3D Dinosaur Cake - Children's Birthday Cakes

The lockdown in 2020 meant I didn’t post anything on my blog for several months, as I tried to juggle a full-time job with a toddler at home every day for nearly three months while nursery was shut. So I’ve only just realised that I never posted anything about her birthday cake in spring of 2020 – better late than never!

Sophie is a big fan of dinosaurs, and from a young age has been able to correctly identify dinosaurs to the extent that I think she already knows more types than I do! We have encouraged her love of dinosaurs through toys and books and also a green dinosaur-patterned beanbag for her room to counteract some of the pink! If I recall correctly, she actually asked for a dinosaur cake for her second birthday, and I was happy to oblige!

We held her birthday party at My Gym, where we go to a class every week – it’s a cross between gymnastics, exercise, games and play, and they do brilliant birthday parties where you get an hour of gym-based games and half an hour in the party room with food and drink, and of course cake. I had the option of providing my own cake so of course that’s what I did.

I wanted a cake that would actually look like a dinosaur – I saw some lovely ideas online of round cakes with dinosaurs on top (either made from icing or plastic toys), where the cake itself was decorated to look like the dinosaur habitat. But I wanted instant recognition and wow factor, and decided it had to be a three-dimensional dinosaur. Luckily, it was easier to make one than I thought, thanks to this brilliant tutorial on WikiHow!

I baked a round vanilla sponge cake and then cut it up according to the tutorial instructions, then covered it in green roll-out fondant. I used yellow fondant to add some spots, and a darker green modelling paste – a kind of icing that is stiffer, so better to use when you are making something that needs to stand up – to make the spines along the dinosaur back. It wasn’t difficult or even massively time-consuming at all and I was really pleased with the finished cake, and I think the kids at the party all enjoyed it!

Passion Fruit Curd Mother's Day Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for Mother’s Day for my mum, my mother-in-law - and me!

I’ve developed quite a taste for passion fruit recently - Passoa passion fruit liqueur is delicious and could definitely be used in baking, but since my four year old daughter was going to have these cupcakes as well I wasn’t going to use alcohol. Instead, I got the passionfruit flavour from a combination of yogurt - papaya, passion fruit and mango flavour, from Morrisons - and passion fruit curd (The Cherry Tree brand, from Ocado).

I wanted a light cupcake using yogurt in the cake mix and these were so light and airy, they probably aren’t robust enough to put a spoonful of curd into the middle but I did anyway (it just makes them a bit messy when you eat them!).

Here is the recipe I used:

125g margarine or butter, softened

150g sugar

2 eggs

150ml yogurt - I used papaya, passion fruit and mango flavour from Morrison's 

225g self-raising flour

1 heaped tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

For the filling:

Passionfruit curd - I used the Cherry Tree brand from Ocado

For the icing:

500g icing sugar

250g butter, softened

Passionfruit flavouring to taste - for example you could add a spoonful of the passionfruit curd, or passionfruit liqueur if the cakes are for adults.

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and the sugar then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Stir in the yogurt, then fold in the flour, baking powder and salt.

Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for around 15-20 minutes depending on the size until the tops are golden brown.

Allow to cool, then using a teaspoon make a small well in each cupcake and add a spoonful of passionfruit curd.

To make the buttercream, cream together the butter and icing sugar and add a spoonful of passionfruit curd, or a few drops of passionfruit liqueur if for adults only - you may need to adjust the quantity of icing sugar if the mixture is too runny.

Using a piping bag and a nozzle, pipe swirls onto the top of the cupcakes. 

I decorated these cupcakes in different ways:

SuckUK customisable cookie stamp - this is a wooden stamp that comes with a plastic disc and little letters, that you insert into the disc to make the message of your choice. You can stamp this onto a cookie before it has baked, or stamp onto a circle of fondant icing, as I did here. I've had this piece of equipment for ages but this was the first time I had used it.

It was quite fiddly to get the letters into the right places, and took a bit of trial and error to work out if they were all the right way around; there isn't a huge amount of space for a message but I managed to get 'happy' across the top, 'mothers' day along the bottom and 'day' in the middle. However, there was only one of most letters and not enough to spell out 'happy' for instance as there was only one 'p', so I had to stamp the missing letter separately. It didn't quite look the same and I was surprised given that 'happy birthday' would be, to me, the most obvious message to use on the cookie stamp that there weren't enough letters to make it! Then I piped some small buttercream flowers around the edge.

Wilton Make Any Message Letterpress Set - this was also something I received as a gift several years ago. The letters are bigger than on the SukUK stamp so I just pressed 'mum' into a circle of fondant icing and placed it on top of each cupcake with a little buttercream. Then I piped some buttercream flowers along the top and bottom.

