Triple Chocolate Cake

Another triple chocolate cake, this time with some simple decoration, a border of crispy chocolate sprinkles and some white chocolate piping, scrummy!

Red Velvet Cupcake

A new cupcake flavour has arrived to join the gang - Red Velvet. 

It's another one of our American inspired range, I say inspired because we've come up with our own recipes for this range.  After doing some research and becoming familiar with the main ingredients and flavours to add, we've adapted those flavours into our own cake recipe.  It is thought that this cake got it's red colouring from a chemical reaction that took place between the cocoa and buttermilk that was used, today red food colouring is generally used to create the red colour.

Red Velvet is a light chocolate cake which is red in colour with a cream cheese frosting and we've completed our cupcakes with some red sugar sprinkles.

West Ham Football Shirt Cake

Not being a football fan I definitely had to research the latest West Ham football shirt for this cake.  Jay told me that the important elements to this cake were the hammers on the emblem and getting the colours right.  I think I managed to get the colours pretty spot on, it took a bit of time to get the sugar paste to the right shade, which meant quite a bit of kneading, so my arms got a bit of a work out. 

I used grape violet, red and navy to get the maroon colour and a combo of ice blue and navy for the blue.  I added the colourings a little at a time in case it came out too strong, it's always best to add colour gradually as you can always add more, but you can't get rid of it once you've added it, to lighten it you'd need to mix in more white sugar paste which would be a waste.

The emblem was piped on using royal icing with the tiniest hole I could create in my parchment piping bag, seeing as I had to make sure I got those important hammers in! 

Baby Shower Cake

Having a baby shower and not knowing what sex the baby is going to be meant making a baby shower cake that needed to be suitable for a boy or a girl.  So I thought I'd stick with pastel shades and use the neutral colours, yellow, green and lilac, as well as pink and blue. 

We were asked to incorporate baby themed items, naturally, and kept things simple with the design.  I thought it'd be nice to add some colour to the sides of the cake and piped coloured stripes all around the sides, making sure they were as straight as possible, it takes a steady hand and an even amount of pressure to create an even thickness. 

The cake flavour is chocolate orange, which means the whole cake was crumb coated with chocolate orange buttercream, which can be a bit worrying when it comes to covering the cake with white sugar paste.  It's best to make sure the board is clean of any buttercream and make sure the sugar paste is rolled out a little thicker to avoid any tearing, after all, you don't want a brown smudge appearing anywhere on your finished cake.

Eggbert Cake

For those who can remember, this is Eggbert from Button Moon, he was friends with Tina Tea-Spoon and he happens to be a favourite of my sister, she loved Button Moon as a kid.  My mum thought it would be a good idea to surprise her with this cake for her birthday and she loved it.

It's amazing to think that as kids we were perfectly happy to sit and watch a show where all the characters were made out of old bottles and cans and things you find round the house, whilst it wasn't a high budget programme, it was still lots of fun back in the day.

Tina Tea-Spoon, Mr Spoon and Eggbert
http://www.buttonmoon.tv/

Betty Boop Cake

I had to do some more carving with this cake, Betty is all cake underneath the sugar paste, but we left her on a slab of cake to get more serving portions from it.  We had to cover the cake in two different coloured pieces of sugar paste too which was a new technique for us. 

Firstly we covered Betty in a pale flesh colour and cut around her so only the Betty part of the cake was covered.  Then we covered the rest of the cake with red fondant, which had to temporarily cover Betty, so plenty of icing sugar was dusted over the places we didn't want the sugar paste to stick.  Once the sugar paste had been smoothed into place we could cut around Betty and remove the red sugar paste that was covering her.  Thankfully it didn't stick or leave any red marks on 'nude' Betty.  All that was left to do was paint on the features of Betty and give her some clothes to wear, and some piped hearts and a birthday message, and a black and white polka dot ribbon around the base of the cake which fitted in nicely with the style of the cake.