Who says Easter is over??

Ever since I was little I've always managed to squirrel away my Easter eggs to keep me in a steady supply of chocolate long after the Easter bunny had disappeared.  Maybe I had taken a cue from my dad who always to prolong the Easter celebrations by eating hot cross buns for breakfast from January to May.  He starts eating mince pies in early November too, I like to think that he's keeping the holiday spirit alive, and that I get to do that too by making celebration cakes every week of the year with the Brighton Bakery.

So with that in mind, I thought I would share with you my slightly-after-the-event recipe for hot cross bun pudding.  It's my take on a bread and butter pudding - I made one for Melissa and me the other night with some leftover buns we had stashed away in the freezer and it was such a treat, a real old school comforting pud.  Yum.

Hot Cross Bun Pudding

3 hot cross buns*
About 2 tablespoons butter
30g dried apricots, roughly chopped (optional)
2 eggs, beaten
2 level tablespoons caster sugar
125ml milk
100 ml single cream
zest of about 1/4 orange
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

*This really works best with stale buns (as they absorb the custard much better) so if they are fresh, split them and leave them out for a couple of hours first. 

Method
1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. Split your hot cross buns down the middle and spread each side with butter.  Cut each in half along the diagonal and arrange the triangles pointy-end up in a small-medium pudding dish.  Sprinkle over the apricots.
3. Whisk together the eggs and sugar, then add the milk, cream orange zest and vanilla extract and whisk again until combined.  Pour over the hot cross buns ensuring they are all doused in the custard and leave to absorb for about 10 minutes.  If you like you can add a light dusting of freshly grated nutmeg on the top.
4. Bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes until puffed up and golden brown on top.
Serve warm with extra cream.  Mmmm.

This is such an easy pudding you won't regret making it.  If you fancy a chocolate version you could substitute the apricots for chocolate drops or even chopped up leftover Easter eggs.

So from a spot of home baking back to my home baking business, here's a picture of a lovely Springtime and Easter inspired wedding cake I made.

Well, it was definitely Spring-like on the outside, but the inside was a rather Christmassy Chocolate Orange Cake with Chocolate Orange Buttercream.  The bride said that at first she was laughed at for picking that flavour but all her guests agreed that it was a great choice and they all loved eating it.  Well I think she must also have taken a leaf out of my dad's book, and I always salute anyone that takes the unconventional option. 

Congratulations Radka, I hope you and your new husband have a very happy life together.

Until next time, happy baking x

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'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!

Wedding fever

Now that spring is here, there must be the smell of romance in the air as we've been getting lots enquiries for wedding cakes.  It's one of the few occasions where people get the chance to go all out for a fantastic cake, and I love working with couples to help come up with a design that fits in perfectly with their day.
 
A few weeks ago, Melissa and I attended our first wedding fayre in Burgess Hill, which went really well, although we did learn a few good lessons from the day:
1. Don't stay out late the night before - wedding fayres and hangovers are not a good combination;
2. People love free cake, but not as much as you might think - I made two 10" square cakes for tasters, thinking 100 portions each of two flavours would be about right for about 250 brides (plus their fiances, bridesmaids, mothers, kids...).  We brought back over half of each cake and even I can't make my way through that much cake before it goes off.  Luckily we knew a few people that could help us out...
3. Invest in a screen to put up behind the table - we thought these were provided so felt a bit foolish when we had nothing to hang our sign on!
 
Still, you only learn by experience, and we had a great day, generating lots of interest in our cakes.  Here's a photo of yours truly waiting for the crowd of brides to arrive:
  

 
I was really pleased with how the show cakes turned out -  I think they reflect our quirky style and also show a range of designs to appeal to different tastes:

 

And thanks to the success of the day and our recent marketing efforts with Your Sussex Wedding Magazine orders are now starting to fill up for later on in the year, which is great.
 
Meanwhile, here's a cake I delivered back in February, which I was really pleased with.  It was for a lovely Brighton couple, Julia and Chris, who had their wedding at the stunning Newick Park near Lewes.  They chose a chocolate cake with chocolate Italian meringue buttercream filling and with Grand Prix red roses cascading down the side - the scent of the roses was stunning.

Congratulations Julia and Chris, I'm so pleased to have been a part of your day, and thrilled that you loved the cake.

If you like the look of any of these cakes and would like me to make a cake for your upcoming wedding or special event, please email brightonbakery@hotmail.co.uk - I love to create bespoke designs so feel free to send me any ideas and we will come up with a fantastic and unique cake to be the centrepiece for your day.

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