We were asked to make a Guinness cake, in the shape of a wooden keg, it sounded like fun and let us try out new recipes to get it right! In the end we settled on the Nigella Lawson Guinness and chocolate cake, it was rich and flavourful, a definite winner! With the cream cheese icing to balance it it was wonderful!

We didn’t want to do a full keg, but it ended up being more of a half-a-keg, I guess it was a 3/4 keg! We stacked 6 layers and then carved the sides.

To create the wood effect we marbled the fondant, and then scored in the graining. The sides were all done as individual planks, the top as one circle.

I took a look at actual Guinness kegs, but they looked pretty boring, so I took some artistic license. Two metal bands at the top and one at the bottom (if it was a full keg it would have had two) and then a plaque with the Guinness logo on it.

It’s January again, Epiphany has passed and it’s King Cake, sorry, Mardi Gras season. *grins* Though I do tend to think if it more as King Cake season.

The end of the season – Mardi Gras day itself is early this year, coming along on February 21st. That still gives you 5 more weeks of eating king cakes though.

The past two years I have talked about the history of king cakes, and how to make them. This year I’m going to stick with just letting you know that we think we’ve gotten that recipe just about nailed and so we are selling them, to you.

We’ve been playing about with fillings now and we’re proud to say we have seven different flavours of king cakes to offer!

So, starting with the traditional filling, (cinnamon sugar) you can get a small (8-10 servings) for $10 or a medium (16-20 servings) for $20.

The filled king cakes are $12 for a small and $24 for a large and you have the choice of -
- Apple
- Cream Cheese
- Lemon Curd
- Pecan Praline
- Chocolate Hazelnut
- Berry

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re interested in trying one!

Our good friends at the Austin Astronomical Society once more got their holiday party cake from us. It’s such a pleasure to get repeat customers like this, although it does mean we have to constantly strive to top last year’s cake!

As before, they had a butter cake with our English buttercream, a nice simple flavour that’s a crowd pleaser.

Before covering the cake we took a melon baller and an ice cream scoop to create some larger craters. Then once it was covered in fondant we added some smaller craters with a balling tool. We pinched the fondant up to create a ridge around a couple of the larger craters.

A blast with the airbrush filled in some shadows, and spread a thin sheen of luster over the entire cake.

.. I feel like I need to photoshop an alien into one of these photos!

So, I know I’m about a week late in posting a Halloween cake, but lets just ignore that and carry on shall we?

This cake was a personal one, I made it for our Halloween party which is always a good time to test out recipes on our guinea pigs *ahem* friends! I initially had huge plans for an extravagant cake, as I do, but time, money and home renovations nixed that idea.. I’m not going to say what it was since I now intend to do it next year. So there was last minute brainstorming as I just could not decide how to decorate my cake.

Cupcakes were an initial idea since we had found some skull sprinkles that I really wanted to use, but since cupcakes dry out so quickly I likely would have been making them the day of the party and I really wanted to avoid that, so a full cake it was.

But I still wanted to use those sprinkles, and so the design blossomed. The skulls could go on little fondant plaques to make something akin to cameos… where to use the cameos? Well, as a joining point between swags would probably work. Ok, swags… what next, it’s Halloween, lets add stripes on the sides, definitely black.. and purple would work, nice traditional Halloween colours. So that’s the sides sorted, what about the top. Definitely a piped design, probably in royal icing, but what. I just could not decide and then Michael suggested a nice big spider, even sorting out a design for me so it had a skull on it’s body.

I actually ended up making this cake start to finish all in one day!

Once the cake was stacked and crumb coated I kneaded the colour into the fondant. I was aiming for purple but starting from scratch (rather than buying pre coloured fondant) purple is really a pain to make. We’ve tried in the past and ended up with a really gray-ish shade, so once I hit this shade of burgundy I decided that I was happy with that.

The cake was covered and then taped up with a very low tack masking tape so I could airbrush the stripes. They ended up fuzzy around the edges rather than sharp but I think that gave it a nice look.

This was my first attempt putting swags on a cake, definitely something to practice on a personal cake. They weren’t as perfectly even as I would like them to be but not bad at all for a start. I stuck them on with royal icing and put on the cameos with the same.

