Farewell to a clown

It doesn’t take long for the farewells to roll around, and before we knew it we were saying goodbye to Arnie! That left me with a Thursday night dilemma of what to make, and again, I went with the simple option, that could be made out of one round butter cake (which was in the freezer from the last baking session!)

A few improvisations were made in lieu of decorations I didn’t have on hand – an ice-cream cone covered in sprinkles replaced the party hat, while silver ribbon curls made for much more fun hair! Wafer biscuits took the place of ice-cream wafers and the lillipops were multi coloured (and about a year old – I think they were in a Bertie Beetle showbag from last year – I really hope nobody ate them!)

A fitting farewell cake for an office fav!

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!

Storybook Favourites #4: Mickey Mouse

This is how I feel when I contemplate yet another Disney offering:

Once again, I'm faced with recreating a character that I didn't like. It's not so much that I mind even that, but the fact that the characters I don't like are the hardest, most complicated ones, and the ones with the most sprinkles – which look gorgeous once they're on, but stick to your fingers like bitches.

Anyway, my Mickey Mouse was a truly gourmet creation, put together from raspberry swirl cake and orange poppyseed cake (when I say “raspberry swirl” I use “raspberry” in its loosest sense. Put it this way – no raspberries were harmed in the baking of this cake).

The cakes were a lot better this time and the cut-out sections were easier to ice than Donald, perhaps because my Canberra kitchen was warmer and the frosting stayed a bit more pliable. Still though, I don't remember my mum cursing and swearing and generally not coping with this book, but my earlier arrogance optimism after managing hickory dickory watch so easily has come back to haunt me.

Mickey Mouse looks like he has a five o'clock shadow, compounded by the random sprinkles around his face like stubble.

Mmm, stubbleicious.

Over to you, Betty. May you have better luck with Minnie!

ETA: Points that my colleagues have raised, validly, are that I haven't mentioned what went wrong, the difficulty level nor time taken.
So, on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being impossibly hard) I would rank Mickey an 8. He took about 2 hours to do (not including the cakes themselves), which was a LONG time to stay awake on a wine-y Sunday evening.
How to improve Mickey/comments on the recipe:
1. Don't use Smarties for his eyes - M&Ms are smaller and darker and would have worked better
2. He needed a minimum of 1.5 quantities of buttercream frosting, not the 1 that the recipe mentioned
3. Next time, I think I would pipe on his mouth with chocolate frosting, because the sprinkles were really hard to contain in the lines I'd traced out and they sort of went all over the kicthen floor.
4. I couldn't find red ribbon anywhere - possibly because Sunday evening isn't the best time to shop for these things. Note to self: shop well in advance to take account of difficult-to-trace materials.
xxMartha