Lived a ma-a-an, Who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life,
In the la-a-and of submarines
We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine….

I’ll save you the rest of the song, I’m sure we all know how it goes. I remember being taught it in primary school… It made a nice change from all the hymns we had to learn.

This is a recent cake we’ve made.. finished this morning to be delivered tomorrow. But since this is a little different from the everyday bits and pieces I’ve been putting up here I thought I’d make it a special entry. The regular Friday Round-Up will be up later today.

It’s a ten inch round chocolate cake, filled with raspberry jam. Crumb coated in chocolate buttercream then covered in fondant. All the detail work is made from fondant. Cut out and put together like a jigsaw before putting it on the cake.

Today I’ll be making some cupcakes to go alongside it.

A 60th birthday was approaching, we were asked to provide the cake.. With a small catch, it needed delivering to New Orleans.*

We were given fairly free reign with this cake, as long as it fed 200 people, tasted good and had a 60s/hippy theme then all was well. Given the delivery requirements we also had to make sure it was transportable, meaning most of it needed to be set up on site.

To fulfil the size requirement we started out with a base, the flower bed, half chocolate cake and half butter cake it was made up of 3 half sheet cakes. Totalling 18″ wide by 33″ long! Wanting to add a bit of pizzazz we made a stem coming up from the centre, with a sunflower head at a 45 degree angle on top of it, with the surprise aspect of the sunflower spun! The sunflower head was a lemon chiffon cake, nice and light yet flavourful. We created the look of the seeds in the centre with chocolate chips glued on with royal icing.

The flowers filling the bed were made form gumpaste. We made them abstract shapes, and in variegated colours, some were even marbled in several colours. We couldn’t transport them assembled so the stems and leaves were made and the flower heads added on site.

We topped the base cakes with a layer of chocolate buttercream and then some cookie crumbs for the dirt effect.

As a final touch some peace signs were added to the garden.

The cake had the perfect site at the venue, a table with spotlights above it. So with the dimmed lights of the party it really stood out.

We are pleased to say the cake was demolished and everyone enjoyed it, many people took samples of each flavour. As a nice touch, one that we were pleased to see, many of the children got sent home with one of the flowers as a token.

Here’s a brief video of the spinning sunflower in action.

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*I should make the point here, we don’t usually deliver cakes to 500 miles away. This was an exception.

The first known recipe using the term “cupcake” appeared in an American cookbook in 1826, although they were probably made long before then. It became revolutionary because of the short length of time it took to cook, their size meaning that the outside was not burnt before the inside was baked. In recent years the U.S. has had something of a great cupcake awakening, as blogs and bakeries have devoted themselves to its pleasures (with at least a half dozen bakeries dedicated to cupcakes in Austin alone). Some attribute this renewed popularity to the cupcake-indulging characters of HBO’s Sex and the City, and food historian Susan Purdy also credits dietary awareness – “you can have your low-calorie cake and eat it, too.”

Either way, this was to be no ordinary cupcake. This was to be a giant cupcake, standing at 10 inches wide, and almost a foot tall.

Sadly the entire thing is not cake, it wasn’t meant to feed that many people, the cup portion is made entirely from styrofoam, covered in fondant.

The top portion is all cake. We took a standard round cake and carved it into a dome. Using fondant we made the swirls that would later form the detail of the “icing” on top. Covered in a layer of pink fondant we  made inch long “sprinkles” and a little cherry to go on top!

This was a new flavour combination for us, chocolate mint. They wanted it to taste like a peppermint patty. Both the cake and the buttercream was chocolate mint flavour, we did consider splitting it up and having a chocolate cake with mint icing, but felt that having both of them the same flavour would work better.

The one in chocolate had to be film or book themed so I went with Harry Potter. Using two big heavy tomes (titled from the series) as my base I then had the phoenix, Faulkes, rising from them. As a small additional detail I made a pair of Potter style glasses to sit on the corner. This utilised all three main flavours of chocolate (milk, dark and white) whilst also showing a combination of tempering work, and modelling chocolate.

The sugar showpiece was an abstract piece, demonstrating several techniques. Among them are pulled and blown sugar, net sugar (the backdrop) and straw sugar (the large pink piece). Sugar does not keep well in the Texan summer so it didn’t last too long sadly.

Wanting to build a bigger and much more impressive cake than the past we settled on the majority of it being made from styrofoam, with only the top four inches being edible. This meant we could get an impressive centrepiece, while not having so much cake left over we’re eating it for months!

The cake was a butter cake, tinted a wonderful brain colour, filled with a black raspberry jam.

As the skull turned into a more stylised shape, to allow for maximum cake capacity on the top there, we decided to go for a dia de los muertos theme, painting it with bright colours.

We briefly considered a tiered cake, with each person getting a tier each, but put that idea to the side after deciding that it would be unfair to have one person get a large cake while the person who got the top tier would get a tiny one.

In the end all four cakes were 9″ round, with the flavour and the base colour as the favourites of the intended recipient. The patterns are in the other three colours to tie the cake together. Each cake was able to move around the centre pole so they could be positioned as desired, but we felt the spiral looked best.

The top purple cake is a super intense, chocolate fudge cake made with 100% Venezuelan Black Cacao with a chocolate fudge icing.

The blue is a spice cake with a pumpkin buttercream, a new recipe for us that we were very excited to be able to use.

The red cake is a pina colada, a pineapple cake with a coconut buttercream.

The red cake is a red velvet with a cream cheese icing.

And of course every Beatles themed party needs a Beatles themed cake.

The cake of the day was Ringo Starr’s bass drum. Made of a lemon chiffon cake with vanilla English buttercream. The drum face was covered in fondant, to get that pure white, but the rest of the cake was covered in white modeling chocolate. All the drum pegs were made of the modeling chocolate too. We made this cake taller than usual to get the proportions closer to that of a bass drum.