The Last of the Summer Roses!

Hi all! Firstly I apologise for the delay in getting this post up as I was a tad busy over this past weekend! 

So this turn I stretched myself to try and make proper rose petal cupcakes for my beautiful niece Amelie Kennedy (Millie)! The actual cupcake mix was a simple all-in-one recipe from the oh so knowledgeable Mary Berry 

• 100g butter or margerine
• 150g caster sugar
• 150g self raising flour
• 2 large eggs
• 3 tbsp milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence.

Chuck them all in the one (electric) mixing bowl and whiz 'em together. Ta Daa ready to pour in to all the cupcake cases. I used one large spoon (it's a serving spoon I have) which was enough mixture in each case. There's nothing worse than the cupcakes sunken below the top of the case, or they've risen above the case where you have to go cut off the top to even it out so you can ice properly (although this predicament usually is welcome in my house as we get to eat all the cut off tops of the cupcakes........ssshhhh don't tell anyone!!).

So let the cupcakes cook for approx 25 mins, and stick a skewer through them to check they're done completely through (skewer comes out clean), and place on a wire tray to cool.

For the butter cream I just mixed the usual icing sugar, butter and drop of vanilla essence in a large bowl. I find that if you add milk to the mix it goes too creamy and soft, which isn't good to make proper shapes such as the petals. So now for the piece de resistance..........you need your pot of red or pink icing colouring open to hand. You take your piping bag, with nozzle 127 in one hand and a small paint brush in the other. Find where the skinner point of the nozzle is, dip the paint brush in the colouring, and run the paint brush from the narrow part of the tip INSIDE the piping bag, in a straight line all the way to the top of the bag. The reason you need to be careful where you put the stripe is that the narrow part of the nozzle will be the tips of the petal, so this gets some darker colouring to give the real petal effect ya see!!! It'll all make sense soon my friends.

So take your piping bag and fill it with your pink coloured butter cream (don't worry you won't smudge the colour stripe!). With a full piping bag in one hand, and a cupcake in the other, you hold the nozzle directly over the centre of the cupcake at a 90 degree angle. Pipe a small mound, or standing heap, of butter cream to form your centre of the rose. Then carefully position you piping bag with the narrow end of the nozzle facing up to the ceiling and the wider end in the cupcake. Your wrist needs to be at a slight angle (here comes the carpel tunnel again!) and you pipe about 3 small upright arches surrounding the little mound of icing in the centre. So basically each base of the arches are actually on the cupcake itself, with slight lift in the centre. Three arches should suffice to go around your little centre. Then in between each arch you create another arch (possibly higher in height) so your next layer should have 5 arches......and so on.......

Here a guy on YouTube that shows the way to do the roses but even watch it for the pure entertainment, he's a made yoke!!

For the green "leaf effect" I got very lazy and just coloured some butter cream icing with green colouring and piped through a regular star nozzle coming out of the base of the flower/petals. I think the contrast in the colours are more appealing to the eye, and give it that real flower effect. If I was to do these again I would maybe go for a stripe of pink colouring instead of red up through the piping bag, just to give a softer look. It was commented that it looks like ham slices!!!!

Even though this piping effect looks the best, it really does take a lot of pressure on the wrist to tilt as your going around for the arches, whilst also putting pressure on the piping bag to squeeze out basically a lump butter mixed with sugar!! I found that the butter was starting to melt in the bag against my hand....which led to less stiff petals on a few cupcakes.

But when put all together they did look good (they were in this container to be transported up to my niece's christening in Dublin). If they didn't need to travel far I would have liked to put them in to a flower arrangement/basket but I is only learning all this malarkey ya see

Things I learned: 

1) I'm going to have to buy shares in Kerrygold and get deliveries of butter to my house in order to ensure I have enough butter cream for all the cupcakes (all the finicky bits see a lot of butter cream wasted).

2) Use less food colouring in the inside of the bag, or go a shade darker on the whole icing.

3) Do more wrist exercises!!!

4) Take pictures as I go along to help explain my method a lot better.

So stay tuned next time................

Hi, Ho! Kermit the Frog here!

I was contacted via my Facebook page and asked could I do a Kermit the Frog cake by any chance. Sure as Barney in How I Met Your Mother says......"Challenge Accepted"!! So I found a great example of a Kermit Cake online and decided to give it a go. Yes making a cake with Kermit the Frog jumping out of a parcel is a tad ambitious but I managed it........eventually. The actual cake itself was standard Victoria sponge mixture, divided out in to two 8-inch square tins with fudge icing. Whilst it was baking away nicely in the oven, I made up the different colour fondant icings that I needed; purple, green, red, pink and black. Now I must mention that I was also making an Australian Flip Flop Cake for my friends' Bon Voyage party (will blog next), so had spare sponge in order to make Kermit's head. If you want to make extra pieces for the top of a cake, then you could just make the sponge mixture times 1.5 so you could make three 8-inch cake tins. Once the two 8-inch square tins were cooked it was a matter of cooling down, filling and covering with chocolate fudge icing.....simples.

Now for the science bit!!  I could have just made his head out of a lump of icing, but I said I'd give the sponge head a go! I needed to make Kermit's head and body, in correct proportion to each other, but with the effect of his open mouth. I can easily say there was a sponge massacre when I was done! It was very tricky trying to get the head to be two sponge circles open-mouthed, but I managed it in the end. This really is the beauty of fondant icing, you can just cover a multitude of shoddy work!!!!! I placed a bamboo stick through the cake and stuck his body and head on it so it could all stay upright (genius strike again!). His arms were just rolled out lengths of green fondant, pushed a bamboo stick in to it, and rolled it around it again so the stick was covered.

