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.

Wurst-Käs-Szenario [language warning: German]

 

Das Motto unserer Eurovision-Party 2015 war, passend zu Conchitas grandiosem Sieg letztes Jahr, WURST-KÄS-SZENARIO!

Weil warum nicht!
(Und, nein, ich wollte wirklich nicht versuchen, das ins Englische zu übersetzen oder irgendwie auf englisch zu erklären.)

Unsere Gäste haben sich wieder mal mächtig ins Zeug gelegt und kamen großartig verkleidet, und bis auf die Musik war’s ein toller Abend!

 

Aber jetzt zum wichtigsten: KUCHEN.

 

Wurst-Käs-Szenario!

 

Ich musste (irgendwie unoriginellerweise) wieder mal meinen Mohnkuchen machen. Der hat einfach echt viele Fans in meinem Freundeskreis (und offensichtlich mehr als The Makemakes und Ann-Dings zusammen, harr harr).

Drauf gab’s zweifärbigen Zuckerguss sowie Wurst und Käselöcher aus gefärbtem Marzipan.

Sieht irgendwie fast ein bisschen unappetitlich aus… Mission accomplished!

 

Außerdem habe ich auch noch pikante Torten gebacken:

 

Wurst-Käse-Torte

 

Halbe Sache: Käsetorte

 

Beide Torten – bzw. die eineinhalb Torten – bestanden aus Kuchenböden, für die ich mein Zucchinikuchen-Rezept abgewandelt habe. Unter anderem hab ich grob gehackte Walnüsse dazugefügt, was dem ganzen echt ne schöne Note verpasst hat. If I may say so myself.

Die Wurst-Käse-Torte war überraschenderweise mit Wurst und Käse gefüllt, und die halbe Sache nur mit Käse. Wer hätt’s gedacht! :D

 

Deutsche Monsterbake-Blogeinträge sind komisch. I’m going back to bed.

Linzertorte tray bake for Austria Day 2014

Having recently moved house, I now live even further away from my home town and feel even more obliged to bring some proper (i.e. Austrian) culture to the people here. :)

And yesterday I learned that our Linzer Torte is the oldest known recipe to take its name after a place.

Two very good reasons to forego my traditional Mozartkugel muffins for Austria day and make Linzerschnitten (Linzertorte tray bake) instead!

The recipe is my dad’s wife’s, and I like it for a number of reasons, the two most important ones being that the tray bake is a) delicious and b) a lot easier to make than the original Linzer Torte.

They key convenience factor is that with this recipe, you can pipe on the dough grid with the help of a piping bag. You do not have to roll the dough into much too long sausage-like thingies and then try and weave a beautiful grid out of the awkward dough sausages.

(Alhtough now that I am writing this I feel like playing with awkward dough sausages… Next time!)

Anyway, back to this recipe. Another thing about it is that this tray bake is considerably less dry than the original torte. Personally, I like my Linzer Torte dry as hell. Linzer Torte is perfect if you have to drink cups and cups of coffee or tea with it just so you don’t suffocate. :)

But a lot of people are, for some reason, not fond of cakes which come with the risk of suffocation. (Weirdos!) And I am on a mission to bring culture to the barbarians, so I don’t want to scare them off with the very first cake. ;)

 

Happy Nationalfeiertag to all of you!

Another Baketastic Day!

Yesterday was another day I spent doing basically nothing but baking.

The occasion? My favourite cake eater is leaving the company he’s been working with for the last sixteen years, and today was his leaving do.

And because he’s so popular and has so many friends at work (especially on days when he brings cake), more than one cake was required.

 

I love my intense baking days, but they are always really exhausting, too, and I’m still rather tired today.

So I’m giving you my list of cakes baked yesterday in photos with no stories to go with them. Feel free to make up your own – the more gruesome, the better! :)

 

For those of who you like a challenge: spot the cake for which I used food colouring! ;)

 

 

Cherry And Mint Chocolate Tray Bake

 

Coffee Cream And Walnut Cupcakes

 

White Chocolate Chip Cake with White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

 

Sesame And Pear Cake

 

Hazelnut And Courgette Balls

 

Lemon Tray Bake

 

Pumpkin Pie

Backen für Wacken / Wacken baking

POPPYSEED AS BLACK AS MY SOUL —

 

At an age when others start to consider quitting their dirty Heavy Metal festival lives, I am attending one for the first time in my life!

My partner said I have to join him and his mad friends at the Wacken Open Air festival.

He promised me dirt and limited hygiene facilities and music played by bands I don’t know – how could I resist!?

So I went along and I had an awesome time. I got dirty and listened to music by bands I didn’t know and fell a tiny bit in love with the lead singer of one of the bands and let the heavy bass thudding from the stages lull me to sleep at night.

 

There are people who say that baking cakes is not Heavy Metal. I beg to differ!

Exhibit a) to prove my case:

 

I had been asked to make my poppyseed cake as victuals for the days on the dusty field somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Of course I obliged – and I WACKENed the cake with the help of a home-made stencil for the festival logo.

Our friends liked it so much they cut all around the poppyseed decoration and ate the rest of the cake first in order to keep the logo intact for as long as possible. Way to flatter the Heavy Metal bakesteress! ;)

 

Next-level intolerances baking challenge: wheat-free, egg-free, dairy-free, sugar-free carrot & orange cake

The older we get, the more our intolerances haunt us, apparently.

I get this with my intolerances towards people.

My friends develop more and more food intolerances.

