What I like to call "domestic science fiction"...

I'm no stranger to sci-fi fans - my old housemate John was mad about Dr Who, my uncle Sean loves Star Trek and even I have been known to succumb to geekdom on the odd occasion.  Recently I was asked to make a birthday cake for a local man who loves science fiction and actually self publishes his own sci-fi books and podcasts (see his website djburnham.com).  Rather than make him a dalek or darth vader cake that could be for anyone, after chatting to his wife we decided that his birthday cake should be a recreation of his own books and an ipod playing his podcast.  I really got a kick out of this idea as it was so personal to him, and I hoped he would really be touched by seeing his own books as the design.
   

  
I had originally planned to make two separate cakes for the books, until I was struck with the genius idea of making just one large cake and cutting it in two (see Dad - I didn't go to university for nothing).  My recipe makes a 3" tall cake, but to make the books look more realistic I didn't want them to be that high, so I used the recipe for an 11" cake in a 12" tin and it turned out at a perfect height.
  
I levelled and filled the cake and then cut into two, placing one on a separate board cut to size and the other on the large cake board.  Each cake then had to be carved slightly on one side to create the curved edge of a hardback book (20 minutes in the freezer to firm the cake up makes this job much easier).  I then covered each book in buttercream and smoothed off nicely:
  

  
If I wanted to make my life easy, I would have simply covered the whole of the top and sides with black sugarpaste, but anyone who has tried it knows that the huge amount of colouring that goes into making it that black is not the nicest to eat (incidentally, I have found that black Beau paste is much nicer than Regalice).  So, I resolved to work in some chocolate sugarpaste with a little extra food colouring as this improves the flavour, and I also used black only around the edges of the cake so there was as little as possible on the cake.
  
I started with the spine, then added a tiny strip all around the bottom of the cake to look like the back cover.  I created long strips of white sugarpaste which I scored with my favourite sugarcrafting tool - my pizza slice (it's soooo handy for cutting long straight lines or used to trim sugarpaste when covering cakes as it doesn't pull the icing like a knife does).  I then added these strips round the edges to look like the pages of the book (not that you can really see from my photo, sorry):
 

 
Then to cover the top, I used white sugarpaste in the middle and strips of black round the edge.  It was important to get the joins very neat and the top as flat as possible so that the image went on top nicely.
 

 
To make the ipod I simply made a rectangle of marzipan and covered it with white sugarpaste.  I added edible images which I made up specially to show the Ad Astral podcast and a happy birthday message.
 

 
The finishing touches were to dowel the lower cake so that it could take the weight of the upper cake and add the ipod earphones made out of white sugarpaste.  I added the upper tier which I secured with some edible glue to stop it moving in transit on the way to the party.
 

  
I'm very pleased with how it turned out - it's a really bold design that's also really personal.  Dave's wife emailed me specially after the party to say how much he loved it and how delicious it was too.  It always touches me when people take the time to say thank you and let me know how the cake went - when you work on your own it's great to have such lovely feedback and to know that something you have made has made other people happy.

Sewing cake for a crafty bird

Sometimes I think the best cakes are those with lots of details - often it's not the intricacy of each item but having lots of simple details really makes a big impact.  This cake I made for my very good friend Laura I think illustrates this really well:

As you may be able to tell from the theme of this cake, Laura loves making crafty things, particularly bold and striking cushions - take a look at her blog Always Have A Plan B to see some of the beautiful creations she makes.  When her boyfriend Slim asked me to make her 30th birthday cake, we both knew that there had to be some kind of crafty element involved.  I also had to make part of the cake cake gluten free so I suggested a cushion and a gluten free sewing box and Slim agreed it sounded like a great idea.  He sent me some pictures of the cushions she has made but we agreed that rather than copying one exactly, it would be nice to do one in her style.  I was placing an order for some edible butterflies (incidentally for Laura's mum's 60th birthday cake a couple of weeks before) and I saw these edible mexican skulls.  As soon as I saw them I knew I had to find a way of using them in a cake.  I sent the link over to Slim and he said it was just like some material Laura had used in one of her crafty projects as I added them to the order and waited patiently for them to arrive from America.

To carve the cake I followed a tutorial on Cake Central.  I started with a 10" chocolate and Baileys cake which I cut into just two layers and filled with Baileys buttercream - this would give me a handy guide for the halfway point when carving the cake.  The first step was to mark the cake with cocktail sticks one inch in on each side:

This gives you a guide to score a curved line to mark the basic shape:

Then using a large serrated knife held vertically, cut out the curved edge:

From this basic shape I used a serrated knife again to carve the edges to make nice domed top.  Then, carefully flipped the cake over and carved the other side to give a cushion shape:

I was surprised how much smaller the cake ended up once it was carved - if in doubt, start with a bigger cake than you think you need.

