In The Pink

This week I was asked to make a wedding cake that was a little bit different from the style of cake I normally make.  The couple had asked for me to incorporate rose flavour and to have fresh fruit on top of a layered sponge cake.  I suggested a vanilla sponge cake, with each layer drizzled with a rose syrup and filled with rose meringue buttercream and fresh raspberries.  Here's how it turned out:

 
To elevate the decoration on top I added some handmade sugar roses and blossoms and some butterflies which I cut from modelling paste and carefully threaded onto wires and left to dry overnight.  I was really pleased with how they looked against the fresh fruit.

  

And pink seems to be a bit of a theme at the moment.  Here's an 18th birthday cake I made for a girl who has a passion for handbags and loves pink.  Her mum suggested the tree design and so I found the perfect sugarpaste cutting tool which makes 6 different handbags and I ordered it as soon as I'd confirmed the booking.  Unfortunately it didn't arrive in time and I had to cut all the shapes by hand.  Just as I finished adding the final handbag the post arrived with the cutter in it - typical!

 

And for some homemade treats, I've been experimenting with pink grapefruit recipes after picking up some lovely pink grapefruits when I saw them on special offer.  With them I made two batches of marmalade - one three fruit marmalade which paired the grapefruit with orange and lemon, and one of pure pink grapefruit which was my favourite - it's got a jewel-like garnet pink colour and a beautiful flavour.  

There was one last grapefruit left in the bowl this morning and I decided to try making a grapefruit curd with some leftover egg yolks I had in the fridge.  I was hoping for a lovely pale pink colour to the curd but the orange of the egg yolks seems to have taken centre stage. 

If you really wanted to you could add a couple of drops of pink food colouring, but the flavour is what really counts and it's lovely and delicate and makes a pleasant change from lemon curd.  Now all I have to do is make some scones to go with it!

Yellow rose birthday cake

It's been a busy week in the Brighton Bakery house and I've finally had a chance to catch up with my blog posts :o)

You may already have noticed the fruits of my labour this morning - the new and improved design to this blog.  I'm the first to admit that I'm no whiz when it comes to these things (I'd rather be baking and eating cake than trying to figure out how to use html code or use photoshop with anything other than trial and error guesswork) but I'm pleased that it now ties in with our new Brighton Bakery website branding.  Please drop me a comment and let me know what you think :o)

And speaking of the new website, I'm delighted to say that it's already had a positive impact on our business.  We were invited by Theatre Royal to present our cakes for consideration for their new Parlour Cafe and have already received another cake commission just a few days after the site was launched.

The cake was a standard 10" square cake with some handmade sugar roses and a piped message.  I'd just taken down the order when the customer told me, "it's a shame that the birthday girl is diabetic so won't really be able to have any".  That defeats the whole point of a birthday cake!  Now I can't make any claims about cakes being diabetic-friendly, but I recommended our speciality Orange and Lemon cake which uses carrot, courgette and ground almonds in the recipe.  It is a really moist and delicious cake, but has less than half the fat and sugar of a regular lemon madeira cake.  It also has the bonus of being gluten free which is great if any of the party guests have wheat intolerances.

When I delivered the cake, the client was really pleased.  I hope that her mum Jacqueline enjoyed it too - especially as she would actually be able to eat a slice!