I think I’d rather live with mine… ;)

 

I baked this cake on Saturday morning for my friend, who had a big party with loads of cakes and biscuits and chocolate mousse – and who’d told me she wasn’t going to be able to eat any of it.

She’s always been wheat-intolerant (you will find a number of non-wheat baking projects in earlier posts on this beautiful blog of mine), and for as long as I’ve known her she’s always been a vegetarian, although not an overly strict one.

But now it’s become more difficult.

Intolerant parents produce intolerant children: my friend had a baby and now while she’s still breastfeeding, she cannot eat or drink any of the things that baby boy is allergic to. Which means she can now not have:
— wheat, as before
— eggs
— dairy of any kind
— sugar (as in, refined sugar etc.)

I simply could not bear her having a birthday party without cake for herself, so I said I was going to bake a cake for her and her special needs. :)

Fortunately, honey is fine for her and the baby. That made life easier for me! I adapted this recipe to my friend’s needs and the result is… It’s…

It’s okay.

The cake was not bad. It just tasted a bit … like a cake for stuff-intolerant people. And the hint of cinnamon I added made it taste a bit Christmassy. Which is not a bad thing but was not the intended effect either.

 

So, I gave her half the cake as it was. And turned the whole purpose of the cake upside-down by icing the other half with vodka & orange sugar icing. In my opinion, that improved matters considerably. As vodka and sugar often do. ;)

Happy Belated Birthday to Me!

I had to bake a cake for everybody at the office to celebrate the fact that I’m getting older and older. Hooray!

In terms of recipe, I haven’t been very creative. Maybe it’s the brownie disappointment the other week. Maybe it’s the fact that I just love my yoghurt & poppyseed cake. Or maybe – no, no, that’s it. Disappointment and love. Two out of the three motivations I have for doing anything, the third being coffee.

So, yes, it’s yoghurt & poppyseed tray bake. Yum. The poppyseed floral pattern on the sugar icing was a ton of work, and it’s not perfect. I made a stencil for the pattern myself, and I think I should have used a different kind of material.

But it’s good enough for my belated birthday, I guess. At least for work, where I am guessing they don’t know how to appreciate a good blood, guts & zombie horror cake. (Yet.)

 

Sick pumpkin cake for Halloween

Well, what did you expect!? I’ve baked intestines in the past. There was only one direction I was heading…

So, happy Halloween. I hope you have a fantastic night with lovely people, scary films and disgusting looking cake. :)

For once, I am happy and disturbed at the same time because my cake turned out just the way I’d hoped.

Anyway, let’s talk shop. This is how this cake came to be:

In a moment of cleverness I decided to start out with carving the pumpkin face, figuring that if I’d messed up (and the chances of that weren’t low), I could still use the pumpkin for the cake and give it another go with the second pumpkin I had. However, I didn’t need that. I like the expression my pumpkin has. And carving it wasn’t as hard as I’d thought! (What exactly was I expecting? Resistance?)

Step 2: the tray bake. It’s a very moist pumpkin and hazelnut cake with a hint of cinnamon. My own recipe; the idea was to produce an almost-but-not-quite cake equivalent of pumpkin pie, and I think I have succeeded. Yay.

I did not use all of the batter for the tray bake; I used some to make three muffins for my grown-up coffee & cake date this afternoon. And I made another tiny baby cake for the next part of my baking project —

For the, er, topping I cooked some pumpkin pulp, added a splash of milk, some sugar, cinnamon, food colouring and torn-up bits of cake. Texture is important. Having watched The Exorcist the other day helped.

PS: I am typing this post on my partner’s computer, and I keep asking myself what the flip this sticker saying “Spill-Resistant Keyboard” is supposed to achieve other than … Challenge accepted.

Happy Friday the 13th! – Bloody Handprint Walnut Tray Bake

 

Yay, it’s Friday the 13th again! Are you as excited as I am!? (Yeah, you are. Don’t deny it!)

Finally a chance to make a slightly disgusting yet delicious cake again!

So, this morning I baked a coffee & walnut & vanilla tray bake. Then I spread some white chocolate on top of it. And then I did what I think you will have dreamt of all your life as well: I painted my hand with red food colouring and went straight into the still warm and soft white chocolate. Yay for squishiness! Squishsquishshquishshquishhhhhhhh.

Does it look bloody enough? I think the result’s not too bad. (I was going to add some more blood spatter, but then decided against it, fearing it would look pants.)

Now let’s hope it tastes as lovely as it smells.

Also, let’s hope my friends are going to believe me I washed my hand first… ;)

A special (Hamburg) football fan’s birthday cakes

There are a number of reasons why you’d do something out of character. Brainslugs, for one. Being possessed by evil demons. Spontaneous mind implosion.

So you make up your own mind why I would bake football cakes of all things.

 

Anyway, I got to bake cakes and use food colouring, so all is well. :)

 

The tray bake is one I’ve made several times before, poppyseed & yoghurt. Lovely stuff. The green icing is made from icing sugar, rum and food colouring – the three main food groups, incidentally!

 

 

For the fairy cakes, I used no alcohol and spelt flour rather than wheat flour to cater for the needs of our pregnant and wheat-intolerant friend.

They are white chocolate & cherry fairy cakes with a white chocolate cream cheese topping and edible Hamburg football decoration on top. A lovely way to make birthday boy happy and upset this other friend of ours who is an avid fan of Hamburg’s traditional rival team. (Can’t tell you what pleased me more! ;)