Peaches and Cream Summer Sandcastle Cake

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

I bought a sandcastle cake mould from Lakeland two years ago and only used it once, when I made this pineapple and coconut sandcastle cake. The uncomfortably but beautifully hot weather we've had for the past week or so inspired me to dig it out again and to come up with another summery flavour for the cake. I decided not to decorate it as a lot of fondant or buttercream is not always a great idea in hot weather, and I wanted the natural colour of the cake to reflect the colour of the sandcastle.

I wanted the cake to be light and moist so decided to make it peaches and cream flavour. I used tinned peaches as I had some in the fridge to use up, and it meant I could use the peach juice from the can as well, but if you want to use fresh peaches I'd use three or four peeled and chopped, and for the liquid element, perhaps the Granini Peach Drink that's made using peach puree (available in Tesco and Waitrose) or peach-flavoured squash, made up quite strong.

Peaches and Cream Cake - an original recipe by Caroline Makes, for Caroline Makes.Net

You need:

Cake Release spray for greasing the mould

200g butter, softened

200g caster sugar

4 eggs

1 cup peach juice or squash

about 200g peaches, either tinned or fresh, peeled and sliced if necessary

275g self raising flour

 

 

I used the Lakeland sandcastle silicone mould for this cake, which doesn't seem to be available on their site any more - if you want to purchase one, keep an eye on Ebay, or you can use any shaped cake tin or mould.

Preheat the oven to 150C. Spray the sandcastle mould with Cake Release or similar.

In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer then mix in the eggs.

Add the peach juice and mix again. Finally add the sliced peaches and the flour and gently fold in.

 Stand the sandcastle mould in a large roasting tin and pour the cake mixture into the mould. Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour.

Allow to cool in the mould and then turn out onto a cooling rack.

 This was a beautifully light and moist cake; so moist in fact it started to break as I took it out of the mould before it was completely cooled, which will teach me to be more patient next time!

 

I'm sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK; her theme is garden party and this cake would make a great centrepiece.

 

I'm also sharing this with the Food Calendar linky on Charlotte's Lively Kitchen as it's summer holiday season!

 

Beach Fun Birthday Card

I love outline stickers when it comes to sentiments but they can be hard to use when it comes to actual shapes and pictures. Do you stick them directly onto the card? Or some kind of cardboard backing? And they are often gold, which isn’t a colour I usually use on greetings cards – other than Christmas cards.

 

I once bought a plastic folder for keeping outline stickers in, that came with 20 sets of stickers already. So there are a few sheets I’ve never found all that much use for, including one of beach images. I think this would be quite useful in scrapbooking to make a holiday page but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a beach holiday!

 

Instead, I decided to use them on a birthday card for a friend who has her birthday in August. I wanted to use yellow card to go with the gold stickers but thought they would get a bit lost on a card that was completely yellow, so instead I chose a piece of backing paper with fine coloured dots, as it made me think a little bit of sand. I used that to cover a standard card blank, and mounted a rectangle of yellow card with lacy edges (I think this is a Tattered Lace die cut, which I bought from Ebay) onto that.

 

As well as some beach images like a sandcastle, deckchair, beach ball and shells, I added the words ‘summer fun’ and ‘sun’ as I thought that was related to birthdays as well as holidays. I also put a wave sticker along the bottom of the card but it doesn’t particularly stand out and I think it may have been better without.

 

To make it clear this was a birthday card I used a little banner die-cut from another pack saying ‘on your birthday’ at the top.

Summer Fun Birthday Card

When I was card making last Saturday I took inspiration from some of the crafting blog challenges that I'd come across. One of them had the theme of flip flops and I knew I had a pack of beach-themed stickers somewhere so decided to hunt them out.

I used a yellow card blank to represent the beach, and began by sticking on the felt stickers that I had left in the pack - a bikini, pair of flip flops, beach umbrella and a bucket and spade. I wanted the wording to be similarly bright and bold and found I had the right letters left in a packet (where I had already used some up) to spell the word 'fun'. As the letters were quite large there wouldn't have been room to write a much longer word anyway!

The card was still lacking something - lacking a lot actually as it looked like a plain card with some stickers added randomly - which is pretty much what I had done! I found a mini rubber stamp with a sun and dotted that all over the card. It still needed something to bring all the elements together and I found I had a few pieces of a coloured border sticker left in a couple of different patterns so I added that around the edges of the card. I was much more pleased with the final result!

I'm sending this to the Fairytale Challenge which has a flip flops theme this week.