Next was the pink ribbon effect. I rolled wide pieces of pink fondant out flat, cut in straight line with a pizza cutter, and just my magical edible glue to stick it on to give the effect of a wrapped present. I rolled and cut out thinner pieces of the pink fondant for the curled ribbons. Now this I did impress myself with! I got a wooden spoon, wrapped cling film around the handle, then wrapped the thin strips of icing around the handle and left it aside to harden up a bit. So it was just a matter of tidying up Kermit's body and the actual cake by putting some more purple icing, as if he has popped out of the box. The I took the coiled pink icing, slipped them off the wooden spoon (this was the purpose of the cling film) and glued it on to the cake, tucking in the end bits under the large ribbon bits (if ya get my drift!).

Apart from the Electric Picnic cake, this was my first real 3-D cake, and I might as well say it was a success! I'm delighted with how it's turned out. I've learned a few lessons in how to put together cake toppings and features, so I hope it won't take me as long the next time.

Electric Cake!!!

I write this, tired and emotional, after an absolutely cracking weekend at Electric Picnic 2012. We got fantastic weather for the whole weekend. There was a few burny bodies going around on Sunday morning, even though Saturday only seemed overcast. My dear friend Jen is an avid music festival-goer. She threw out a mail early last year with a novel idea that she would like to celebrate her 30th birthday at Electric Picnic 2012! So a year on, and here we finally are - celebrating Jen's birthday at EP.

Since I have delved in to cake decorating world, it would be rude of me not to have a go at making an EP birthday cake. I Google'd "festival cake" and it threw up all sorts of mad yokes. Some cake look phenomenal and some just look weird. So I took the concept from a few cake pictures and came up with this:

You may not think it, but I've learned a thing or two from the previous cakes I've made; prepare as much in advance as possible!! The beauty of fondant icing is it keeps forever (apart from passed it's sell-by date obviously) so you can make all toppings and bits and bobs for the top of the cake a couple of days in advance. The tent is basically a slab of icing because I tried my best to roll out a sheet of icing and hold it up with cocktail sticks to drape down like a tent...............not a hope! It was 10pm and I just didn't have the energy to erect a miniature icing tent. I died a slab of icing yellow (to give a bright colour), and basically shaped it in to a triangle. The "strings" to the side are cocktail sticks, and just small balls of green died icing to look like rocks against the tent strings. The guitar was fairly simple: die a piece of icing red, roll out, cut out guitar body shape. Do the same with a smaller piece of white. The silver bits are silver decorating balls. I died another piece of icing black for the handle and strap, and ran a tub of white icing up along the guitar for the strings. The boots were a funny one! It was basically a lump of white icing moulded in an "L" shape and then I got my nifty ball shaper thingy and buried a hole in the top of the shoe to go down in to it. I had red icing left over from the guitar, so I rolled it out very thinly for the top and bottom of the wellies. Now I recently came across stuff called edible glue for cake decorating which is better to stick decorations to the top of the cake, rather than using butter cream. I was in my element at this point!!! I painted on the glue to the edge of the wellies and slowly attached the teeny tiny strip of rolled red icing, and every time my hand got stuck I could lick off the glue! This would have been fierce handy back when I was 11 and ACTUALLY glued my index finger and thumb together with super-glue (I was committing crimes like the new time back in the 90s without a trace before my skin grew back!).

The following evening I made the actual cake. So I took a normal recipe for a chocolate cake and times by 4 so there would be enough for everyone at the Picnic. As I measured out the ingredients I realised there was pretty much a full bag of sugar and 12 eggs going in to this mammoth cake (pass me the Gaviscon!) It was fairly liquidy mixture so as I poured it out on to the lined baking dish (a rectangular deep roasting dish to be exact), It filled up to near the top. So I said to myself, it looks dense enough, it probably won't rise much. WRONG!! After about 30mins the cake rose, and rose, and rose!! It was ginormous!!! It was now basically a big mountain slab of chocolate cake. The next challenge was trying to slice it through the middle to put some fudge butter cream icing in between, after it was cooled on a wire tray. This involved using my cake slicer thingy (like a thin wire you'd cut cheese with) and running this through the slab of cake. Then I had to place a baking tray on top of the cake, and flip over quickly to get it upside down! So at this point there is cake crumbs everywhere and I am again getting my upper body workout session. Now for the tricky part, taking off the top layer to line with fudge icing. This was a careful operation, one which require the help of my gorgeous assistant (hubby). We lifted it carefully from the bottom layer and placed on another tray to the side. Phew, it worked. So I spread the fudge icing on one layer, and carefully managed to get the next layer on top of it.


The finishing of it all was very simple; large amount of white fondant icing rolled out to cover all of the cake. Green fondant icing to cover over half of that, to look like grass. Then all the little bits an pieces were put on with my good friend edible glue! Now the writing is still a bit of a challenge to me, so I did the best I could folks. I kind of threw in the EP 2012 with glitter and the stars at the end to fill in the white gaps. Hey presto, there it is!! And further more, it made it all the way to Electric Picnic in 1 piece. The birthday girl was happy out....as you can see.