Duh.... I'm the captain. My son is Bart*

Sunday 19 September was International Talk Like a Pirate Day and to celebrate, Betty and I decided to bake the sad pirate cake in The Book. I can’t speak to Betty’s experience, but I found him really quite easy – the only issue being my own stupidity. You see, I baked the cake (thank you, Green’s Classic Chocolate cake mix) and made the amateur mistake of trying to carve out the pirate hat while the cake was still warmish. Turns out it was too soft and crumbly, but I think I managed to salvage it, mainly. I left the ear and the cake out to cool down and dry out a bit overnight and cut up all the candy for our sad pirate’s face.

I tried using my leftover fruit sticks to make his hair but alas! They too had dried up and were too stiff to trim. I think it’s time to have a candy audit of my bucket and get rid of some old stuff. Anyway, I had two yellow snakes left which I used to good effect, had a trimmed down Monte biscuit for his eye patch, smarties for his nose and good eye, and liquorice (red and back) for the rest of the details.

After making a complete abortion of a skull and crossbones from liquorice allsorts, I resorted to the black construction paper originally recommended in The Book.

I also have to admit to pretty bad laziness here – not only did I use a packet mix (which was completely legitimate, bootcamp wiped me out) but I also decided to finish up the Frosting of Death to decorate it (hence, I can only believe my colleagues when they told me he tasted good – I am not going near that stuff ever again). It has a pretty great texture for spreading, and it gets even more pliable when it’s adulterated with buckets of food colouring.
Overall, I think he ended up looking pretty cute – now I’ll leave it up to Betty to follow up with her awesome version.

My version:

The Book version:

*for Simpsons fans...

Cake or death?

Well, it may have been a bit late, but I (Martha) finally managed to get my shit together and bake the Julia Gillard inspired cake. Naturally, just when I thought I was done, it was pointed out to me that by doing _only_ Julia I may appear partisan - so I will also bring you a Tony Abbott cake in the near future.

(Betty, no need for you to as well - unless you want to!).

After asking my colleagues for a recommendation for a design or element which best represents our PM, the shortlisted was whittled down to two: one, which I won't bore anyone else with (unless you're a Cake Wrecks fan, in which case... congraudation it a gril!) and the second, a front page from the Illawarra Mercury:

So, I went with the second option, against my better judgement.

Naturally, the cake _had_ to be carrot (carrot top, Anne of Green gables, anyone?) and because it was such a big fuck off mixture, involving 5 eggs and 4 cups of flour, I went with the easy frosting option of Betty Crocker Creamy Deluxe frosting (vanilla). Can i just say - yum. And also, gross. It tastes yum at first... but I'll get to that later.

After baking the cake for a good 1.5 hours (like i said, it was HUGE), i took it out of the oven to cool down while I coloured the frosting and cut out the licorice to form the outlines above.

Then, being way past my bedtime at 9pm, I had to hit the hay and let the cake cool properly.

7am the following morning and it was time to actually decorate this little bitch. Red icing? spreads like a dream. White fondant? Rolled out easily and using the skills I learned from Puss in Boots, I cut out a reasonable likeness of the outline in the picture. The hardest bit was the licorice - every time i do this, i swear i will pipe with chocolate instead and i think i should have! Still close enough.

I do have a question though... no matter how "friendly" my pictorial inspirations are, I only end up with angry faces. What am I doing wrong???

The finished product:

I had set aside some time for afternoon tea to devour this cake experiment - but everybody decided it just couldn't and we dug in around 10.30.

Redheads after our attack:

(Sorry, don't know why I can't rotate). You can see we tried hard to retain the integrity of both her hairstyle and her facial structure.

The verdict? Despite being massive and therefore massively heavy to mix, the cake itself was a great recipe. I give it 8 out of 10. The decorating? Not too hard and not as hard as i thought, I'd say a difficulty rating of about 8. The taste? Cake good, frosting was deadly. in a bad way...

Overall I'd say the cake was an 8.

The major downside? There's something in that pre-made frosting that is lethal. I ended up sweating, shaking, with heart palpitations and a small blackout, and had a little break on the bathroom floor.

All better by afternoon tea though :)

Over to you, Betty!
xxMartha

PS a sneak preview of the TA cake to come:

Rising to the cupcake challenge

The stakes were high and so was my confidence as I prepared to make my giant cupcake masterpiece.

There is a bit of a story to the cupcake tins. They were a suggestion of the EA to the GPB and seeing as Martha had her car broken into that day, they seemed the perfect online purchase for a cheer-up surprise present. (Surprise, it didn’t turn up ‘til three weeks later and you had to go collect it from the post office before they returned it to the sender.)

Back to the cake. Deciding to keep it simple, the recipe choice was easy – Chocolate Cake 1 – ‘a simple recipe a child can make’.

