Elderflower and white chocolate cake: Free Cakes for Kids

Think back to when you were a child and celebrated your birthday. I’ll bet there was cake, and you can probably remember some of your favourite cakes as a child, right? I was obsessed with Sarah Lee Double Chocolate Gateaux and often had one of those for my birthday but I also remember very clearly when my mum baked several loaf cakes to make the shape of the number 14, decorated with chocolate icing. I have a feeling I remember a hedgehog cake with chocolate buttons when I was younger as well!
Some children aren’t lucky enough to get a birthday cake, for all sorts of reasons - money is tight, they are living in temporary accommodation without the facilities to easily bake a cake, their families have got a lot on their plate due to illness or disability or maybe the child is a young carer themselves and deserves a treat. Free Cakes for Kids is an organisation that links up local amateur cake makers to provide birthday cakes for underprivileged children and makes sure they get a homemade treat on their birthday, which makes them feel special.

I’ve written about Free Cakes for Kids before as I’ve been involved with the group for a little while. To find out if there is a local group in your town check out the website.
For a little while now my local group has been baking a cake once a week for an Age UK tea party at a residential care home. I was just about to go back to work after maternity leave (yes, there’s been a bit of a delay in posting this!) and knew I wouldn’t have much time to bake any more so signed up to do one of these as it fell nicely into my last week off when my daughter was doing half days at nursery, so I could bake the cake and deliver it while she was there.

I wasn’t doing any grocery shopping for the next few days and rather than make a special trip out (which is not as quick as it used to be before I had a one year old in tow) so decided if at all possible to use ingredients I already had at home. I knew I had an unopened bottle of elderflower cordial in the cupboard and that I had seen recipes for elderflower cake somewhere.

I made Lynn Hill’s elderflower cordial cake with white chocolate ganache from the original Clandestine Cake Club book - you can find part of the recipe online here though to see the whole thing you will have to buy the book!

I found it interesting that the cake itself doesn’t use butter; it seemed to give a light texture to the finished cake but of course I didn’t get to eat any as it was for Age UK!

The white chocolate ganache was a little tricky as first it was too thick to spread (I left it too long in the fridge) then it was too runny. I wasn’t happy with the finish and decided I needed to decorate it but not in a way that would be too time consuming.

 

I loved the idea of piping ‘hello’ on the cake, since this was for a tea party and wasn’t a birthday cake, so I used some melted milk chocolate and a tiny piping bag. I then got out my special flower piping nozzles that make beautiful shaped petals of different kinds - you don’t have to have any special piping skills as the nozzles do all the work! The purple flowers were a bit darker than I would have liked as I used a bit too much food colouring but overall I was happy with the effects and hope the residents of the care home enjoyed their cake!

 

D'lish Donut Shopkins Birthday Cake

Do you know what Shopkins are? If you have children then you might… if like me you are yet to become a parent then you can be excused for having absolutely no idea!

 

I’ve written before about the fantastic charity Free Cakes for Kids – I made a Rapunzel cake for a girl who otherwise wouldn’t have had a birthday cake.

 

Another request came through from the same group that I decided to volunteer for, for a child who would like a Shopkins cake, even though I didn’t know what that was. Shopkins turned out to be a collection of characters based on items you find in the supermarket – everything from cakes to fruit to a loaf of bread, bottle of bubble bath and even clothes and shoes. They have names like Suzie Sundaw, Mandy Candy and Angie Ankle Boot.

 

I browsed the website for a while until I was able to find a character I thought I could easily incorporate into a cake and remembered I had a giant doughnut cake mould I bought in the sale ages ago and had never used. There is a Shopkins character called D’lish Donut that looks like a pink iced ring doughnut with sprinkles (and of course arms, legs and a face) which I thought would be perfect.

 

The mould comes in two pieces - simply grease them and fill with cake mix.

 

I used a standard Victoria sponge cake recipe for this cake – as it was for a child, I wanted to avoid strong flavours or making it too rich and thought that the icing would be sugary enough!

 

 

 

 I filled the cake with jam and buttercream – the cake mould worked perfectly, turning out the bake cake into a perfect ring doughnut shape.

 

 

 

It wasn’t too hard to decorate – I decided water icing with pink food colouring might be too runny and not look very neat so I coloured some white roll-out fondant, cut it into a  circle large enough to go over the cake and cut a space in the middle. The arms and legs are also made of fondant, and I used some tiny plunger cutters to cut out diamonds from pink, blue and yellow fondant, and stuck them with a dab of water on top to look like sprinkles.

