Tabby Cat Birthday Cake

Since I’m on holiday and wanted to schedule a few posts for when I was away I thought I would share this with you. Isn’t it brilliant?

 

My sister made this cake for my birthday, using an idea and instructions from a brilliant cake decorating book I got her from Sainsbury’s that only cost £5 for a big hardback with lots of colour photos. I think her cake has a very professional finish even though she is quite new to covering cakes with fondant. The stripes look perfect and the cake was so cute! The cake underneath was delicious too – a Victoria sponge.

 

I’m so used to making my own birthday cake - I don’t get many opportunities to make big cakes and I usually don’t want someone else stealing my glory! I think I would feel the same about a wedding cake but that’s a bigger challenge). But in this instance I’d been really busy and we popped in to see my family for a day right before we went on holiday – so it was lovely that she made this for me! I might have to let someone else make a birthday cake for me in future!
 

Baby shower cake for my boss

So I promised a while ok (Ok, quite a while ago) that I would show you what I did with this fondant sheep... it found its way onto a baby shower cake for my boss!

My boss and his wife are both American, and actually met while they were working at our company's head office in the US. After they got married, he got a promotion and they came to London. Now, baby showers are a big deal in America - some people set up gift lists as we do here with weddings, and the mother-to-be's friends have a big party and play games like tasting baby food and quizzing the parents-to-be about baby-related facts. So I gather from the internet, anyway - I've never been to a baby shower before! They haven't taken off in the UK at all and while I do think it would be nice to celebrate an impending birth (and be pretty handy to get a whole bunch of things you need for the baby), some friends I've spoken to say they find it really mercenary and would never dream of registering with Toys R Us in the same way that they registered with John Lewis when they got married. But I guess if it's generally accepted and what everyone else is doing...!

Anyway, since the folks in our US head office knew both my boss and his wife, they wanted to throw them a baby shower that they could also be part of, so we set up a fake meeting invite for my boss, invited his wife into the office, and set up a video conference link between the two locations. We decorated the rooms and the US team said they would order a cake - and I volunteered to make one.

And where does the sheep come into play? Well, my company's logo is a kind of sheep - it looks nothing like the one I made out of fondant but I think mine is a much cuter, nursery character-style version. And to be honest, I was going to make a teddy bear but ran out of time and had already made this sheep in the cake decorating class!

I decided to make a simple victoria sponge and followed a Mary Berry recipe that I found on the internet. I also made good use of my new Kitchenaid that I had got only a few weeks before!

Beating the eggs

Adding butter, sugar and flour

Mix it all up - I sometimes find I need to use this protector if there's a lot of flour, otherwise it goes everywhere!

Tasting the batter - chef's perks!

I love the fact that the Kitchenaid bowl has a handle, so it's really easy to hold and scrape out the mixture with a spatula

In the oven waiting to be baked

Now for the tricky part... rolling out the white fondant.

As well as registering at three different places for baby gifts, my boss's wife told me they had also chosen the colours lavender and mint green for their new daughter. I thought that was really nice and a good way of making sure they didn't receive an ocean of pink!

I wanted to make the cake reflect those colours but not make it too bright and gaudy, so I decided to leave the cake itself white, but coloured a small amount of fondant with lavender and a small amount with green. If you're using a gel paste colour, you just need to dot on a few blobs with the end of a cocktail stick, and knead the fondant well until the colour is evenly distributed.

I used the Tappit alphabet set to cut out some letters

I moulded some of the coloured fondant into cubes and stuck a letter on top. It's supposed to look like the alphabet building blocks that children have.

The cake, when it had come out of the oven

I sandwiched the two cakes together with buttercream and spread a thin layer of buttercream over the top and around the sides

Then I covered it with the rolled-out fondant icing. This is pretty neat, for me!

Smoothing down the sides

I wanted something to decorate the sides of the cake so it didn't look too plain. I had some baby-themed cookie cutters, which were quite small, so I used them to cut out shapes of the coloured fondant: a rocking horse, a baby's bottle and a teddy bear.

I used a small amount of water to stick them around the side of the cake

And here's the sheep I made a while back in an edible modelling class. I'd been wondering what to do with him...

