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.

Charlie Alpha Kilo Echo!

As I tweeted last week, my hubby is returning home from overseas so I decided to make him a welcome home cake! Now I must first explain that his nickname is Frosty. Some of you may have seen the suggestions on my Facebook page to make him a Frosty The Snowman cake but even though it looks like we woke up in Oct outside, I just couldn't bring myself to do a Christmas theme cake in August!!!

So I began by making the normal Madeira cake mixture (10oz Butter, 10oz Flour, 10oz Sugar & 5 Eggs) and divided the mix between two 8-inch square tins and chucked them in the oven for approx 20mins. Whilst these were rising to perfection I began to create some of the different colour greens I needed to make camouflage icing. I had loads of blue icing left over from my Batman cake below, so thinking back to my primary school days, I remembered I needed to add some yellow colouring to get my green. 

Remember you'd be sitting there in class, half listening to the teacher going on about times tables, or potted plants or something, when next she'd announce it was arts and crafts time!!!!! Sweeeet! Get the bib on me Miss, because this is going to get fierce messy.

So back to the colour making. For inspiration I hung one of his uniforms over the door in the kitchen so I could get all the different shades of green as real as possible (not a stoopid as I look). I also had yellow left over from Batman, so I added blue to this to make a shade of green. Now the big challenge was the army shirt had lots of browns in it. To make brown I needed to blend yellow, red and blue, which started out like something out of Rainbow Bright. After much kneading, and reaching the early stages of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, I eventually got it to a khaki brown. Going from light brown to dark brown proved very difficult indeed. I added black, and it looked like human excrement, and I added yellow and it was nion green. So it was a chapter of 50 Shades of Green after a while but  managed to get a few different version of green going on!!

I had seen a clip on Youtube on how to create a marble effect with blending two blocks of coloured icing together. I decided not chance this on the whole lot of my icing in case I made a total hames of it, so I just did this for a piece I was going to make in to a collar.

I proceeded to make up some butter icing and initially thought I would make it a khaki colour for the overall cake and place the different colour greens around it. So I made a cup of drinking chocolate to give that caramellie colour but that went pear shaped fairly lively!!! It made the butter cream very watery and not caramellie at all (the cheek of it). Another plan foiled! So decided to use the same concept for creating a brown colour; by adding red, yellow and blue colouring to the butter cream. So ya............this didn't go so well. Basically as soon as the yellow and red went in, it turned to pinkish. Then BRAINWAVE!!!!! I could use this as skin under the army shirt that I was going to create. I'm a frickin' genius.

I sandwiched together the two cakes with my newly invented genius skin colour butter cream and covered all around the cake with it as well. I figured that butter cream would offer a better sticking base for the fondant icing than jam (i'm seriously coming out with all sorts of genius ideas here, I amaze myself sometimes!). Now the entire cake is covered in "skin icing", then I take all the different shades of green and roll out little segments to place scattered on the cake, giving that camo effect. For the collar, I lined up rolls of all the different shades of green (as seen on Youtube clip) and twisted them around each other. I rolled them flat, then twisted them again, and then rolled it flat again.........you get the drift.....until you see the different coloured icing's edged blend in to each other. On reflection this would have worked perfectly for the whole cake, but hindsight is 50:50 as a friend of mine says!!

The finishing touches were the teenchie bits of white icing to make it look like stitching all around the collar, and of course my junior infants handwriting scrawled on the chesticle area!!!! And here's to another creation/attempt/fluke.................

You can see few more of these pics on my Facebook page. If you like then "like" the page.

Nana nana nana nana BATMAN!!!

This was my first attempt at making a proper theme birthday cake and let me tell you it took all flipping night!!! The cake making was the least of it. I started off with, what I thought was enough, ready to roll icing (lazy lady's version as it is a Tuesday night and I didn't get home from work until 6.30!!) and gradually coloured it blue for the background of the cake. Man who needs kettle bells class when you can build up muscle kneading a colour in to fondant icing!! I literally was sweating by the end of this stage. Then I figured out I did not have enough to cover the damn cake so had to add more white icing (another plus to having it pre-made!) which I then had to add further blue colouring to get it to the colour I needed!

So assembly time. I got the two separate 8-inch cakes and sandwiched them together with some Betty Crockers chocolate fudge buttercream (again pre-made but please refer to above reference to Tuesday!). Then I discovered I needed to coat the cake with something to make the roll icing stick, such as Apricot jam. PANIC......I do not have any Apricot jam!!!! Found raspberry jam and felt this would suffice......and I was right! 

Rolled out, now vibrant blue, icing to cover cake and gues what??? I had LOADS. Chipical (as they say in Clonmel!). So trimmed nicely around the edges and made sure the icing was smooth and even. Feeling pretty proud of myself at this stage might I add!

Next comes the all important Batman symbol for the top. Contrary to my apricot jam debacle, I had done my research on a template for the correct Batman symbol and luckily I had small and large versions, as this cake was smaller then I had thought! So I reverted back to my "How-Do-You-Do" days (for all you 80's Irish kids out ther!) and got out my baking paper to trace the symbol from the sheet I had printed to this so I could see the cake through it. So I took the remainder of the blue icing (waaaaay too much blue icing) and proceeded to add black colouring to this. I thought it was going to end up navy but it didn't (fluke!). I put my Mary Fitzgerald work of art Batman symbol traced over the black rolled out icing and drew over the outline so it left an indent in the icing underneath. Then I took off paper and was able to go around the full outline with a sharp knife (always ask and adult before using such utensils!) and TA DAAAA the Batman symbol was born. I've taken proud up an notch to well chuffed with myself.

Next I got some more pre-made fondant icing and added yellow colouring to it to make the light behind the symbol. I felt it was easier, due to the stencil I had, to make a large yellow circle and place the black symbol on top instead of black circle with the yellow outline and background over it. I didn't explain that very well but I hope you get the gist of it.

I stuck the circle and symbol on with jam (raspberry of course!) and rolled a bit of left over black icing in a sausage like form and wrapped that around the bottom (to make it all profess like) and around the symbol. I threw on a number 4 as the boy the cake is for is 4 (in case ye thought it was for me) and hey presto.........

Batman Cake for Dylan Slattery's 4th Birthday