Boom boom sexy time (Happy Birthday Tricky)

Today marks the momentous occasion of Tricky’s birth, 21 years ago. On that day, in 1989, did Ma Tricky realise what a lad she was about to raise? What a devastatingly handsome, debonair, smooth ladies’ man she had?
Probably not.

I think everybody is a bit perplexed by my (Martha) choice of cake decoration. It is a replica of this cake that I first found on Cake Wrecks and thought was just odd and kind of inappropriate but also kind of funny:

However, even given the state of perplexedness (perplexment? Perplexion?) I’m pretty sure the cake itself is still good.

The funnest part of this cake was revisiting what I thought was a Nanny-special cake, the simplicity chocolate cake. It’s essentially a melt and mix cake and it always turns out awesome and chocolate-y. I only learnt a couple of years ago when I was flicking through Mum’s PMWU cookbook that my Nan stole the recipe from there.

So after baking the cake in a loaf tin and chucking in some extra chocolate chips (it’s his birthday after all) I left the cake to cool overnight.

I’m totally sure that Mr and Mrs Martha didn’t mind in the least picking up butter, icing sugar and milk on their way home from the airport after 6 weeks in Canadia. And I’m almost positive that whipping up the Vienna cream at 6.30 this morning didn’t disturb them, either.

I couldn’t get the butter icing as snow white as I wanted, but I did manage to get a pretty light colour thanks to some fairly vigorous whipping and the use of this Wilton product:

Overall I think it was a fairly faithful replica of the original – even though I have managed somehow to tear a huge fuck off hole in my piping bag.

Happy Birthday, Tricky. Hope you had a boom boom sexy day.

Arriving on a jet plane

Today marked the momentous occasion of The Big Boss's return. Not that there was much to return to - no election results and no government. However, there was new carpet and there was a cake, which always makes things better!

I asked the gang at work what cake we should use as inspiration for LVV's return and we decided on the "jet plane" (I say "jet plane" because it looks more like a cartoon than an actual plane!). The jet plane is in the chapter titled "For boys" (I couldn't tell you why, except that possibly in 1983, at least in Women's Weekly land, girls still did the sewing and cooking while boys kicked it James Bond style).

Anyway, back to the point. The prototype:

And the result, made using the basic buttercake recipe, vanilla flavoured, with plain blue Vienna frosting. You'll see I had to improvise with some of the lollies for decoration, having eaten all the bullets and chocolate peanuts previously. I found halved jelly beans and trimmed musk sticks worked just as well!

I did have two issues though:
1) I used what was obviously too big a loaf tin, as the cake was not as risen as it looked in the picture and was consequently harder to shape into a round
2) My Vienna frosting split. I don't know why, except perhaps I used too much colouring and ran out of butter, so had to use margarine.A lesson for next time, I guess.

Here is the final product! The photo isn't very good but by this point I was rushing to finish.
xx Martha 

Tears before bed time

The title of this post pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

On Saturday, I (Martha) hung out with my friend Mrs Duffman and her daughter (my "god"daughter) The Divine Miss O. Miss O is 18 months old and is the cutest baby ever - but I don't think we really anticipated the pull that marshmallows, smarties and cake batter would have over Miss O's temperament.

We decided to make this cake, although we ran out of time to do every detail of the picture, we did manage to make some pretty darn good cupcakes and they looked pretty too!

We started off with a basic buttercake mixture, kind of made from memory... and we were out of baking powder, but substituting bicarb resulted in fluffy and well-risen cupcakes - a minor catastrophe averted! although we did manage to create two mutants:

Apparently, not putting the patty cases in the tins is a bad idea. Still, these gave up the opportunity to make rainbow mutants, which I understand went down very well with Miss O. We also made the fatal mistake of giving Miss O a taste of cake batter:

Which was a mistake only because once she had a taste of the sugary, soft, mushy goodness, she then refused to eat anything else and we had a very teary and frustrated little girl continually pointing at the decorations and cakes and putting tiny, sticky little fingerprints on our pants :) which was exceedingly cute but I did feel a little bit mean!

Once the cakes were done, we made a nice big batch of Vienna frosting and separated it into 3 bowls, and added copious amounts of food colouring to produce blue, pink and yellow icing.

