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:

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

My "action" contract

It's taken a while to be able to face blogging about my (Martha's) Tony Abbott cake - the experience was vaguely disturbing for all involved, including the birthday girls and boys who were the main beneficiaries of his chocolate tastiness.

There's just something really wrong about eating the Liberal leader... *gag*

On the bright side, I did get to give my stupidly expensive, collectors edition "Edward Cullen" Barbie (complete with sparkly torso skin) an Abbott-esque makeover. Which largely involved painting on red budgie smugglers, trimming his hair and sticking it to his sparkly, well-muscled chest. And then trying to avoid eating that hair as it fell from his body to the frosting.

The cake was the AWW's Crowd Pleaser Chocolate Cake and the inspiration for the design came from my old favourite, Cake Wrecks. Something I should point out at the beginning is that i could not find, anywhere, a regular Ken doll, nor the reclining "hey bebeh" style doll that the Cake Wrecks feature.

There's not much more to say apart from here are some pictures (the white thing is the bearskin rug!). In order to make him look like he was reclining, we actually dug his arm into the cake after it was iced.

xx Martha

Cake or death?

Well, it may have been a bit late, but I (Martha) finally managed to get my shit together and bake the Julia Gillard inspired cake. Naturally, just when I thought I was done, it was pointed out to me that by doing _only_ Julia I may appear partisan - so I will also bring you a Tony Abbott cake in the near future.

(Betty, no need for you to as well - unless you want to!).

After asking my colleagues for a recommendation for a design or element which best represents our PM, the shortlisted was whittled down to two: one, which I won't bore anyone else with (unless you're a Cake Wrecks fan, in which case... congraudation it a gril!) and the second, a front page from the Illawarra Mercury:

So, I went with the second option, against my better judgement.

Naturally, the cake _had_ to be carrot (carrot top, Anne of Green gables, anyone?) and because it was such a big fuck off mixture, involving 5 eggs and 4 cups of flour, I went with the easy frosting option of Betty Crocker Creamy Deluxe frosting (vanilla). Can i just say - yum. And also, gross. It tastes yum at first... but I'll get to that later.

After baking the cake for a good 1.5 hours (like i said, it was HUGE), i took it out of the oven to cool down while I coloured the frosting and cut out the licorice to form the outlines above.

Then, being way past my bedtime at 9pm, I had to hit the hay and let the cake cool properly.

7am the following morning and it was time to actually decorate this little bitch. Red icing? spreads like a dream. White fondant? Rolled out easily and using the skills I learned from Puss in Boots, I cut out a reasonable likeness of the outline in the picture. The hardest bit was the licorice - every time i do this, i swear i will pipe with chocolate instead and i think i should have! Still close enough.

I do have a question though... no matter how "friendly" my pictorial inspirations are, I only end up with angry faces. What am I doing wrong???

The finished product:

I had set aside some time for afternoon tea to devour this cake experiment - but everybody decided it just couldn't and we dug in around 10.30.

Redheads after our attack:

(Sorry, don't know why I can't rotate). You can see we tried hard to retain the integrity of both her hairstyle and her facial structure.

The verdict? Despite being massive and therefore massively heavy to mix, the cake itself was a great recipe. I give it 8 out of 10. The decorating? Not too hard and not as hard as i thought, I'd say a difficulty rating of about 8. The taste? Cake good, frosting was deadly. in a bad way...

Overall I'd say the cake was an 8.

The major downside? There's something in that pre-made frosting that is lethal. I ended up sweating, shaking, with heart palpitations and a small blackout, and had a little break on the bathroom floor.

All better by afternoon tea though :)

Over to you, Betty!
xxMartha

PS a sneak preview of the TA cake to come:

Is this burning an eternal flame?

There are so many bad candle/flame puns to make, and limited space/patience to make them in. My shortlist for titles was the bangles or Elton John - I decided The Bangles was a lesser crime against fashion.

To celebrate the first of my friends to visit Canberra in my (shared) honour, Beach Girl and Power Ranger (another Canberra resident) requested the Candle cake. That is, this one:

Which was to be my first attempt at fluffy frosting (Italian meringue, basically). Now, I have to admit, before we properly read the recipe, I could not understand why the Power Ranger's mum had refused her requests for this cake.

I mean, look at the picture - surely it's just a cake baked in a date loaf or other pipe tin? and then covered with plain white icing?

Erm, no. No, it's a sponge roll with jam, covered in Italian meringue and surrounded by a bed of candy. Still though, we ploughed on.