Piped flowers: I used two different colours of buttercream (pink and purple, though the latter looks a bit grey in this photo), and two different nozzles to pipe a swirl and some smaller flowers onto each cupcake and added some edible silver balls on top.

Strawberry Milkshake Easter Cake

Having guests over Easter is always a good excuse for baking and I find cakes easier than desserts to make in advance. So I made this after work in the evening and decorated it first thing in the morning, in  time for my sister and niece to arrive.

The cake is a strawberry milkshake cake, so called because of the secret ingredient - Nesquik! (For those not familiar with this childhood staple, Nesquik is a powdered flavouring to add to milk, which comes in strawberry or banana flavour. It has been around since I was a child in the 80s, if not even longer!).

I recently made an Oreo cake for my husband’s birthday which I haven’t blogged about yet - it was the most delicious moist chocolate cake, and I decided to create a cake along similar lines. That cake used cocoa powder - and boiling water, to which I attribute the moistness - so for this one, as I wanted a fruity spring flavour but with an ingredient of a similar texture to cocoa powder and suddenly remembered Nesquik!

 This is the recipe I adapted, using Nesquik in place of cocoa powder, though I only used the recipe for the sponge and not the buttercream or chocolate ganache.

For the buttercream I made a standard butter and icing sugar combination, adding in some strawberry syrup for flavour and colour. I filled the three layer cake and then piped some swirls on the top, before colouring some more buttercream purple and green, to pipe more flowers and little bits of green (foliage, I guess) in between. 

I then decorated the top with Easter marshmallows (you could also use mini eggs if young children aren’t going to eat it) and a little pink glimmer sugar. The ‘hoppy Easter’ cake topper is a plastic sign that my husband printed for me with his new 3D printer, which I love!

5th Anniversary Wooden Log Celebration Cake

The theme for a fifth wedding anniversary is wood so when my husband and I were celebrating that particular milestone recently I decided to make a cake based on the theme. There are a lot of ways you could interpret ‘wood’ - after all a lot of different things are made of wood - but to me the obvious choice was a woodland theme and a wooden tree stump!

This cake has vertical layers running through it which makes it a bit different - because it’s actually a Swiss roll cake on its side!

The recipe and general design came from a blog called Top with Cinnamon. It’s actually very easy to make this delicious cake - you make two Swiss rolls, cut them vertically so you have four strips, and roll them all up around each other with frosting in between. 

I didn’t make the coffee frosting in this recipe and instead added some cocoa powder as I wanted my daughter to have it and she’s too young for coffee (and probably wouldn’t like the taste anyway). I spread the ganache around the outside and on top and marked it with a fork to look like a tree trunk.

If I had more time to decorate I would have made woodland creatures out of icing but instead I used some mushroom shaped sweets (you can get these in most grocery shops) and made a ladybird, leaves and some tiny flowers out of icing (a flower plunger cutter made that last part very easy). Finally I added a ‘happy anniversary’ cake pick.

You can see the vertical layers when you slice into the cake - overall I’m really pleased with how the cake matches our anniversary theme!

Baby Cow Gender Reveal Cake - For My Own Baby!

There’s a big trend at the moment for gender reveal parties, in the US at least. I’m seeing more and more posts and pictures on the internet where couples expecting a baby reveal whether it’s a boy or a girl in front of their family and friends – often in quite creative ways. For instance, when the gender is discovered at the antenatal scan, rather than tell the parent(s), the sonographer places the result into a sealed envelope. The parents give the envelope to a bakery, which makes a cake that has either neutral or both pink and blue decorations on the outside, but the cake inside is dyed either pink or blue, and often has sweets in the centre that tumble out. It’s only when the couple actually cut into the cake and see what colour is inside that they find out whether they are having a boy or a girl.

 

Another reveal method is for the couple or mum to stand surrounded by family and friends (usually outside) holding a large helium balloon that is opaque – often black or patterned. They burst the balloon and are showered with either pink or blue confetti – again having had no idea themselves what the gender would be.

Those seem really fun if you want to make a thing of revealing the gender in front of your loved ones, but the idea of not knowing ourselves was a bit strange to me – and gender reveal parties aren’t really a thing in the UK. Nonetheless, I decided I wanted to make a gender reveal cake – but rather than give a sealed envelope to a bakery, my husband and I would find out at our 21-week scan and I’d bake a cake that evening.

I wanted to fill the cake with sweets that would tumble out when it was cut, and I found getting hold of pink sweets was easy but blue surprisingly hard! As I was making the cake in the evening I wanted to have both colour sweets already to hand, so a few weeks before the scan started having a look on the internet and online in supermarkets. There are loads of pink sweets available, from strawberry bonbons to a giant tube of purely pink Smarties, but there didn’t seem to be a blue equivalent – at one point the closest I thought I was going to get was mint tic-tacs! Of course, I could have gone to M&M World in Leicester Square – where you can buy M&Ms by weight in any colour you like – and I do work in London but getting to Leicester Square is a bit of a pain and the shop is busy, full of tourists and generally not somewhere I want to go if I can help it.