Once I was happy with the shape, I covered the top of the cake with a layer of buttercream and covered this with teal coloured sugarpaste and trimmed to the half way mark round the edge- this would be the underside of the cake:

I then carefully turned the cake over again and covered the rest of the cake with a layer of buttercream and the pale yellow coloured sugarpaste for the top:

Using the line of the teal sugarpaste underneath as a guide I trimmed the edges to match and eased together to make a neat join.  I could have used a thin sausage of sugarpaste around the sides to look like piping but that's not Laura's style so it was slightly trickier to make the join clean but it just needed a little patience.

Then to finish the cake, I brushed over the top with pearl lustre dust (anyone that knows Laura knows I had to get some glitter in somewhere!).  I also added a strip of teal sugarpaste which I went over with a quilting tool to look like the stitched hem of the opening for the cushion.  The final touch was to add the skulls using a very thin brushing of edible glue:

Once it was finished I added it to my custom made board:

Next I turned my attentions to the sewing box.  This was a 6" gluten free chocolate and Baileys cake which I cut into two to make the box and lid.  I put the lid on a separate board and covered it to look like a pin cushion top.  I made a ridge round the edge of the box from marzipan and covered this with chocolate sugarpaste to make it look like the inside of the box for the cotton reels to sit in.  I covered the sides with teal sugarpaste and some edible butterflies for decoration:

Then to bring everything together I made lots of cotton reels and buttons to fill the box.  The cotton reels were very straightforward, made from fat sausages of sugarpast that I rolled a knife around to score a pattern to look like thread, then ends were added on using edible glue and short lengths of dried spaghetti.  To make them look like they were inside the box I cut them at an angle before sticking on to the middle of the box.  I rolled a long length of white sugarpaste and drew on numbers and rules to make the measuring tape.  My favourite bit of the whole cake was the scissors that I modelled on my mum's old dressmaking shears - I think they turned out really nicely and looked quite realistic.

The cake a was brought out as a suprise at Laura's birthday barbecue bash and she really liked it.  So often when I make a cake I never get to see the reaction of the person I've made it for and it made my day.  Plus I got to have a slice too, another bonus! 

I'll have a pint of cake please

I get a few unusual requests for cakes sometimes, which actually suits me down to the ground as I love flexing my creative muscles to make a cake that is a bit out of the ordinary.  Over the last week I have made two cakes on a tipsy theme - a bottle of Grey Goose vodka and a packet of Marlboro Lights for a 40th birthday cake, and a giant pint of Guinness cake which I made for Melissa to celebrate St Patrick's Day on Saturday.

  

 
As I'm writing this post I'm getting hungry again and might just have to cut myself another slice of the Guinness cake before I tell you how I made the cakes....
 
I've made the vodka bottle cake before, so it was quite handy that I already had the label prepared.  Usually I can find a suitable picture on Google Images but in this case I had to make it up from scratch which took more than 2 1/2 hours that I hadn't budgeted for - oops.  Luckily after some good searching I was able to find the Marlboro images I needed, and with a bit of photoshopping I sent the pictures off to be printed into edible images at a local company in Newhaven.  I got some slightly strange looks when I picked them up and had to assure them it wasn't a cigarette flavoured cake!
 
The cake itself is a vanilla madeira cake made from two 5" round cakes that I filled and cut in half to create the main bottle shape:
  

 
Then it just needed a small amount of shaping with a sharp knife to create the domed top and to make sure the sides were smooth and even.  Once carved, the cake was then covered in a thin layer of buttercream:
 

The neck of the bottle was made from a sausage of marzipan, then I covered the whole thing in grey sugarpaste and trimmed neatly:
 

 
The cigarette packed was made from a rectangle of cake cut to just smaller than the image and covered in white sugarpaste.  I've learned the hard way to always use plenty of icing sugar underneath so that when you come to move it to the board the sugarpaste doesn't stick to the surface.
 

 
The surface of the sugarpaste is dampened with a little water before fixing the edible image (see my Monkey Street Art post for top tips on using edible images):
 

 
The bottle label is added to the cake in the same way and the cigarette packet is secured to the board with a little icing.
 

A few finishing touches and a happy birthday message in royal icing and the cake is finished:
 

I think making this cake gave me the inspiration for the Guinness cake, and I instinctively knew that the recipe I had to use was Nigella's Chocolate Guinness Cake.  I'm not a huge fan of chocolate cakes, but this one is a little bit different - moist and dark, with a hint of bitterness coming from the Guinness and then lashings of cream cheese icing really makes it a special cake.  Nigella's recipe is for a 9" round cake, which I split between a 5" and a 6" tin to give the basis of the famous pint glass shape.