Loads of candy = check.
Jam=check.
Egg whites and sugar=check
Candy thermometer=check

I have never, ever made a successful sponge before. The candle tasted ok, although it was quite dry. The jam made it nicer. Beach Girl was super-fast at rolling it up, while it was still warm:

After we (impatiently) let the rolled sponge cool (there may have been some pizza consumed during this interval), we started the process for icing the cake. While we boiled the syrup away with the candy thermometer (brilliant invention by the way - the little mark on the thermometer that said "soft ball" was so accurate!), I whipped the egg whites til stiff. Unfortunately, this is where the whole plan fell down.

If it wasn't enough that I was ready for a nap even before we put the sponge on, by the time it got to fluffy frosting stage i was ready to drop. However, we powered through - but my lack of motivation was really showcased.

I don't know if it's because my egg whites were too cold, or my syrup added too quickly, or the beaters didn't reach far enough into the bowl or what, but what came out of the bowl after about 45 minutes wasn't "fluffy", even if it was frosting.

Nevertheless, we kept going and just let the icing drip dramatically and wax-like down the upright jam roll. It didn't end up looking too different from the picture:

Although we should have put the seam at the back. You will also notice our distinct lack of live flame. This was pure laziness - it was far too fucking freezing to go out to the shops for candles so Beach Girl and Power Ranger had a flame-off - who could design the best candy flame?

In the end and because Power Ranger was busy with Robin Hood, Beach's flame (right, above) won, and we used that in place of a real fire.

Result?

E for Effort
F for Fail!

Difficulty rating: 8.5-9/10
Time taken: The course of an evening from 6pm onwards
Artistic merit: 4.5
Overall score: 4.5 for appearance and taste, 8.5 for difficulty.

Next cake is something else hard i think, Beach Girl is requesting another cake in October!

Stay tuned for the Julia Gillard bake-off - Betty, you ready???

xx Martha

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)

Not drowning but waving*

Today was a momentous day – Mish left for the adventure of nesting and subsequent motherhood, I made cupcakes that look like ta tas, we discovered that jelly and cake is not a bad mix, and I found out that if you use cultured unsalted butter to make strawberry flavoured icing, it ends up tasting like strawberries and cream!  

To celebrate our colleague’s last day, and to honour my lost bet to Navonod (for mentioning the word “ta tas” in a professional, work-related telephone conversation), I decided to bake the impressive and much-longed-for-in-childhood swimming pool cake, and some boobalicious cupcakes.

  

tray full of ta tas

                                          soothing booz.

Naturally, I had forgotten that I was also going out for dinner, so I headed home from the shops after an Ethiopian feast with a sack full of strawberries and cream lollies (to represent nipples), jube rings, musk sticks, jelly babies and teevee snacks (malt sticks). I stuck with vanilla and chocolate and strawberry as a classic Neapolitan combo for these cakes – vanilla buttercake with chocolate frosting and blue heaven** jelly and chocolate cupcakes with strawberry icing.

The lilo on the pool is made from snakes joined together with some frosting, the fence is teevee snacks, and the little people are jelly babies. The cake-making, commenced as it was after a big dinner and late at night, went surprisingly smoothly. The cake was even and brown, the cupcakes took longer than expected and were slightly dry but still tasty.

The pool is made by hollowing out the centre of the cake (the instructions said to level the top of the cake and then hack out the innards for the pool hollow – but why the need for 2 steps?). So I dug out the centre of the cake (mmm cake offcuts) and let everything cool down overnight with the intention of decorating the next morning.

I had not, though, remembered that something about these Canberra winters requires me to sleep for a minimum of 18 hours every day, so getting up early to finish the decorating and making it to work in one piece was dicey. I managed though, with the only mishap being the absence of a cocktail umbrella.

Luckily, S and J came to the rescue with a craftily folded piece of paper and a plastic knife (see image). I have to say, that umbrella really completed the scene. The cake looked a bit lacklustre without it and I didn’t want to let Mishy down.

So with the swimming pool and edible ta tas  completed, the only thing left to do was wait for afternoon tea time. It came eventually, of course.

The only thing missing? The presence of our Dear Leader (shoutout: LVV).

Bye Mishy... and to quote someone highly emotional and articulate “Enjoy the kid”

xx Martha

*thanks Stevie Smith

** yes, blue heaven IS a flavour. It doesn't mimic a fruit or something else - it's a stand alone flavour.

PS. From the archives: My 4th birthday

Betty x