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! 

60th birthday butterfly cake

My dear friend Laura commissioned me to make a gluten free cake for her mum's 60th birthday party.  I was delighted to be asked and even more excited that Laura wanted to use some beautiful and very lifelike edible butterflies she found on Etsy (take a look at Sugar Robot's shop to see the amazing range of cake toppers they have).  In fact the whole design was created by Laura, who wanted a two tiered gold cake with lots of butterflies down the side. All I had to do was recreate her vision.  Here's how it turned out:
 

 
This was a fairly straightforward cake to make as all the impact comes from the butterflies themselves.  I started with an 8" and a 6" round cakes which were gluten free orange and elderflower filled with homemade orange curd Italian meringue buttercream.  Apparently Laura's mum was very intrigued by the sound of my Italian meringue buttercream from reading this blog so if you are reading I hope it lived up to your expectations!
 
I covered each cake with a pale yellow sugarpaste:
  

 
And then brushed on metallic gold lustre dust with a pastry brush.  This is quite a messy job and I seemed to get gold dust over everything (actually this isn't limited to just gold dust in my kitchen...):
  

 
I added some dowels to the lower tier to support the weight of the upper cake:
 

 
In fact as this cake had to travel 200 miles fully assembled I added an extra tall dowel in the middle which went up into the top tier through a hole cut in the cake board.  This made it slightly tricky to assemble the tiers and make sure it was in the middle but it turned out well.  A simple gold ribbon finishes the tiers off nicely:
 

 
Then to start adding the butterflies, which are made out of wafer and are very delicate to work with.  I created a slight crease down the middle and attached with a tiny dab of edible glue applied with a very fine brush.  You have to be careful as if you add too much glue then the butteflies actually melt and tear so there were a couple of casulaties as I got used to working with them. 
 

 
I added the butterflies in diagonal drifts to make sure she size and colours were balanced:

  

It was tempting to keep adding more, but I felt like this was just the right amount to finish the design:
 

 
The cake then travelled from Brighton up to the Midlands in Laura and her boyfriend Slim's converted ambulance campervan for a big birthday bash weekend.  I packed a few spare butterflies in the cake box just in case there were any casualties.  Luckily it survived the journey and everyone was pleased with the cake at the party.  I can't wish for any more than that - a very happy birthday Laura's mum!

Karaoke Cake - Happy 30th Birthday Jon!

I seem to be riding a wave of 30th birthdays at the moment -  they started to creep up slowly over the last year or so, my own 30th was just six weeks ago, and they still keep coming.  Last weekend was Jon's turn, who is the lovely and supertalented boyfriend of my very good friend Karrie (you can see the cake I made for her 30th here).

Jon chose to celebrate his birthday with a karaoke party so the obvious choice was for me to make him a karaoke themed cake.  I found out from Karrie that they have a very distinctive pink karaoke machine so I  looked up some pictures online and immediately saw it would make a great eyecatching cake.

This was actually quite a straightforward cake to make, but I think its simplicity and boldness makes it a really effective design.  I started off with a square cake in my new favourite flavour - courgette and cinnamon with lemon curd buttercream (and I know I'm tooting my own trumpet here but it's really good!).  I then cut it into a rectangle and covered it with white sugarpaste to make the box.  I made the basic shape for the microphone from marzipan and left it to firm up overnight.  In hindsight I probably should have given the marzipan a couple of days as it was still a little soft but it worked ok.

The next morning I made the dials for the top of the box, by cutting a fat sausage of white sugarpaste into equal slices and then re-shaping a little by hand to make them neat and even like fat extra strong mints:

Easy peasy.  To fix them to the cake I used a short length of dry spaghetti and some edible glue.  The spaghetti probably wasn't 100% neccessary here but as the cake had to make the long trip up to North London on public transport I wanted to make sure that nothing was going to fall off.  A few details with my knife and edible pen and the cake was already starting to take shape:

Next up was the microphone, which was a very fetching tone of pink which needed plenty of colouring paste adding to beef up the colour.  I got to a point where it wouldn't go any more pink so I couldn't quite get it the fluorescent colour of the actual microphone (and to be honest too much colouring might start making you feel fluorescent if you ate too much).  I started by covering the top of the mic, which I did in two halves.  First I painted the top half with edible glue and shaped the pink over the top:

Then I cut round the middle, turned it over and did the same again for the bottom:

Then I added a strip around the middle to cover the join.  I created the textured effect by pressing dimples into the paste with a round ended tool while it was still soft.