Luckily I spotted an old fashioned-style sweet shop called Hardy’s near my office – there are a few of these around. They had giant jars of all kinds of sweets against one wall, including pink strawberry bonbons and blue raspberry bonbons, so I bought a bag of each.

I also wanted to plan the cake and buy the ingredients in advance – it might have been nice to have the option of baking both a pink strawberry cake and a blue raspberry-flavour cake but I decided to take the easy option and make a lemon cake.

I used this recipe from Good to Know, though I didn’t do the lemon syrup due to lack of time, and realised the lemon curd in my fridge was out of date and I didn’t have time to make more, so I made a simple lemon buttercream for the filling.

 

I made up the batter, adding lemon zest and a bit of lemon juice, and then added some gel food colouring before the mixture went into two cake pans.

 

When it was baked and cooled, I used a glass to cut a circle out from both layers of cake, going right through the top layer and part way through the bottom layer. I spread lemon buttercream icing on the bottom layer and sandwiched the other cake on top, then filled the hole I’d cut with the sweets, replacing a thin slice of the disc I had removed so the cake would be flat on top.
 

The rest of the buttercream went on the top and around the sides of the cake so I could cover it with a large piece of rolled white fondant. As my surname is Cowe – pronounced cow – this had to be a cow-print cake, like my wedding cake last year! But instead of black and white I made the patches a mixture of pink and blue. I used the same cutters from the Lakeland ‘make your own cookie cutter’ set that my sister and I used on the wedding cake last year – lovely to think that the cutters were coming out again for such a special reason!

 

It was already 9pm and I was watching the Apprentice when I decided the cake did need a baby cow topper as well, so I moulded the animal – complete with baby bottle – while sitting in front of the TV. It’s not my best creation but given it wasn’t even going to be seen very long (I was taking the cake into work, not having a gender reveal party) I didn’t think it mattered much. I also made four alphabet blocks spelling ‘baby’- I thought the cake looked quite pretty and it didn’t actually take that long.

So here’s what you’ve no doubt been waiting for…. when the cake was cut the first slice revealed the colour inside was…. Pink!  We are having a little girl.

The cake tasted really nice and it was fun to see people’s reactions and to be able to share our news!

I'm sharing this with CookBlogShare hosted by EasyPeasyFoodie.

Pink Ombre Wedding Cake and How To Make Pink Sugar Flowers

Pink three-tier wedding cake

- How to make a pink wedding cake

- How to make a pink ombre cake with each layer a different shade of pink

- How to make realistic sugar flowers

- How to decorate a pink cake

- Can you freeze cake

..... all these questions will be answered in this post!
 

This cake was a real labour of love so I think deserves a big blog post. It isn't actually a wedding cake but I think would work very well as one, perhaps with another one or two layers. I made it for a bake sale at work that was raising money for Breast Cancer - the charity with the pink ribbon campaign, so the theme was pink. The bake sale was meant to be a 'bake off', judged by a senior member of staff with a prize provided by a local business, but for various reasons the competitive element was cancelled. I wish I'd known that in advance as I might not have spent so much time and money on making this cake! Even so I'm very proud of it, it helped raise a good amount of money for charity and it's great to be able to share this cake and how I went about making it with you all.

 

To begin with I made the sugar flowers; as I was making them from flower paste they were intended to harden and I knew I could make them at the weekend (the bake sale was on Thursday and I knew I wouldn't have time during the week).

 

I bought various things after watching a sugar flower demonstration at Cake International two years ago that I still hadn't used so it was about time! Here you can see an Iris petal cutter which I used to cut out some large petals from Renshaw's pink flower paste.



 

Here are stamens and florist tape - the only non-edible part of the flowers.

I also had two smaller Iris petal cutters which I used for the inner petals. Take a few stamen and bind them together with the florist tape then take your first petal and wrap it around the stamens, quite tightly at the bottom but more open at the top. Start with a smaller petal and place a few of these around the stamen, overlapping each one.

Then add a couple of the bigger petals and curve them outwards at the edges. I placed them on this drying rest; they dry hard quite quickly. Keep whatever flower paste you are not using covered up.

I made three of these, but in the end could only fit two on the cake.

I also used this blossom flower cutter to make some smaller flowers to cascade down the side of the cake. I've explained in more detail how to use the cutter and embosser on this post on wedding cupcakes.

I made a whole pile of these and left them to dry.

