The very hungry caterpillar and other hilarious anecdotes

OK so actually, there's no anecdotes here. Also, no story about a caterpillar, but whatever.

Monday 16 August was RSPCA cupcake day! And by happy coincidence, there is one - just one - cupcake-cake (ptooey!) in The Book.

And it's this one!

Which is totally rad because not only is it made from cupcakes, but it also looks like a "critter" and thereby fulfilled the main criteria for the day.

The cake? Simple butter cake (from scratch, this time). The frosting? Fluffy Vienna coloured green and flavoured with strawberry just for fun. I actually made the cakes into mini cupcakes but i think it could have worked just as well with full sized ones. The baked cakes are completely covered with the frosting, then rolled into green-dyed coconut. It's pretty simply after that - the cupcakes got stuck to the board with icing, little feet made from chopped up snakes and a face made from licorice and a snake head.

And there you go! or as BN taught me today QED. Which is slightly out of context but meh.

The next cake coming is to celebrate the return of the Big Boss, which is awesome but - I wish it could also be a celebratory reprise of the redheads...
xxMartha

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)