I covered the main part of the microphone with the pink sugarpaste and attached it to the top with a piece of dry spaghetti and some more edible glue.  I then rolled a long sausage of black sugarpaste to create the cable and fixed it all together with the same method (who would have thought dry spaghetti would be so useful in cake decorating??)  The cable needed a bit of support while it dried so I propped it up with a small pot to stop it from coming out of the cake.  And with that the cake was finished:

The cake went down really well at the party and it all disappeared within about 10 minutes which is about as big a compliment as I can get.  Happy Birthday Jon, thanks for inviting us to your party - your version of One Week was worth the trip up to London alone :o)

I'm back... although unfortunately this time it's on the wrong side of 30

Hello again dear readers, sorry for the radio silence over the last couple of weeks!  Thanks to my lovely wife Melissa, I seem to have been able to drag out my big 3-0 birthday celebrations for way longer than I deserve - the highlights of which were an amazing trip of a lifetime to San Francisco and an 80's theme birthday party last Saturday. 
There was much debate on my part, and speculation on the part of others, as to what type of cake I should make for my 30th birthday.  I had some grand plans for a topsy turvy 3 tiered Alice in Wonderland cake, but with only 25 people coming to the party there would have been way too many leftovers for my waistline to handle (and if there is cake in the house, I can't help but eat it).  We also had a few friends coming down to stay with their little ones and I didn't want to spend all my time decorating, so I scaled my ideas back to something simple, but iconic, that would fit in with my 80's party theme.
 
I had the idea of incorporating an 80's computer game, and really wanted to do the NewZealand Story which was my brother's and my favourite game growing up, but I decided that was a bit too obscure and instead went for the classic 80's arcade favourite that everyone would know, Pacman.
 

 
Of course this wasn't just any plain old cake, I wanted to try something a bit different and have a more unusual flavour that maybe people hadn't tried before.  I adapted one of my favourite loaf cake recipes for cinnamon and courgette Cake into an 8" square tin.  Scaling up recipes can be a little tricky, and I was a bit worried how it would turn out as sometimes it doesn't work quite how you expect it to.  Luckily, it baked into a lovely moist cake, although it was a little bit too dome-shaped so I had to trim a lot off the top to make it level.  Next time I'll use less baking powder and either line the outside of the tin (like you would for a Christmas cake) or else I might invest in some of those bake even strips.  Needless to say that the leftover cake trimmings didn't go to waste....
 
I decided to fill the cake with my favourite icing - Italian meringue buttercream laced with lemon curd.  The 45 minutes it takes to make it is SO worth it, I can't get enough of the stuff, and it was the perfect combination with the cinnamon and courgette cake which has lemon zest running through it. 

I covered the cake with a light grey sugarpaste, followed by a very thin square of black sugarpaste and a grey button to make it look like an 80's computer monitor:
 

 
Next I rolled very thin sausages of blue sugarpaste to make the lines.  I know that to be 100% authentic, these should have been double lines, but sometimes it's better to capture the essence of what you are recreating rather than an exact copy.  Well that's my reasoning anyway!
 

 
 Next up was my favourite bit, the monsters!  I cut these freehand and added tiny circles of white sugarpaste for the eyes, finished off with edible black pen for the pupils.  I love how they look in the direction they are moving:

 
Then to finish the cake off, I needed to add the dots.  I had originally planned to use royal icing, but I find it really annoying to make and I had also uncovered some silver dragees in my decorating box and thought they would be perfect.  And very reminiscent of 80's party cakes.
 

 
I have to say that the cake went down really well at the party (although maybe that's due to the amount of homebrew people had consumed...), in any case, the birthday girl was very pleased with it, and I've saved the final piece for my 11 o'clock treat tomorrow.
 

 
I'm also very happy that although I may have turned 30 and should officially have grown up by now, I can still have a big kid's birthday cake :o)

Mighty Mo - monkey street art birthday cake for David

I don't know why January has a reputation for being boring, miserable and staying indoors - last Saturday Melissa and I were back up in the big smoke for our third London party in as many weeks.  Our good friend David turned 40, and to celebrate he invited his friends and family and threw a lavish party with a film screening and a slap up 3 course meal in a top London hotel - he really spoiled us all.

A few of us clubbed together to get David something really nice, and part of the gift was a Brighton Bakery birthday cake (I happen to know the owner there so can get a good discount haha).  David really loves monkeys and I toyed with the idea of creating a carved cake in the shape of a monkey - that would have been pretty cool, but if it went wrong it could have looked a bit...special.  David collects and is a big fan of street art and I thought I could make a cake in the shape of a brick wall with a Banksy style image on it, but that idea still didn't seem quite right.  Then Melissa told me that David really liked a particular graffiti artist called Mighty Mo who paints his iconic monkey across London, and he'd recently bought one of his prints.  This was the perfect image for David's cake, and along with a cheeky message this would be something he would really like.

