middle.

It’s the first time I made one, and I think the sponge has turned out alright. However, there’s waaay too much filling. This cake will be no fun to cut up and serve. I’ll have one of my mates do that. :)

Old: Snake Cake

My friend’s son’s birthday is coming up – and that’s reminded me that I never posted any pictures of the cake that we made for him last year! Shocking!

My friend John and I spent a dreary grey rainy day in the kitchen and this was the result. That was also the day when we first came up with the idea of a Snakes on a Plane Cake. Good times! :)

If I remember correctly, the snake was a vanilla sponge with a strawberry cream filling. The skin was white chocolate cream, I think; the eyes were marshmallows with chocolate dots. Yum.

That’s-No-Moon Cakes for Star Wars Day

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU!

A while back, I saw this baking mould, and the second thing I thought was, “Ooh! Pretty mini cakes!” – Because the first thing was, “DEATH STAR CAKES!”

So I bought the baking mould and I have made some pretty mini cakes – but of course I have been waiting for today to finally put it to the use that the Force wants me to put it to. :)

For Star Wars Day, I have bullied my zombie film group into watching the trilogy with me. (There are only three Star Wars films in my world. As far as I am concerned, no prequels exist. And neither do remastered versions of the original films.) So, I am baking cakes for the group again.

One thing you should know about my film group mates: like the manly men they are, they are deeply in love with unhealthy foods. It was only last week that they all agreed that any delicious kind of food could be improved by deep-frying it. And then they discussed whether something deep-fried could be improved by deep-frying it a second time.

So when I saw this recipe for a mayonnaise cake, I immediately thought of them. I personally find mayonnaise quite disgusting. I don’t like the taste, and the texture seriously disgusts me. But then I didn’t bake these cakes for me, and I must admit that (slightly) yuck ingredients are one of the items on my loooong list of reasons to bake. :)

In defence of Cukrowa Wróżka, please let me point out that the cakes are not disgusting at all. I made a trial run cake earlier this week and glazed it with a hazelnut glaze – lovely. Not overwhelming, though. I do have nicer cake recipes in my collection. But hey, that wasn’t the point.

I’ve used a vanilla icing with a dash of black food colouring to decorate the cakes. I ran out of time doing the decoration so it’s not as nice as I’d hoped but that’s life for you. Deal with it you must. :)

Happy Star Wars Day to all of you!

Passionfruit Cream Sponge

This post is a bit late… Sometimes I have other things to do than write my blog. Shocking! :)

On Sunday, we were invited to a special double-birthday-slash-welcoming-the-new-baby brunch at our friends’ house. And I couldn’t go. So I just sent my representative and a cake. :)

Passionfruit Cream Sponge

When I saw the recipe on chocolate CHILLI mango a while ago, it immediately had to go on my to-do list. Passionfruit are just too yummy, and I must say that seeing as I have a couple of friends who are gluten intolerant I was intrigued by the fact that it’s a corn flour sponge. I also have other friends who are generally intolerant, and they get cakes from me too – so it’s only fair! :)

You can see that I cut my cake only once; I had to use a bigger baking tin and my sponge was a bit too flat (or I was too much of a chicken) to go for three very thin sponge layers. But I think two layers work as well, and the cake looks nice with the passionfruit cream on top.

As I haven’t eaten any of it myself, I can only rely on second-hand information but apparently it’s nice. Yay. :)