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!

Little miss muffet

Back to work after three blissful weeks of holiday and it was time to get back to baking.

I must admit the back to work blues meant I wasn’t very inspired, but when Aaron brought me in a spider, I really couldn’t put it off any longer!

I chose little miss muffet because it seemed the simplest – one round cake, plus a bonus cupcake for miss muffet’s tuffet! I didn’t really think about how difficult it would be to find the right doll, however, and had to make do with a try-hard barbie from Coles.

For this cake I went back to the classic basic butter cake from the recipe book, topped with some electrifying blue icing!

A near disaster was just averted when I discovered I had no idea where my piping bag or nozzles were – a make-shift bag made from baking paper and no nozzle wasn’t ideal, but I managed the design despite being a bot thicker than intended.

Another tasty treat for the workmates to enjoy!

Run, run as fast as you can … !

Ok, so you may (or may not) have noticed that I am a bit behind in my blogging. Ten cakes behind to be precise - time to catch up in a hurry!

July 2010 – The gingerbread man

The focus of July’s baking challenge was on a BIG gingerbread biscuit. It had been years since I had last made gingerbread men, and I had certainly never made one as big!

Following the gingerbread recipe in the AWWCBC cookbook, it was all going smoothly, I had made my pattern from tracing paper and cut it out with a knife … to find it stuck to the bench! I had forgotten how fragile the necks can be!

Take two and I rolled the gingerbread out onto tracing paper, so that it could easily be lifted onto the tray. The leftover gingerbread was also a great chance to test out the little gingerbread cooking cutter that I got at the show last year.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a cake without cake, so gigantic chocolate cake it was!

Chocolate icing sealed the gingerbread man to the cake, while liquorice strips, smarties and icing pens made light work of decorating the man.

The perfect man to say happy birthday to Becky Boo!

I sphinx it's a pyramid

I (Martha) strayed once again from the book into, as Mr Graham would say, "avant garde" territory today, to welcome back a much-missed member of our team, Wilson.

Since Wilson returned today from her Egyptian holiday, the really happy frood in our team convinced me (after a brief debate about the differences between iced vovos and strawberry mallow biscuits which ended in my defeat) to construct a pyramid in celebration.

What the frood didn't realise though was that I have no spatial awareness and don't do too well with shapes, either. Or carving/sculpture. Luckily, the frood has a slightly more impressive cranial capacity than Martha so was able to not only find a template, but do the legwork.

I mixed up the biggest fuck off cake mixture I've ever seen - 8 eggs, 500g butter and practically a whole bag of sugar and flour. I decided at the last minute to make a rainbow cake, so I divided the mixture into three parts, coloured one part pink and flavoured it with strawberry essence, the other with cocoa and I left the other plain. I had to bake it in two deep square tins, and it took ages. So much for an early Sunday night!

I left the cakes to cool overnight and in the meantime, crushed up two packets of scotch finger biscuits to use as sand and packed two cans of frosting of death, colouring, a bread knife, a box of matches and a little bag of cocoa (for the bricks).

The frood and I set to work as soon as we got in in the morning, with the frood starting out with carving while I mixed up some sand-coloured (kinda) icing:

The first cut is the deepest... BABY*

 
 The two cakes were stacked on top of each other, then the frood carved down the sides at the precise angle of 51 degrees (well, it would have been precise if we'd remembered the protractor) and fashioned some of the off-cuts into a peak. I then bollixed that up by frosting it too enthusiastically and making it slump >:

I used the first can of frosting-of-death to dirty ice the pyramid after we spackled it together, before covering it in the sand coloured mixture. The frood arranged the "sand" (crumbs) on the iced board while I made brick lines using the ole matchbox-dipped-in-cocoa trick (thanks, AWW!).

Work in progress:

And then the frood found a little green army man and Blunt Angel found another, and we had ourselves a diorama. Add in King Kong to the scene and it became nothing like an Egyptian pyramid but it was still pretty fun - and I think quite tasty.

The final product:

*that one's for you, LVV.

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.

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...

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