 

The eyes took a couple of attempts and my husband actually ended up helping with these! We made four circles of diminishing size in white, blue, black and white, and layered them to make the eyes. I then used black fondant to make a nose and some eyelashes and pink fondant for the mouth.
 

 

I put the cake onto a silver board and at the last minute decided to spell out the little girl’s name with leftover icing. I had a lovely email afterwards from the charity co-ordinator saying she had been really pleased with her cake – it was fun for me to make a cake for a child and to copy a cartoon character as I don’t get a lot of opportunity to do that (my neice is 8 months old so too young for cake) – and of course I was able to do something good and help a charity that hopefully made a difference and helped that little girl have a happy birthday.

 

Rapunzel Cake and Free Cakes for Kids

Have you heard of Free Cakes for Kids? No, it's not a company handing out free samples - it's a charity that helps disadvantaged youngsters have a bit of a treat on their birthday.

For many children a birthday cake is a luxury they don't get - or at least not a home-baked personalised cake with their favourite animals or characters. These days so many children seem to expect that and parents spend a great deal sometimes on their child's cake.

But it's not just about feeling left out among their school friends - many of the children this charity helps are underprivileged, either from families that are below the poverty line or living in temporary accommodation or women's shelters. For them, receiving a birthday cake is hopefully something that will bring a smile to their face, helping them to forget for a moment their hardship, and something that will bring joy to the rest of their families as well.

The way it works is that the parent or more often their school or shelter representative contacts a co-ordinator, and gives them some information like the first name and age of the child and a few things that they like. The co-ordinator then sends out the request to an email distribution list of local bakers and someone responds and volunteers to make the cake. The co-ordinator (in my area at least) will collect the cake from the baker and deliver it to the recipient.

You can find out more about Free Cakes for Kids and sign up to your local group by clicking on the link.

I signed up a while ago but usually by the time I saw the email (as I work full time) there was already a volunteer to bake. A few weeks ago I happened to be looking at my email as the request came in and so I responded - and the next thing I know, I had agreed to make a birthday cake for a girl about to turn seven, who liked Rapunzel and butterflies!

I had nearly two weeks' notice which was really handy as I was able to google Rapunzel cakes and realised that the Disney film Tangled is actually about Rapunzel. I knew I was going to have to make the cake on a day when I was working from home, which worked out quite well as I save time that day by not having to commute into central London (giving me back nearly three hours). Even so I wasn't going to be able to spend hours crafting Rapunzel out of icing!
I ended up ordering a personalised cake topper printed on wafer paper with the little girl's name and age, which I got via the internet. I actually baked the cake the night before and decorated it very early in the morning before I logged on to my computer to work.

Thinking that most children probably won't want a strongly flavoured or unusual cake I decided to stick with a vanilla sponge. The recipe I used is from the Sainsbury's Cake Recipe Collection book:

250g butter, softened
250g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 eggs, beaten
250g self-raising flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
I added a splash of milk as I like my cake mixture to be looser

Preheat oven to 180C and grease an 8 or 9 inch cake tin. Cream the butter and sugar and beat in the vanilla and eggs. Fold in the flour and baking powder and the milk and beat until smooth.

Pour into the cake tin and bake for around 25 minutes, testing with a skewer until it is no longer raw inside. Leave to cool in the tin then turn out onto a wire rack and split through the middle to make two cakes.

It made a decent 9-inch cake which when split and filled with vanilla buttercream made a good height cake (I was worried about it looking too flat).

I covered the cake with a thin layer of buttercream and then fondant that I had coloured lilac.

The cake topper sat nicely on the top (once I had levelled the top of the cake that is), moistened slightly with water (just a tiny bit) so it would stick to the fondant, and I coloured some extra buttercream and piped it using a star nozzle around the edge of the wafer paper.

 

I made the butterflies using a plunger cutter from fondant I had coloured pink and stuck them around the cake.

 

A week or so after the little girl's birthday I received a lovely message via the organiser saying she had been thrilled with her cake and was still talking about it a week later, and that the butterflies happened to be in her favourite colour. I was really pleased to think I had made a little girl and her family happy, even if they were complete strangers, and I will definitely be baking again for Free Cakes for Kids.