Who's always cool and calm??? FIREMAN SAM

This is only a quick blog on Fireman Sam cake I did for the adorable Evan Murphy of Sixmilebridge. He gave me his surprised face and everything when he saw it!!

I used 2 x 10-inch tins filled with Mary Berry's Very Best Chocolate Fudge Cake mix. I doubled up the quantity of ingredients as Mary's recipe is for 8-inch tins (best to have too much than too little!!). After that was baked and cooled, I spread the left over chocolate butter cream I had from my Monkey Cake (see previous blog) over one half of the sponge cake. It dawned on me here that I needed to transfer it to a cake board, so I did this before I went any further, involving a slight breakage in the base layer....oops!! Tis gran though!

Then take the 2nd sponge cake and place on top of the base, so they are sandwiched together. I decided that Sam would stand out better against a white background, so I got out my trusty Betty Crocker's Vanilla Frosting (which I always keep stocked in the press) and spread this only around the top of the cake. This mixture is very creamy and goes on and off sometimes in the same spread, so don't be afraid to lump loads of it on there, and you can always level if off then. I coated the chocolate butter cream around the sides as the chocolate fudge cake would be too difficult to conceal around the edges with the vanilla icing. Now, you can also use the Betty Crocker's Chocolate Frosting for the filling and around the sides instead of making chocolate butter cream from scratch, but I had mine already made and left over from the Monkey Cake. In fairness that would be an easier thing to do all-in-all, just bear in mind that when it's fresh it's very gooey.

So now on to the main event: Sam!! I basically went online and got a picture of the good man himself (click here), scaled him down to the size I wanted on the cake, and printed him off. I then placed parchment paper, (or tracing paper if you had it) over his picture and traced him out. I traced out all his parts out separately, i.e. his head in one part of the paper, his jacket in another, etc, so I could use them as stand alone piece when cutting out of the different coloured fondant. Pure simple like!!

For the fondant I suggest taking a trip down to Homestore and More as they have all the baking stuff you'll need next. You get the ready to roll Fondant your icing colour gels ready. I would advise against using normal food colouring for dying fondant as it make it runny, so always use these gels with fondant. As always, wear clear gloves when mixing in the colours to the fondant (or else find somebody who doesn't mind having multicolored hands for a good month!!). With your gloves on and block of fondant in your hand, you mean business!! The largest piece of fondant is for his jacket so see what size you want Sam to be and work out how much fondant you will need, bearing in mind how much/thin it can roll it out to be.

So the main colours you need are: Navy, Yellow, Black, Yellow, Red and Ivory. When dying the fondant use a cocktail stick dipped in the tubs and rubbed on the fondant, little by little. You massage the piece of fondant like morla until you get the colour you want (say hello to carpel tunnel syndrome!!). For the Navy I would suggest dying the piece blue and adding the slightest bit of black to it to get it to shade you want. Now by all means you can just give Sam a blue jacket, he's hardly going to come after you with his fire hose!! The only tricky fondant piece is the face and hands; dying them ivory. This is a colour in the gel set I've mentioned above, but you could leave them white. Continue to dye all the relevant colours you need, according to Sam's picture. For his hair, I took some left over yellow and put a little bit of red with it to bring it to that kipper red!!! Roll out the coloured fondant pieces as you need them, cut around your stencil, and you have all your separate components lined up. This is where the very important edible glue comes in to play. With a thin paint brush (gotten in any stationary shop) in your hand and your glue, you can assemble each component together, i.e. hands to arms, nose to face, hat to head, etc. As the top of the cake is soft vanilla frosting you could just place all the components directly on to the cake and they will stick just as good. I referred to have him assembled beforehand and then plonk him on the cake top.

For the finer details, I made an indent in his jacket for the buttons, brushed a little glue in the indents, and dropped a decorating silver ball in to resemble the buttons. I painted on the blue and black on his eyes with a very thin brush, and a fierce steady hand. The name and age are just more coloured fondant rolled out cut in to letters and numbers, but you can pipe these on with butter cream if you want. I used icing modelling tools to make the lines in the pants, but that's just 'cos I was showing off at this point :)

And there you have it..........The Hero Next Door!!

Sam got a snazzy glitter belt!!

Monkey Business

Well it's been a very busy month of October for me, but not on the cake side, so I'm afraid I just haven't have a chance to get any baking/decorating done. And of course, true to fashion, I'm choco-block with requests for November!! So this cake kicks off the month, and what a challenging one it was (cake that is)...

I decided to take a few pics as I went along so you can see how I put it together. Please excuse the mess in the background of the photos, or the odd silhouette of the hubby lurking like a cake stalker!