Even my photocopy of Mrs Betty’s recipe book reveals how well-worn chocolate cake page 83 is, many words have been re-written in after sticking to page 82 – testament to the recipe’s status as family favourite.

Having baked this cake hundreds of times as a child, I knew there was no way I could go wrong.

Taking Martha’s advice, I decided to double the recipe, figuring that I could always make another cake with any leftovers.

Revisiting this recipe proved simple enough for Betty to make, though beating out 200 strokes with the wooden spoon (the method instructs ‘do not use electric beater’) did take its toll on my left shoulder!

Into the lightly greased silicone bakeware and into the oven, all was looking good for a perfect result.

The first sign that things weren’t right should have come when the cakes weren’t ready on the buzzer.

The second, when the cakes started crumbling when I lifted them.

The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth … etc. was when the smoke alarm went off – again and again and again … although snothing was even anywhere near burnt! Rapid tea-towel flapping under the alarm ensued, with quick darts to close doors, open windows and turn on the exhaust fans in the kitchen and bathroom to clear the air … and when all that failed I gave up and removed the batteries. Grrr.

Turning the cakes out of the moulds turned out to be a complete disaster, leaving almost a quarter of the cake stuck to the mould.

What should have been a perfect swirly, cherry-worthy top was instead a crumbly mess, resembling instead one of the rocky mountains. And to top it off (pardon the pun) the brilliant tip from Martha to sit the silicon bakeware in a biscuit tin (for ease of transport in and out of the oven) had overheated and burnt the bottom of the cake (cheap Safeway tins will do that I have now discovered).

The pressure was on to make a big save in the decoration.

Figuring that traditional was the way to go, the only filling it could be was raspberry jam and cream. Remembering to buy full cream instead of light (it doesn’t whip) I was on a roll filling the cake. Until I realised I had quite a lot of cream left over. What to do with it. Now I do love cream, but even that was a bit too much for me to eat! My brilliant plan was to create another layer of jam and cream lower down in the cupcake (like you would a sponge cake) which successfully used up all the cream.

 Now it was time for the decoration. I still had a tub of my very own chocolate fude frosting leftover, which I applied liberally all over. A dusting of rainbow sprinkles and a cherry on top and we were close … it just needed a little something … and raiding my gift-wrap box came with the perfect adornment – a pink ribbon. Now I should mention here that this was to be my friend Josh’s birthday cake, so to ‘masulinise’ it, I wrote ‘Happy Birthday Josh’ in blue glitter. Perfect.

Transportation proved a slight drama however. Remember that extra layer of cream? Well it turns out that wasn’t quite so stable in the car … however a quick cleanup and reposition of the ribbon before arrival meant no-one ever know the difference.

The final challenge was in the cutting and serving – it was basically a mess. Turns out cupcakes really aren’t meant to be shared.

The verdict:

Effort: 6

Presentation: 9 (for the cherry on top)



Overall, a cool idea, but probably not worth the trouble.

Betty x

PS. For all my firefighting friends out there – I did replace the batteries in the smoke alarm when the non-smoke subsided. Cakey bakelicious does not endorse the taking out of smoke alarm batteries and we recommend photoelectric smoke alarms … only working smoke alarms save lives!

The cake will go on and on…

Note: this post is actually a few weeks old and I have been put to shame by the speediness of Martha's cooking ... better late than never! - B

Well the birthday celebrations certainly did go on and on – but when you reach 80 there is a lot to celebrate!

Two weeks later the big night arrived – April 14, 1912  the night the Titanic would sink – with Grandma and family aboard celebrating her birthday.

But back to the cake.

The only cake that seemed fitting for such a big occasion was to bake the Titanic itself ...  but with such a busy week at work how to get it done?

I had to employ some time savers – namely Safeway’s already made rainbow cake and mini choc swiss rolls and Betty Crocker frosting (it’s can’t be cheating if it’s my own frosting…).

From here it was a case of building. A BBQ tray was the perfect setting for the cakes to sail the high seas and surrounded by blue jelly the scene was set. Four mini choc swiss rolls made Titanic’s iconic four funnels. While the pre-iced rainbow cakes stuck together beautifully to make the upper and lower decks.

Betty Crocker’s chocolate and vanilla frostings were applied liberally to the lower and upper decks respectively and proved the perfect consistency for spreading. For decorations, what could be more appropriate than lifesavers to create some not-so-traditional-but-very-colourful portholes. And finally, some pre-piped lettering left over from the hickory dickory clock spelled out Happy Birthday to Gran and declared the ship to be HMS Titanic.

The finished product was certainly as decadent as the Titanic itself, if sugar was a unit of wealth I would have been very rich indeed.

The verdict:

Difficulty: 6 - 2 (for pre-baking) + 3 (for difficulty in carrying a it was so heavy) = 7

Tastiness: pure sugar hit



Betty x