 
Back before Christmas I made a vodka bottle cake and used a local company who print edible images onto sugarpaste to print the label.  It turned out really well, so I thought I would use the same technique for this cake.  I never did a post for the vodka cake so here's the picture:

I'd made the trip all the way over to Seaford to get the image so I had to make sure the cake was good as I didn't have a back up.  I started with an 8" square cake which I cut and reshaped into a rectangle and covered with orange brick coloured sugarpaste.  I used my handy brick texturing tool to create the brickwork effect and then used a dry brush with some red colouring dust on top to create a bit more texture.   The cake was then ready to add the edible image.
 
The image itself is on very thin sugarpaste which is very fragile and can be quite tricky to work with - once it's stuck you can't move it so you have to get it right first time.  Here are my top tips:
1. Trim around the edge of the image on a flat surface using a cutting wheel, making sure you have a clean cut through the paste all the way around - you'll find you don't need to press too hard as it's very fine sugarpaste.
2. Put the image still with its backing into the freezer for exactly 90 seconds.  This makes the image stiff so that the backing peels off easily.
3. While the image is freezing, dampen the area of the cake where your image is going to go with some moistened kitchen towel to make it tacky so that the image sticks.
4. Take your frozen image from the freezer after 90 seconds and quickly peel off the backing and set in place. Smooth gently with the side of your hands moving from the centre outwards to remove any air bubbles.  By the time it is in place the image will have defrosted and gone soft again so be confident and work quickly.

I had planned to take plenty of pictures but our camera had run out of battery and I felt completely foolish.  Luckily our good friend Jo had her camera at the party and has kindly allowed me to use her picture of the cake:

Thanks Jo!

I hear that David took the cake leftovers into work last week and it was all eaten up, and that's always lovely to hear.

David - happy 40th birthday, thanks again for inviting us to your party we had a fantastic time and so pleased you loved the cake.

Monkeys, show cakes, wedding roses and more butter than you can shake a stick of butter at!

I know it's been a couple of weeks since my last post and you may well have been wondering exactly what the Brighton Bakery has been up to.  Well, it's been a bit of a whirlwind - over the last 10 days I have systematically worked my way through more than 18 packs of butter and 5 dozen eggs - that's a lot of cake!

In fact, we have made:
one graffiti monkey birthday cake
3 multi-tiered wedding show cakes
more than 100 portions of tasting cake in two flavours,
one banana birthday cake
and to top it all off, yesterday we delivered a fantastic 3 tier chocolate wedding cake with cascading grand prix red roses.


So over the next few posts I will finally have a chance to share with you some of what we've made.  Enjoy!

Emily x

Mexican Farewell Cake for Polly & Michael

Last Saturday Melissa and I were back up in London for another party, this time to celebrate my good friend Polly and her boyfriend's new adventure, which will see them travelling across Asia for six months before settling down in Australia for a couple of years.  So it naturally followed that the theme for the food was, er, Mexican!  Polly had cooked up the biggest pot of chilli I had ever seen (which was delicious by the way) and she had also asked me to make a cake for the occasion.  So carrying on with the Mexican theme, and also taking into account Polly's wheat intolerance, I made a gluten free lemon and lime cake for 50 people. 

The recipe I use is based upon one in Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet And Chocolate Heartache, which uses finely grated courgettes and carrots as key ingredients in the cake batter.  As well as being gluten free, it has the added bonus of only having about a third of the usual amount of sugar and also being dairy free, the only fat in the cake coming from the egg and ground almonds, which are much better for you than butter.  When you describe the cake on paper you'd never believe how delicious it actually is, plus it has the huge advantage of being a cake that is actually good for you!

The only trouble with this cake, is that it can be slightly temperamental as the water content in the vegetables can vary hugely, depending on the season, their size and how fresh they are.  This batch turned out to be extra moist and the cake took double the amount of time to cook than it should have done.  Polly had given Brighton Bakery a mention in her party invitation and lots of my friends were going to be there too so there was really nowhere to hide if the cake turned out badly.  I was worried.