From left to right: Body, Head and Base

The request came in from a work colleague, for his girlfriend who loves monkeys. I took the literal approach of "monkey see, monkey do" and didn't ask any questions!!! I knew I wanted one main cake with a monkey sitting on top of it, in a 3-D format, so I decided to search for deep tins that I can have the depth for Marvin's (that's what I've decided to call him btw) head and body. I was kind of fortunate it is coming close to Christmas, as a pudding bowl tin (oven proof) was just the shape I needed for his body. I decided to go with a deep cake tin for the head, so I could have enough to work with for ears, etc, and then just a large spring-form tin for the base cake. It was like Russian dolls at one stage, with all the different size components. You can see the different tins in the picture above, so you get the gist!

Next I needed to make the base, which simply involved getting ready to roll fondant (my aul reliable!) and die it pink. For this I have learned the art of delegation works best, and I roped in my lovely assistant hubby to fold in the colouring in to the block of fondant. I don't know if anyone has experiences massaging a hard block of, what is essentially sugar and egg, in your hands. 'Tis tough work lads, so I called in the army for it! I picked pale pink because, well it was for a girl, and pale pink goes well against the brown. I perched my base cake up on my turn table (check me out all professional-like!!) and covered in Betty Crocker's Vanilla Fudge Spread so the fondant would stick to it. I used Betty's as I wanted to save the butter for my main event....Marvin's fur!! So I placed the rolled out fondant over the full cake, and then just cut away the excess to be neatly covering the whole cake. Simples!!

Now for the fun bit, assembling Marvin! As mentioned above, I am going to use the pudding bowl shape as his body, and the next size cake for his head (stay with me on this one!). So I leveled off the pudding-shaped sponge to sit flat upside down on the base cake, then cut out a circle with a large cutter for his head. After the circle was cut away on the sponge, I cut half circles just up from where I had cut out the head piece, so they'd sit on the head, if ya folly me!! I discovered the only difference between Mickey Mouse and Marvin the Monkey is the positioning of the ears (imagine!). If they were close to the top of his head, it was Mickey, but going directly out from the side of the head is Marvin. Now for ya!!

Using a long bamboo stick (can be obtained in art/stationary/baking shops) I stuck a bamboo right in the center of the cake, and sat his body directly on the base cake. I placed the ears on with cocktail sticks and butter cream. I then rolled out some ready to roll marzipan, and cut a small and smaller circle with a round cutter for the face and belly. I had thought the yellow would look good, but you'll see in the fourth picture, white fondant looked better! So I stuck on the marzipan with butter cream (in which the white fondant was stuck on top of this same way).

I then mixed up some chocolate butter cream icing :

• 9 oz (225g) Milk Chocolate (I like O'Connell's Irish brand)
• 1 lb (450g) Softened butter (I use Superquinn own brand)
• 2 lbs (900g) Icing sugar
• 2 oz (50g) Cocoa powder

Melting the chocolate in a large glass bowl over a smaller pot of boiling water. In a separate bowl cream the butter, cocoa powder and icing sugar together with a wooden spoon. I use this method instead of the hand beater as it blends it in properly, and doesn't end up sending lumps of butter flying around the kitchen! As this was a rather large amount of ingredients I called in the army (hubby) to use his manly strength. When this is all blended in together to a creamy consistency, I poured in the melted chocolate in to the butter cream bowl. This is now ready to be piped! I used a closed star nozzle to get the proper fur effect, and piped this all on to the body and head.

white fondant over marzipan face & belly

The arms and legs were ready roll chocolate fondant (Irish brand Decobake) simply rolled in to long sausage-like rolls. Of course I rolled an extra long one for his tail! The hands and feet were plain white fondant ready to roll icing, molded and shaped in to feet/hand-like lumps. As these were being placed on to the body, coming from under the ears, I just pressed them against the butter cream in the position I wanted them to be, and then used edible glue to stick on the hands and feet to the end of the arms and legs. Now the banana was a small roll of marzipan, with painted black colouring for the banana strip effect. Fierce fancy altogether!!

The finishing touches were his eyes, nose and mouth in which I used Dr. Oetker Writing Icing in black. For the happy birthday, I just rolled out fondant and piped the words with the remaining chocolate icing. Now at this stage the kitchen was ROASTING with the heat of the oven, and the lights, etc, so I noticed poor aul Marvin's left ear starting to droop. A one-eared monkey isn't the most attractive  so I took the last of the photos and placed him in the spare fridge.Our beer fridge to be exact!! So we had a monkey chilling in the beer fridge....literally. So here's the end result: