New blog

I have swapped this blog over to Wordpress. You can now find it here: http://cericakes.wordpress.com/

I will not be updating this blog any longer.

Tarte Tatin

In keeping with the French theme of dinner the other night (see here for the story), I decided to bake a French style dessert - Julia Child's upside-down apple tart. It was a buttery, caramelly, yummy tart!

Served with Creme Fraiche, it made the perfect end to our dinner!

TTFN

Jamie Oliver's Sexy Swedish Buns

With a title like that, how could I not attempt them? This recipe is from one of Jamie Oliver's recent cookbooks - "Jamie Does" - and is supposed to reflect the cuisine of Sweden. They are basically a kind of blueberry flavoured brioche, and are best served warm and sticky.

Here's the ingredients. I was going to measure them all out for a pretty photo, but that would've made a lot of dishes... and that is so not how I roll when baking!

This is them before going into the oven. I was planning on taking progress shots as I went along, but I got carried away. And I thought that John might get mad if I got his camera all covered with flour, dough and sticky stuff. Note the recipe book in the background.

And this is the final product... really really yummy. Next time I might give this a shot with raspberries and cinnamon. Mmmm.....

There is likely to be a lot of posts in the coming weeks, as the countdown to Christmas begins. I'll keep you posted!

TTFN!

Fathers Day 2010

This year for Father's day I made Dad a cake - he's been asking for one for months and I figured that it was good opportunity to give him what he wants!! I love you Dad!

I was actually quite pleased with the result:

This is a chocolate mud cake, layered with white chocolate and strawberry mousse, covered in chocolate ganache and decorated with strawberries and cigarellos. There's also a bit of cointreau in there too!

September is a busy month for cake baking, so there will be more in coming weeks!!

Happy Birthday Jen!

Last weekend we helped celebrate the birthday of a very close friend. I had a go at another fondant cake, and made my first gumpaste flowers. I was quite pleased with how they came out, but the smooth look of the fondant still needs some work.

Here are some pictures:

Til next time!

Not the gum-drop buttons...

In celebration of the release of the latest Shrek movie - we decided to bake gingerbread men. Gingy is one of my favourite characters from the movies (after Puss in boots) so these were going to be made to look just like him.

The first problem was that I couldn't find gumdrops. Apparently "Dolly mix" doesn't exist in Australia, and the closest thing I could find were Jubes - but Jubes are enormous, way too big to be used as buttons. So I went to the sweet store and bought a whole lot of different small lollies for potential buttons. We ended up using pieces of purple jube, mini M&M's (but these don't come in purple) and mini musk lollies. Here are the results:

"Do you know the Muffin Man?", "The Muffin Man?", "The Muffin Man", "Yes I know the Muffin Man. He lives on Drury Lane", "Well, she's married to the Muffin Man".....

I like aeroplane cookies...

Aeroplane cookies for me!

I made these using a basic vanilla cookie dough, with orange zest added for an orangey flavour.

Apologies for the crummy photos, I almost forgot to take any!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Birthday Rescue plane

My husband works for a Search and Rescue company - as such, when his birthday came around I decided to make a cute Rescue aeroplane cake.

It's a homemade chocolate mud cake, with dark chocolate ganache and fondant icing.

The stuff under it's wings is just fairy floss.My fondant skills are improving, even if this one was a little lumpy-bumpy.

Edgar the Elephant

My sister-in-law loves elephants, so I made her this cake for her birthday recently:

He was made using a pattern from the Wilton website. Here are some photos of the process....

It all starts with a 3D teddy bear cake.

Then you stick in the extra bits....

And start icing!

Ta-da!

Rainbows

I made this cake for a work morning tea. It's lemon flavoured sponge, with lemon cream cheese frosting.

Oh, and it has a surprise inside...




So we were all a little hyperactive for the rest of the day, but it was worth it! Yum!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Golf cake

Today I made a cake for my father-in-law's birthday. He's really into his golf, so the obvious cake choice was a golf theme.

I used the Wilton Sports Ball pan set to create the following. It's a chocolate cake, with choc-mint buttercream covered in plain fondant. Smoothing fondant over a sphere was a bit of a challenge, but I was quite pleased with the result - as was the recipient, which is all that counts really!

Til next time!!

Choc-mint cupcakes

Chocolate and mint is one of my favourite combinations. In any form, these two flavours just go so well together. So I decided to make some choc-mint cupcakes for a work morning tea. The cake is a rich, dark, moist chocolate cake (almost flourless), and the icing is just mint flavoured buttercream with chocolate chips added. Shame the piping didn't work so well - it was getting late and what was supposed to be cute swirls of icing turned into big ugly blobs. Oh well. Still tasted awesome!!

Australia Day

In celebration of Australia Day, on the 26th January, I decided to make some Aussie themed cupcakes. I made two types:

1) Lamington inspired (Vanilla cupcakes with raspberry jam swirl, iced with chocolate ganache and shredded coconut); and

2) Chocolate cupcakes with wattleseed frosting.

Wattleseeds come from our National flower, the wattle. They are quite hard to come by as they are difficult to harvest. Wattleseeds need to be picked by hand. After much searching, I managed to find some at the Oxfam shop - so these are ethically sound ground wattleseeds! Wattleseed tastes like a combination of chocolate, coffee, hazelnut and poppy seed. It's interesting, but quite nice. Here I mixed the ground wattleseeds with regular cream cheese frosting. The chocolate cupcakes were a new recipe, which turned out to be a big success. They were awesome!!

Til next time!

Happy New Year!

I decided to make a big cake for a New Years Day gathering that I was hosting. I got the idea from the Planet Cake book. A white chocolate mudcake, with dark chocolate ganache, decorated with homemade marshmallow fondant and store-bought fondant.

I wasn't entirely happy with the result - the icing was too lumpy bumpy. The day I was trying to decorate this, it was 35 deg C outside and quite humid - this made the ganache all melty and the fondant really hard to work with. Not good. I actually waited til early evening to begin as I thought that would be cooler - it was, but not by much. To make matters worse, we lost power during a big storm at about 10pm (and it didn't return until 3pm the following day!) - so I had to do some of the decorating by candle-light.

Ah well - the cake was enjoyed by all who saw/ate it - so I guess that's all that matters!

Mmm... I could so go for some cake right now...

Christmas Cake

Last year I was the one designated to make the family Christmas cake (okay so I volunteered). I wanted this to be the most yummiest, moist, prettiest dark fruit cake ever! I messed around with the recipe a bit, and the result was fantastic. It was so moist you could smell the Cointreau from metres away!

I had planned to decorate it with homemade marshmallow fondant - but then I learnt what happens if you put marshmallows in the microwave and forget about them. Oops! So I was forced to use pre-made fondant which (luckily) I had in stock. This cake also has a layer of marzipan - because my Dad insisted. I hated marzipan as a kid - turns out I still hate it - so next year, sorry Dad, no marzipan. I'll buy you a block to have on the side!

Merry belated Christmas and Happy 2010 everyone!