I think he looks quite cute sitting on top of the cake!

Finally I added the alphabet blocks, which spell 'baby'

My boss and his wife really liked the cake and I was very pleased it turned out well :-)

 

I'm updating this post to send this celebration cake to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked.  Tea Time Treats was one year old in November so their theme for this month is celebration cakes.. and what better thing to celebrate than a new baby?

Diamond Jubilee Crown Cake

I wanted to bake something to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and my mum's birthday which was the same weekend. I had an idea of a royal crown cake and browsed a few images online until I came up with an idea and a plan. Then a week later, the Mail on Sunday magazine only went and published a 'how to make a Jubilee crown cake' guide... damn it! In the end it was a handy reference guide anyway so I can't complain.

I found this butter in the supermarket and thought it was very appropriate for some Jubilee baking.

I had decided to make a Victoria sponge for the cake itself and that happened to be the one given in the Mail on Sunday article as well, so I decided to just follow their quantities, even though I wasn't following their instructions on how to assemble the cake.

450g butter, softened
450g caster sugar
450g self-raising flour
8 eggs
2 tsp vanilla flavouring
2 tsp baking powder

Cream the butter and the sugar... have I mentioned how much I love my Kitchenaid? :-)

Add eggs

Add flour, vanilla and baking powder

Here are the first two cakes after they came out of the oven. They sank a little in the middle which was strange, but in the end quite helpful as it made them easier to stack with the cakes that rose more.

The other two cakes

So to assemble the crown, I sandwiched all four cakes together with buttercream

 Then I carved the cakes at a downward diagonal to make a shape that was wider at the top than at the bottom

I decided that purple was a suitable regal colour (and annoyingly so did the Mail on Sunday... I promise I wasn't copying their cake!) and so coloured a kilogram of sugarpaste.

I rolled out some more fondant and cut it into long strips to go up the sides and over the top of the cake. I sprayed it with silver lustre spray and left it to dry. The Mail on Sunday article recommended using gold edible lustre which you mix with vodka to make a kind of paint - but I think the spray is a lot easier! And I wanted to make mine silver rather than gold.

 Oops, a bit of stray buttercream to clean off...

The Mail on Sunday piece also suggested using jelly diamonds, which come in different colours - I wanted to stick with the silver theme so I found these edible jelly diamonds online instead. They're proper 3D diamond shape and made of a clear jelly - they were a little fiddly to use but I think they worked really well.

I also wanted to make a ball and cross to go on top of the crown, so I started by rolling out a small piece of sugarpaste...

Which I then cut into a cross like this

Out came the silver spray again!

I also bought a diamond plunger cutter and used it to cut small diamonds out of the leftover sugarpaste

I made a ball out of fondant and sprayed that gold as well, and placed the cross on top. I think it looks quite good on top of the cake (shame about the rest of the cake....!)

I stuck the jelly diamonds with some edible glue on the strips on the sides and top of the cake, and stuck the fondant diamonds I had cut out around the side.

One idea in the Mail on Sunday piece which I really liked suggested crushing a packet of Fox's glacier mints and arranging the pieces around the edge of the cake like a fur trim

But as usual, my sugarpaste skills are far from perfect... my confidence was knocked a little recently by a rather nasty comment on a previous post, so I feel like I should point out here that I'm a complete amateur, I never pretended to be perfect and as long as I am enjoying what I do, why should it matter? :-)

It didn't look as good as the one in the magazine, but then these things never do.. at least not when I'm concerned! I still quite like the way it turned out, anyway. It would have been better to use a darker purple and make the silver strips a bit wider, and as usual the fondant tore a bit when I put it over the cake so I did have to do a repair job on one side. Never mind!

As a finishing touch, I arranged the jubilee cake balls and corgi cake balls around the edge.

Happy Diamond Jubilee, and happy birthday mum!

The letter for June's Alphabakes challenge - hosted this month by Ros - is V, and since this cake is a Victoria sponge I'm making it my first entry for the month (I'm sure I'll do at least one more!)

I am also entering this in Homemade by Fleur's Blogging Jubilee Baking Competition.  The competiton is sponsored by Appliances Online and the deadline is tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's entries and already have spotted a few that I think are potential winners!