Curious Confections » Everyday Cakes

Stars In The Sky

Gemma — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:12:46 +0000

For the local astronomical society we made a butter cake with English buttercream. Covered in fondant and airbrushed to resemble the night sky, with just the last hints of daylight on the horizon.

The stars are pearl dragees and royal icing, for some variety in size, then we added some large stars on wires.

Toga!

Gemma — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:30:07 +0000

We were set the task of creating a Roman themed cake “with pillars and marble” for a toga party. Settling on a slightly different presentation to normal we created the base with the cake being held up by the pillars, painted to resemble marble.

The main challenge was how to decorate buttercream to look like marble, after a few practices we found a method that seems to work for now, giving light and dark variances in colour, and veins running through it.

We added the age in Roman numerals around the side and then researched the Latin equivalent for Happy Birthday (as I discovered, the Romans didn’t celebrate birthdays as we do, so there’s no direct translation, the inscription we found appears to approximately mean ‘congratulations on the moment of your birth/natality’

The cake was a vanilla butter cake with black raspberry filling.

Christmas Is All Around

Gemma — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:03:19 +0000

And since it’s the festive time of year, what’s more festive than a Christmas Cake.

Now, this is apparently an entirely English thing that I’m introducing America to, but it’s a good cake, even if it is a fruit cake.

But it’s a good fruit cake (I’ve seen the ones in the shops here, I wouldn’t eat one if you paid me!), and here’s the important bit, it’s soaked in alcohol!

The cake making is in fact a process that takes a few months, starting by soaking the fruit in alcohol, then making the cake. Once the cake is made it then gets soaked in alcohol. In this case we used Cherry Bourbon.

A week before Christmas it’s covered in marzipan (homemade, and less sickly sweet than the shop bought marzipan here), and once that’s dried out it’s covered in fondant. From there you can decorate it as you wish.

For this cake we made some white modelling chocolate and dyed it, cutting out several hundred leaves (no, I’m not kidding, it was 800 in total). Then we decorated the cake to look like a Christmas wreath.

Happy Holidays