The problem is, you can't cut a slice out of the cake to try it until it's too late.  I had to have faith in my judgement and carry on with decorating the cake and at least this could redeem me if the inside turned out dry.  Polly didn't want a cliched Mexican design with 3D cacti and sombreros so I had to think a little more abstract.  My first thought was to try and replicate a Mexican cut paper design that my friend Laura used on a stunning cushion she made:

(c) Laura Tovey

But alas I think this would be too intricate to do justice to the design in freehand, and I'm really trying hard not to keep buying new cake tools and cutters (honest Melissa!).  I did like the idea of including birds, as it was a nice symbol for Polly and Michael flying away on their adventure.  So I did a search on Google Images and came across the most fantastic Mexican bird design:

(NB If this is your image please let me know so that I can credit you!)

I knew I couldn't recreate the exact intricacies of the design but I used it as my inspiration and this is what I came up with:

The two birds have slightly different designs, all cut free hand from sugarpaste (and with the help of two piping nozzles to cut the circles).

I finished off the design by adding some colourful flowers round the outside and some added details in the same colours used on the birds.  As always, it took me longer than I thought it would as all the individual cut out pieces are quite fiddley but I was really pleased with the result:

Melissa and I dropped the cake off at lunchtime and Polly and Michael really seemed to love it.  Polly said that she's the smaller bird - I'm still trying to figure out which one that is, considering they were cut from the same template... 

We left for a few hours to take advantage of an afternoon in the capital.  We took a walk round Borough Market then along the South Bank to the National Theatre to look at the landscape photography exhibition and a quick look into the Tate Modern.  There's few things I miss about London, but those are probably my top 3 favourite places that I used to enjoy going to.  All the while we were enjoying our afternoon of culture, I had a niggle in my mind and a worry in my belly that the cake was going to be dry which meant I could never fully relax.  Melissa and I went back to the party at about 6pm and two thirds of the cake was already gone.  That had to be a good sign but I was still worried.  I had to try a slice for quality control.... luckily it was still lovely and moist and really tasty.  If I was really nitpicking the very edges were just a little too browned but it didn't seem like anybody else noticed, and by the time we went there were only 3 slices left.  Hurrah!

So Polly and Michael - it was a great party, we loved catching up with everyone and will really miss you.  Stay in touch and roll on 2014 for when you return :o) xx

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

Woodland Animal Cake

For my latest commission I was asked to make a birthday cake for a one year old boy called Albert.  His bedroom is decorated with woodland animals so his mum asked me to create something along the same theme as the centrepiece for his first birthday party.
 
I had so much fun designing this one and creating the cute creatures to go round the outside. Here's how it turned out:

I started with a classic vanilla madeira cake, filled with raspberry conserve and italian meringue buttercream which is just the lightest, super smooth and utterly butterly creamy buttercream you can make.  I started making it a couple of months ago - it's a bit fiddly but I will never go back to regular buttercream, it pales in comparison.
 
Once I had covered the cake with a thin layer of buttercream and cream coloured sugarpaste I had a blank canvas for my design.  As I was decorating this cake freehand, without any moulds or cutters, the first element I had to get in place was the tree.  I rolled a layer of chocolate brown sugarpaste and used a funky new impression mat I bought which gives a tree grain texture when pressed into the sugarpaste.  I then cut out the tree shape freehand.  I deliberately made the tree longer at the top and bottom so that I could get it in the right place and then trim to size.
 
Next I added the grass trim round the bottom of the cake using the same technique as in the footballer cake I made a couple of months ago.  It's good to have a pattern, ribbon or trim of some sort to go round a cake as it really finishes it off and also hides any little imperfections that you may have from trimming the sugarpaste that covers the cake.
  
Then I had lots of fun creating all the woodland creatures that went round the side of the cake.  I wanted them to be bold and graphic but not too cartoony. I chose a few complementary colours and made everything freehand as I went along, starting with a cunning fox:
 

 
You can just about see the wee hedgehogs on the right.  There was also a bluebird flying, a few red toadstools and a badger:
 

 
And finished off with another bluebird and an owl on the top of the tree:
 

I created the texture on the owl's belly using the top of a piping nozzle at an angle.  I also used a different piping nozzle to cut the circles for his eyes - I find them so handy and probably use them more for cutting out sugarpaste than for piping!

I then finished off the cake with a big number one and Albert's name.  I had planned to write Happy Birthday, but I think it would have looked too crowded and decided it was better to keep it simple:

When I came home the other day the answerphone was flashing with a lovely message from Albert's mum saying how much she had liked the cake and that it really made a great centrepiece for Albert's first birthday party.  It's so nice when people take the time to say thank you, I put a lot of love into the cakes I make and it makes it all worth it when you know your creations have made somebody happy.