 
This is quite a damp cake and not really suitable for carving, but I had my heart set on making this cake work and just took shaping the cake very slowly, glueing crumbs back on with a little more icing to fill in any holes.  Usually you can freeze cakes before carving to make it easier, but I didn't want to risk the cream cheese icing in the freezer.   I also stuffed cake crumbs on top of the layers of icing to make as stable a surface as possible for the sugarpaste as the icing isn't as firm or stable as buttercream (so also not really suitable for a carved cake like this!).  Before I started carving I placed strips of greaseproof paper just under the edges of the cake which protect the board from crumbs and smears of icing.  It doesn't look very pretty at this stage, but it's now got just about the right shape:

Then for a thin layer of icing so that the sugarpaste will stick and once that's smooth you can carefully remove the greaseproof paper and you will have a nice clean board underneath:

And then time for the sugarpaste - I like to use Renshaw Chocolate Sugarpaste which has a lovely chocolate flavour.  I covered this up to nearly the top, then covered the top part with white sugarpaste for the head of the pint.  I then cut through both layers of paste and removed the excess to give a nice clean line:

All that was left was to add the logo using some edible gold paint and some superwhite mixed with a dash of water to create the white for the writing.

And it just so happens that this is excellent timing as I am celebrating my blogiversary this week - one year of writing the Brighton Bakery blog.  Thanks to everyone for reading, and I hope you all have a pint of cake to celebrate with me!

The Cake That Groaned

Usually January is a pretty miserable month - everyone's dieting, cutting down on the booze and the party season has been long forgotten as we all try and figure out how to make it through to the end of the month after overspending at Christmas.

Well last Thursday night defied convention with a cracking launch party for the new graphic novel, The House That Groaned by the super talented Karrie Fransman.  The party was held at the Gallery in Foyle's, the iconic independent bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London and the room was full to bursting.  That Miss Fransman sure does know how to throw a party.  There was a magician, animations, characters from the book were working the room with big papermache cartoon heads, delicious canapes handmade by Karrie's mum and lovingly carried down from Edinburgh in her suitcase, and a room buzzing with fascinating people.  I was thrilled to have been asked to contribute to the festivities by baking a cake in the shape of the house itself.

Here's how it turned out:

Photo (c) Sabrina Dallot-Seguro

I was really excited that while Karrie was busy signing books, for once I actually got to cut the cake!

Photo (c) Susan Yan Mach

Although it could never compete with the multilayered, twisted adult fairytale that is The House That Groaned, I would like to share with you the story of The Cake That Groaned.

One windy afternoon, two days before the party, a couple of chubby packs of butter made friends with some golden caster sugar, a few eggs, some real vanilla and a cloud of flour.  Once they had thouroughly gotten to know each other in the bowl of a shiny red Kitchenaid, through the magic of bakery these ingredients gently rose in the warm oven of a basement kitchen in Brighton and a delicious 10" vanilla madeira cake was born.

As with all my cakes, I left it well wrapped overnight to settle, and the next day I split it into 3 even layers ready for filling.  The book itself uses different tones of blue throughout, so I thought the perfect choice would be a wild blueberry jam for the filling, which complemented very nicely with the real vanilla cake and Italian meringue buttercream.

I cut a two inch section from the side of the cake and fixed it to the top of the cake with a smear of buttercream, trimming at an angle to create the shape of the roof.  I then gave the whole cake a thin covering of buttercream and covered it with blue sugarpaste:

I then had some fun with my new brick texturing tool to create the brickwork pattern over the top and sides:

 

Next up I created the texture of the roof slates using the end of a piping nozzle.  I also added the chimneys, secured in place with a short length of dried spaghetti and some edible glue:

For the windows I had cut out rectangles of yellow modelling paste and left them to dry out before drawing on the room scenes with edible pen.  Once the ink was dry, I fixed them to the cake using some edible glue.

Karrie - if you're reading, don't look too closely at the drawings, I am definitely not an artist!  As with all my cakes, it's about capturing the essence of the object I am recreating, not an exact depiction...

I finished off the cake by adding the window frames and doors and it was ready to travel 50 odd miles up to London to the party.

Here it is, next to the book itself:

And I'm pleased to say that I had some great feedback on the cake.  Most of it had gone within about 20 minutes so that's got to be a good sign.

If you've not bought the book yet I can highly recommend it.  It's a cracking read, exploring the themes of body image and desire through the larger than life characters that live in a crumbling down house.  Take a look at the book's website www.thehousethatgroaned.com to meet the characters and order your copy. 

Enjoy xx

Converse Boots Cake - my favourite yet

It was Melissa's birthday way back on 19 October, but the week of her birthday we had so much leftover cake from the Indulge Sussex stall we held that at the time it seemed crazy for me to add another to the cake mountain.  So finally, six weeks later I was able to make Melissa's birthday cake, and I wanted it to be extra special as she had waited so long.  It was also an opportunity for me to really push myself to try something new and I had the perfect challenge in mind.
 
