12th February 2011 - A Valentines cake with Westie

Well its time for St Valentines day again and this year I was determined I was going to make my wife Lel, a cake especially for her.  A heart shaped triple layered orange flavoured sponge cake with an orange buttercream filling and crumb coat, containing real Orange juice and orange zest.

The cake was then covered in marzipan because my perfect wife loves marzipan and I am quite parshall to it myself.... so I wasn't going to complain if that is what she wants.  Once the marzipan was finished and smoothed out i put on the red fondant covering for all love hearts are red!!!

I made tiny roses out of sugarpaste, some of them even had little leaves on them. these are tricky to make to begin with, but after doing a dozen of them I was beginning to get the Knack of it.

Now for the hard part.... A sugarpaste Westie.  Why a Westie you ask?  because if you look down at the first entry to my blog you will see we have a Westie who is now 7 months old.  He is my wife's baby =].  This took a couple of hours of trial, error and alterations to get right but I think I did a good job in the end.... Oh I hope I did because if she doesn't think it looks like a Westie I will get my butt kicked.....

Well now my mini Alfie Westie sugarpaste thingy ma bob is ready, all that's left to do is place a few different sized white sugarpaste hearts over the plain red of the heart cake.  Then arrange and stick down the roses and Alfie..... Job Done and I think it looks good.

Thats one thick chunky cake!!!

Aww lots of sweet things going on =]

9th February 2011 - Lel's Road to Heaven

Lel was off work today and decided she fancied a little baking time for a change.  As I stole the roll of cake maker in the family from her I couldn't say no could I.  So my beautiful wife baked some gorgeous rocky road muffins while I was sleeping.  These are the best muffins I have tasted with a moist sticky sponge.... perfection is all I can say about them.

 

My wifes Rocky Roads are heavenly!!!

8th February 2011 - For friends and Family.

I was asked by some work colleagues to make a cake for then for tonight.  I decided to make a Victoria sponge cake with fresh fruit (strawberries.... because everyone loves those) and double cream filling.

I didn't have all the ingredients to hand so I had to go shopping this morning before I went to bed (I do night shift and had only been in since 6am.) 

Not only did I have to get ingredients for the work cake but also for the one I made for my kids, wife and me.  We had blueberries as well as strawberries though, for that extra tasty twist.  I couldn't use blueberries in the one for work because a lot of people don't like them... Bless 'em =] it's their loss 'cos they taste great.

I forgot to take a photo of the work cake before I wrapped it up.  Just look at the one below but imagine three whole strawberries on the top and no blueberries showing in the filling.



Strawberry Blues Cake

5th February 2011 - First time piping.

Well it is time I had a go with a piping bag..... Just simple star shapes but still it is my first try.  The cake I made is chocolate sponge made with a Victoria sponge mix but re-placing 1oz of flour for 1oz of cocoa powder.  The filling was a chocolate buttercream as were the stars I piped on the top.  Unfortunately I didn't make quite enough so I couldn't decorate the whole surface of the cake with rings of stars.

Once I finished the piping, I popped the cake in the fridge to cool the buttercream a little, as it had been warmed by my hands in the bag a little too much.

While that was cooling I tried my hand at actually decorating some butterflies properly for the cake.  I know I did some last week but I didn't spend much time on them.





Stars and Butterflies