Summer Berry Cake with Stencil Decoration

I made this cake for an afternoon tea team-building event at work, based on a Peggy Porschen recipe I found online. It also gave me the chance to try out some cake stencils I got for Christmas.

Peggy Porschen has a cake shop and baking academy in Belgravia near where I used to work - I often used to walk past the shop, which is pink, though I never really found an excuse to go inside and have cake on my lunchbreak or the way to work! Peggy also featured in the finale of the last series of the Apprentice, giving advice to aspiring baking business owner Luisa Zissman. I thought it was quite funny that "Peggy Portion" was trending on Twitter; a lot of people seemed to think her name was spelled that way and that it was perfect for a cake maker!

The recipe that I used is here, though my cake unfortunately turned out nothing like the picture!

You need:

200g butter, softened

200g caster sugar

pinch of salt

seeds of 1 vanilla pod or 1 tsp vanilla flavouring

4 eggs

200g self-raising flour

For the buttercream:

250g butter, softened

250g icing sugar

3 tbsp mixed berry jam plus extra to fill the cake

Preheat the oven to 175C and grease and line a cake tin. Cream the butter and sugar with the salt and vanilla. Then mix in the eggs.

Fold in the flour.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.

You're supposed to slice the cake into three - or make three separate cakes - but I made one and sliced it in half.

Spread one layer of the cake with mixed berry jam.

Make buttercream by creaming the butter and icing sugar, then mix in 3 tbsp of the jam

I got this pack of cake stencils for Christmas and hadn't used them yet. There are a selection of designs and you just sprinkle cocoa powder or icing sugar over the top.

First spread the buttercream on top and around the sides of the cake, using a cake smoother or spatula to smooth the sides. Then place the stencil on top and sprinkle over the cocoa powder.

Carefully lift the stencil off and you should be left with the pattern. I think I used too much cocoa powder here. Also, the instructions said to grease the underneath of the stencil so it would catch any excess rather than letting it fall onto the cake and I stupidly skipped this part - I was doing this at 7am before work, as I thought if I put the cocoa on the night before it might sink into the buttercream. I will follow the instructions properly next time - has anyone else tried to use a stencil on a cake before?

I am sending this to the No Waste Food Challenge - I don't eat jam so whenever I buy a jar it's usually for a cake, and then I have to find something else to use it up in, so this cake saved me from having to throw the jar away! The challenge is hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary on behalf of Turquoise Lemons.

Flower pot cupcakes

We recently had a charity bake sale at work, which I only found out about at the last minute - literally ten to five on the day before! It was apparently a last-minute decision and not very well publicised... so I thought I would go home and see if I had any ingredients in the cupboard and if I could think of anything to bake.

I'd seen some flowerpot cupcakes on a couple of blogs and thought they looked brilliant, and also saw them in a new recipe book I bought recently - Peggy Porschen's Favourite Cakes and Cookies. I realised I had everything I needed to make them and decided to have a go.

I followed the recipe for chocolate cake from the Peggy Porschen book, but found the cakes very sof and crumbly and not really very easy for this recipe - next time I would make something a bit denser like a chocolate mud cake.

Melt chocolate with milk and brown sugar in a pan

Beat butter and rest of sugar then add the eggs. Then sift in the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and bicarb of soda.

Pour in the melted chocolate mixture

Pour into cake cases and bake.

Next to make the cakes look like flowerpots - I freestyled and used the recipe for inspiration rather than following the exact instructions. Peggy's book shows you how to make very elaborate flowers but I knew I wouldn't have time for this so I decided to use a shortcut as well.

I took some white fondant and coloured it a caramel brown with some colouring that I already had. I then cut a wide strip, turned the cupcake upside down and used chocolate buttercream to stick the fondant around the cake.

Turning it the right way up, it looks like  a flowerpot filled with mud! I cut leaves using a plunger cutter from green fondant.

I also topped them off with some Dr. Oetker wafer daisies. When the lovely people at Dr. Oetker recently agreed to offer a prize for this month's Alphabakes, they also sent me a set of the same items to review. One of those items was a packet of wafer daisies.

I've used these before, but they came in particularly handy for this last-minute baking as I just wouldn't have had time to make my own fondant flowers. They cost around £1.49 (current Tesco price) and there were 12 in the pack - just right for a batch of cupcakes. They come in three colours - pink, white and yellow - with a yellow or white-coloured centre. All you do is place them on top of the icing just before it sets - they're quite large, so one would be enough on top of a cupcake, or you could use the whole packet to decorate a large cake. They don't really taste of much so don't detract from the flavour of the icing. I also think it's good that there's a long time before the best before date - this packet that I got in July (2012) said best before March 2013, so you can definitely keep them in the cupboard for when you're short of inspiration, or short of time!

I ended up making quite a few of these - they were a bit fiddly and time consuming but the Dr Oetker flowers really sped up the process!

I had to take the cakes out of the paper cases to put the fondant around them, so I put them into larger muffin cases afterwards, which I think added to the flowerpot effect. They went down really well at the bake sale!

As these were actually made for a bake sale, I'm entering them in Tea Time Treats, a blogging challenge hosted by Karen from Lavender and Lovage and Kate from What Kate Baked, as their theme for July is cake stall cakes.

I am also entering them in Cupcake Tuesday, hosted by Hoosier Homemade

Disclaimer: the wafer daisies were provided free of charge by Dr. Oetker. I was not required to write a positive review. All other ingredients were paid for by myself.