Then, we cut up little marshmallows to make petals and dipped the sticky side in bright green and pink jelly crystals:

And finished by decorating the cupcakes like this!

(note the rainbow mutant cakes, above)

All that was left was to spread the benefits of our baking and do some cleaning up!

So, while there were indeed tears before bed time, everybody ended up relatively unscathed!

ETA: Why toddlers are so cute! Miss O v Cupcake:

Flutterby butterfly

Happy Birthday Aunty Martha!

For the grand occasion of Aunty Martha's 60th birthday, the often-baker but never-baked-for lovely lady requested the butterfly cake. Naturally, Martha and Mrs Martha obliged!

However, we decided that a lady of mature years deserved something far more sophisticated that bright yellow icing and red smarties - so we went with purple icing (the birthday girl's fave colour apparently), large silver cachous and smaller rainbow ones, along with the ubiquitous licorice and buttercream icing.

In terms of difficulty and timing, this was quite a good cake - with the mad cake decorating skillz of Mrs Martha, it was a snap. We had quite a big cakeboard to fill, so we decided to make a double quantity of the basic buttercake, and put half into our round 20cm cake tin and the rest into patty cases to make mini cakes.

The cake mix was whizzed up with the electric beaters in about 10 mins and all was in the oven in preparation for decorating.

We spent a bit of time, while the cakes baked, in the Essential Ingredient in Kingston - where we picked up my new favourite toy, the icing pen. A little silicon syringe, and it makes piping writing the easiest thing ever!

Once the cakes were out and cold, I recruited Mrs Martha to cut it according to the template. Although crummy, this cake proved relatively simple to ice even on the cut sides. We had a minor catastrophe with the icing when we added too much purple, but the timely addition of some red colouring soon put things right.

With tiny little wings made from dark chocolate, some whitened buttercream and patty cakes, we had some cute little cupcakes to complement the big butterfly and I think overall it worked out very well.

Time taken: 2-3 hours
Degree of difficulty: 6 (icing cut cake = hard)
Taste: 8.5 (tangy lemon icing helped!)
Success: I would rate this cake an 8 out of 10 all round.

Prototype:

Our attempt:

And just for fun! Martha (front), Big Cousin Martha (behind), and Little Cousin Martha (background)

Pray for mercy, from Puss...in Boots!

Yet another cake which seems easy but ended up having a higher degree of difficulty!

The weekend away with Aunty, Uncle, Cousin, Mr and Mrs Martha started off with a long drive late at night, plenty of rain, and a baby albino koala (so cute!) and finished with an epic fail.

In between the long, lazy and country-fresh-air days and long, lazy and boozy evenings, we got stuck into the old family albums for proof of Mrs Martha's cake decorating prowess, and got to reminiscing. The one thing we tried to reminisce about but couldn't was the story of Puss in Boots. None of us remembered what it was or why we thought it was so cute nor why the hell the AWW put him in The Book.

PiB is particularly poignant because, according to my reliable interwebs source (wiki), the story is a French fairy tale written by a retired civil servant. Whoop!

Anyhoo, according to wiki, the story is "about a cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand of a princess in marriage for his penniless and low-born master."

 The AWW prototype


                                                                                                                                                           Inspiration from the movie Shrek2

My feeling is that actually, PiB uses trickery and deceit to gain poor baked representations of himself from unsuspecting and not-particularly-talented girls like Martha and Betty (sorry Betty, I mean that I am not particularly talented, not you - of course!)


Naturally, I had my own muses to help me with the design, the furkids Carl and Lenny:

But in the end, they just slept while I toiled away with apricot and "leaf green" Vienna cream.

Anyway, thanks to the assistance of Mrs Martha and the supervision of Aunty Martha, we managed to put together a semblance of the original:

Degree of difficulty: 7.5 (licorice is a bitch to shape when it's thick like that, and because the cake had so many cut sides, it was hard to ice without getting crummy).

Time taken: 2 hours not including baking (which, I should add, I had to do from scratch under Mrs Martha's direction), and that was with my able assistants.

Alterations to the recipe: nary a glace cherry to be found at the farm, so we went with red smarties. Also, apparently they don't make green smarties anymore so I used blue. Next time? Ditch the licorice and pipe thick chocolate icing instead!

xxMartha