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.

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:

Happy birthday to ... me

Kinda. It was not exactly my birthday, but it was the one year anniversary of being in my current job. And what better cake than the number 1.

This particular cake was well-celebrated in my family, with myself, sister betty and brother betty all having this cake in some variation for our first birthdays. (see picture evidence.)

Again (and being for a different audience) I decided that the simple chocolate cake was a goer, as was my new lamington tin. (and actually a tin this time, I’m quite over bendy bakeware!)

The cake turned out beautifully, however it appears I forgot to consult the AWWCBC book until this point – when I realised I should have made two loaves instead of a rectangle. (Which would also explain who my mum always used the loaf tins for this cake – she must have started with number 1 and just kept going.)

Not to worry however as the cut-out cake took a near-perfect number 1 shape … just a lot of leftovers!

A quick layer of icing (using the ends of my chocolate frosting) and it was smartie time! The best part of the cake.

This was no occasion for Coles beanies, only real smarties would do. Applied in no particular order, a pretty good replica of the cake in the book was taking place. I may have run out of smarties for the sides, but never mind … I ran out of frosting first. And you would never tell from the picture…

The verdict:

The cake: perfect

Effort: 4

Decoration: 8 (would be 10, but took off 2 for missing the sides).

Another masterpiece to be consumed by my colleagues.

Betty x