Anyone who knows us will probably have noticed that Melissa and I live in Converse boots.  I'm a little embarrassed to say that between us we have at least 8 different pairs of Converse in the house.  Well I decided that 8 wasn't quite enough and for Melissa's birthday cake I would make her a pair of edible Converse made out of carved cake.
 
Here's how they turned out:
 

 
I was so pleased with this cake and think it's probably the best one I've done yet.  Here's how I made it:
 
I started off with an 8" square lemon madeira cake which I filled with lemon curd buttercream (I didn't bother to level the top as it was going to be carved anyway).  I put the cake in the freezer for about an hour to firm up for carving.
 
Meanwhile I found a picture on the internet of a Converse sole and adjusted it in Photoshop to the right size.  I then cut out a template from baking paper and used it to cut around for the left boot:
 

Using the same template I flipped it over for the right boot:
 

 
I created bases from a cereal box covered in foil using the same template.  I used buttercream to secure the cake to the bases:
 

 
Then using pieces of the leftover cake I added the top of the boots and secured with buttercream:
 

 
I pushed a couple of dowels down into each of the heels to secure the back of the cake while I was carving it.  Then using a sharp paring knife I started to sculpt the shape.  It's best to go little by little as it's easy to take away but much harder to add back on if you take too much. Here it is about half way through:
 

 
The toe section is still too high so I need to be a bit braver .  Must try not to eat all the cake trimmings while I'm doing this....
 

 
Done.  Now I'm happy with the shape they are ready for a layer of buttercream:
 

 
Getting the buttercream smooth was really time consuming as all the surfaces are curved.  I used a small pallette knife dipped in a glass of hot water and lots of patience!  At this stage they look more like wellies than converse but I have faith.  The cakes then went into the fridge to firm up the buttercream before decorating.
 
In hindsight, I wish I had left the cakes in the fridge a bit longer as I decided to make the sugarpaste sections freehand as I went along, using baking parchment held up against the cake to create templates.  The parchment kept sticking as the buttercream was still a bit soft.  I had to be really careful when placing the sugarpaste on as if I got it wrong it meant resmoothing the buttercream before trying again.
 
Using a real Converse boot as a guide (as you know we have many kicking round the house), I figured out the order for which layers had to go on first, and started off with a piece to cover the top of each boot:
 

 
Next came the tongues.  I made a template with parchment first and cut out the shapes with a cutting tool - this looks like a mini pizza wheel and helps to cut the sugarpaste evenly without pulling out of shape (which can happen when you use a regular knife):
 

You can't really see it in the picture, but I used a teatowel to make an imprint to give a fabric texture but rolling over the towel onto the paste with a rolling pin.  I also added some detail using a knife making small indentations round the edge to look like overlocked stitching:

 
Then I added the tongues to the cakes and trimmed the sides at the front once they were in place:
 

 
Next I made another parchment template for the sides, using the same template I flipped it over for the other side of the boot.  Once I had cut the shape I used my new quilting tool to make the stitching:
 

 
I then used a piping nozzle to cut out the eyelets:
 

 
I used some silver lustre dust mixed with a little vodka to make a silver paint and painted the inside of the holes before securing to the sides of the cakes:
 

 
It's now starting to come to life and look like a Converse trainer.  Next up I added the toes and the trim round the edge, which I did in two pieces to make life easier.
 

 
Time for some colour now and the red trim makes all the difference.  I also texturised the piece round the toe by making a criss cross pattern with a small knife:

Another bit of colour was added with the blue trim and the All Star logo on the heel.  I didn't have any deep blue royal icing so I made the lettering with a very thin sausage of sugarpaste fixed on with edible glue:
 

By this point the end was in sight but I had been on my feet for hours and needed a break.  So I sat on the sofa with a tray in my lap and made the laces in front of the TV.  I rolled a rectangle of thin sugarpaste and texturised it with a criss cross pattern made using the side of my small pallette knife.  I then cut thin strips of this to make the laces.  Back at the work top I attached the strips using edible glue starting from the bottom, placing one end in the eyelet hole and then trimming to the edge to make it look as if it went underneath the side piece:
 

 
Then the final detail was to add the round Converse logo to the sides of the boots.  This called for the tiniest piping work I've done to date.  Strictly the logo should have gone on the inside but I used a little artistic licence and placed them on the outside so they would read better:

 
Converse boots cake - done!
 
All in all I think this cake took about 9 hours to make, carve and decorate, but I was so pleased with the finished cake.  There's plenty of detail and I think they look pretty close to the real thing.  Melissa was really pleased with them too - I hope they were worth the wait :o)