I had prepared the spider body early in the morning, piping the skull and then filling in the body so the skull was in the body rather than on top (it also meant I could trace the design), it got a few cracks as I put it on the cake, after piping on the spider webs, but it looked pretty good. I gave it an outline and then piped on some loooooong legs, so they spread over the entire top of the cake – that’s a 9″ wide spider *shudders*

A band of orange ribbon (that I had actually bought to finish my costume) gave the cake it’s finishing touch.

It is our tradition to hold a Halloween party for all of our friends. We try (where possible) to go all out and make it a special occasion.. this starts with the invites. This year we tried to make something that was more of a keepsake… a party favour, more than a throwaway invite.

We actually came up with the idea back in July, but failed to actually make anything until the start of this month.. bad us!

We took jars from the dollar store and some of the grow-in-water cheap toys, snakes and body parts, with some plastic snakes for good measure. We cut the snakes down to a manageable size and each jar got some snake pieces, a body part and some plastic snakes.

We took some of the sanitiser mix Michael uses for homebrewing since it goes a little cloudy when it gets old, we added a touch of yellow and green food colouring and a pinch of cocoa powder to make it look really quite funky.

Several of the “things-in-jars” tutorials we found online covered the lids in twine to hide the modern lid, this seemed like a good idea so we did that and even tea-stained it a little to make it look less pristine.

We cheated and used adhesive labels, printed the specimen label with a laser printer and then tea stained the pages to make them old. They were hand cut out for the more aged look and stuck on the jars. We attacked them with sandpaper and chipped and peeled edges to wear them down and make them look battered and worn, some extra tea darkened the edges.

They then took several baths in hot gulf wax to really seal them in. I’m fairly sure even though the toys had been submerged for a week they hadn’t reached their full growth potential as I’m sure the one we have sitting on our shelf now has less room in it than it did!

Once they were completely dried and set we packaged them up in boxes stuffed with shredded paper. Wrapped in brown paper and finished with black ribbon for the full effect we spent an evening hand delivering them.

We obviously want our friends to know it has arrived and not leave it sat on the doorstep, but it is our mission to always  deliver with no one noticing. So after we had pulled away from each house a text message was sent:

Our tracking services show that your package from Innsport has arrived. We request that you check your doorstep and confirm delivery.

(Innsport is a town in the Lovecraft mythos, since our specimen labels said Miskatonic University we figured it fit in).

We decided on the house to stop and take a photo on the doorstep.. yes they have a frosted glass door but we could be certain of reaching there in daylight and they had no windows looking over the approach to the house. This was also where I was caught out and discovered… notice the little face in the door? He certainly gave me a fright *grins* But I’ll claim my record still stands – no person has noticed me while I’m sneaking about their house, leaving packages on their doorstep!

If you are looking to get into the Halloween spirit head on over to our friends at Halloween Magazine and take a peek at the 2 part interview with our resident Mad Scientist Michael!

It’s hotter than hell down here in Texas at the moment, making a devil’s food cake more than appropriate. Maybe I can bribe the heat with the cupcakes to go away and not return!

Sadly I can’t claim this recipe as my own, I made no changes (excepting making cupcakes rather than one big cake and that doesn’t really count). The honour of this wonderful recipe goes to Alton Brown.. not my favourite cooking personality, but occasionally he pulls out something good!

Whisk the boiling water and the cocoa powder together and set aside. I’ve been told this helps the flavour of the cocoa be more fuller.

Combine the sugar, flour, baking soda and salt. Then in a separate bowl combine the oil, sour cream, eggs and yolk, whisk in the cocoa mix (this won’t look too pleasant but it’s ok!).

Add all the liquids to the dry mix and beat until the batter is smooth. It is a very loose batter for a cake so don’t be surprised.

Bake at 325F until it springs back to the touch.

I didn’t however stick with Alton’s frosting for the Devil’s food cake, I much prefer my own fudge icing recipe. Butter is melted and  the cocoa is mixed in with it. Then powdered sugar and milk are added alternately and it is beaten to consistency.

I piped the icing onto the cupcakes, it becomes reasonable firm at room temperature so if you’ve done a single cake make the icing when the cake is cool and decorate immediately other wise you’re going to have to put it in the microwave for short bursts to soften it up.

I took these to work to share… they didn’t last long at all!

Firefly has always been a favourite show of ours. Neither of us discovered it until it had sadly ended but it hooked us in and is a show we can happily re-watch (when we have that elusive thing known as free time).

Apologies to anyone not familiar with the show Firefly, a lot of this post is going to seem like gibberish, guess you’ll just have to go and watch the show to find out what I’m talking about! *grins*

The cake needed to be relatively simple so we were left with the brief of Firefly “themed” and just make sure it feeds the right number of people… And make sure it’s chocolate, lots of chocolate! (it’s chocolate cake with a rum syrup and chocolate buttercream).

Size wise we went for a half-sheet cake (12″x17″) with a 10″ round cake on top. This splitting of layers meant that we could incorporate a couple of different elements into the cake. We decided early on that the round cake would be turned into the Serenity logo. The metallic red disc with a burnished gold centre and Chinese characters (that we assume actually say “serenity”).

What then to do with the sheet cake underneath? Finally we settled on decorating it to look like a metal hull (of a ship), albeit a rather rusted one.. maybe it’s a Reaver ship! *grins*

Then we added two logos onto that cake. The Browncoats and Blue Sun, both influential in the plot lines. I wish I’d taken a picture of the full Blue Sun logo before half of it got covered!

A banner at the front declared Happy Birthday to the birthday girls, in both English and Chinese since language in the series contains Chinese elements.. at least I hope the banner says Happy Birthday in Chinese.. I’m going on what google translate told me!

A finishing touch of blue gloves for the “hands of blue, two by two” and the cake was done.

It’s the first time we’ve used fabric to cover a cake board and we’ll definitely be doing it again. We really loved how the textured red looked under the cake.

We got a request for a peanut butter cup cake, it didn’t need to be huge, the shape and flavour were the important bits.

We umm-ed and ahh-ed over trying to make a peanut butter flavoured cake but finally settled on a chocolate cake with a peanut butter flavoured icing.

The cake had some mild carving to give it it’s distinctive shape.

Fondant or buttercream was of course not going to do the trick so we covered the cake with milk modelling chocolate to replicate the chocolate coating.

As a finishing touch we made a wrapper for it out of, well, wrapping paper. Painting it with tempera paint in a logo very reminiscent to a famous brand but using the recipient’s name instead.

Reviews were glowing, and despite being a chocolate cake the flavour was spot-on. Hooray for peanut butter and chocolate!

That time of year that calls for the mass genocide of that little bug called a crawfish is almost at an end. I’m going to leave the boil details to the Southern boy but I couldn’t let the event pass without making a little something.

When we were buying king cake babies earlier in the year we saw some themed cookie cutters; gators, masks, fleur de lys and of course a crawfish. Well, we couldn’t pass them by… I think I may have a “thing” for random cookie cutters, you never know when you’re going to need one shaped like a margarita glass!

My lemon sugar cookies are my favourite for cut-out cookies, they hold their shape well when baked out. This time I decided to change things up a little by using lime instead of lemon, a minor difference but a tasty one!

The cookies were baked out and left to cool, I had a lot of them!

Next I made a deep red royal icing and piped my outline round each one of them. They’re really a simplified crawfish, doing all the details would be exceedingly fiddly and take a long while.. these took long enough!

Keeping a little bit of the dark red icing to one side thin the rest out and make it a little lighter. Flood inside the borders, using a cocktail stick to spread the icing to fill the gaps.

When that’s dry come back with that thicker dark red and pipe some spots on the crawfishs’ backs. As you can see an actual crawfish has these lumps all over, but that made the cookie look too busy and not so good. Again, this is a simplified crawfish.

Leave to set fully then store in an airtight container until you want them. Of course, I couldn’t let the crawfish get boiled without the “cousins” getting to meet each other!

So, as before, I’m practically begging everyone to call and/or email your Senator and ask that they support SB 81 — specifically supporting it “as is” with the current crop of amendments, as there is little to no time to make any more.  The passing of this bill is the best chance for home-baking Texans to get a legal baking business off the ground without having to scrape up  thousands of dollars in additional fees.  If you would like to help, I ask that you do so very, very soon.

Find out who your Senator is HERE.  More info on the progress of the bill is HERE.