As for the cake: I wanted to make each layer of cake a different shade of pink so I thought it was important to use a simple sponge recipe. I went for a 6/6/6 cake - that is, 6oz of flour, 6oz caster sugar and 6 oz butter, and 3 eggs. The sponge turned out really well, very light and tasty.

I made several quantities of this cake mixture and used more for the first few layers as I was using a bigger cake tin; so in total I made three batches of this cake mixture but it wasn't evenly used across the three tiers of the cake. I didn't make a note of exactly what quantities I used for each cake unfortunately!

I used Sugarflair pink colourpaste for three of the layers and fuchsia for the fourth. I added a tiny amount of the pink to the cake mixture and spread a very thin layer on the bottom of a greased 10-inch cake tin, and baked that in the oven for about 12-15 minutes.

I then added a little more of the same pink food colouring to the cake mixture left in the bowl and repeated the procedure. I did that one more time with the pink (I think at this point I had to make more cake mixture) and then finally I used fuchsia for the last layer.

You can really see the difference in shades when they came out of the oven! My three-tier cooling rack came in very handy.

 

 For the final tier I made a very small cake in a 5-inch cake tin and did a marble effect, combining a spoonful of pink cake mixture with a spoonful of plain until the tin was filled.

 

As I knew I was going to be too busy in the days leading up to the bake sale, there was only one thing for it: I was going to have to freeze the cake. I looked up how to do this on the internet and discovered that you can't really freeze frosting but the actual sponge cake should be fine. Wrap each layer in clingfilm and carefully place in the freezer.

I would never been able to do this with the freezer in my last house as it was quite small, and had drawers which wouldn't have been wide enough for the biggest layer of cake. But when we bought the new house we treated ourselves to an American-style freezer (partly as my boyfriend wanted the ice dispenser but two months later it still hasn't been connected to the plumbing!). One real advantage is that the shelves are very deep so I had no problem sliding my layers of cake into the freezer. And rest assured the cake tasted absolutely fine when it came out of the freezer!

 

So the night before the bake sale I assembled the cake. I made a simple buttercream which I coloured pink and spread it very thinly between each layer of the cake.

I had to level off one layer of cake as it wasn't quite flat but otherwise the layers were all relatively uniform, and definitely came out in different shades of pink!

I was limited by having to carry this in my cake carry case to work so I made the bottom tier four layers thick and then covered it in pink fondant from Renshaw.

The next tier was two layers but the layers were thicker. The final cake on top didn't come out of the tin very well and left a chunk of itself behind which is why the top looks quite uneven.

I thought that covering the whole cake in pink was a bit much, plus I had some specific decorations in mind, so I covered the middle layer in white fondant.

 

I bought these printed sugar paper decorations from Culpitt after seeing their stand at the Cake and Bake Show. They are really easy to use - pre-cut circles you just pop out of the page. They are edible and the circles were a variety of sizes and patterns which I thought would look nice around the side of the cake, on the white layer. I also bought some pink ribbon from the same website to put around the pink layers.

So finishing the cake was quite easy. I didn't bother using dowels between the tiers - I never have done, though some people say it's essential. I'm doing a wedding cake course next year so hopefully I will find out more!

After covering each tier of the cake separately, I placed one on top of the other, securing with some buttercream in between. I wrapped the ribbon around the top and bottom layers and secured with some edible glue, and stuck the sugar paper circles around the white layer, again with edible glue. I placed two of the large sugar flowers on top and secured them with royal icing, and used royal icing to stick on the smaller flowers so they would look like they were cascading down the side of the cake. I was really pleased with the final result!

 

 

There aren't many blog challenges this month that I can share this cake with, which is a shame, as it doesn't fit any of the themes. But I can send it to Cook Blog Share, hosted by Lucy at Supergoldenbakes. 

 

 

New Baby Girl Card

My friend Jane just had a baby, yay! I made a girl and a boy card in anticipation as I didn't know which she was going to have; it turned out that she had a daughter.

I went with the traditional pink theme and used a pink card blank, and cut a rectangle from a piece of printed backing paper that I thought would make a nice contrast. The swaddled baby, the small heart and the larger heart with the word 'baby' are made of wood, and all came from the same sticker pack. I think cards look nice where they are symmetrical and elements are within the lines but it can also look good to cross lines and borders, like I have done with the 'baby' heart which cuts through the border. The border itself is a silver outline sticker, as is the 'congratulations' word.

Half and Half Vegan/Regular Lemon Birthday and Baby Shower Cake

 One of my closest friends is having a baby and she decided to combine her birthday party with her baby shower this year, and I offered to make a cake. Another friend who was coming was vegan, so I knew I had to make a vegan cake. I wanted to somehow incorporate the birthday and baby shower and brainstormed a few ideas to get them both into the same cake - which wasn't particularly easy!

I decided to make two layers, as I knew a lot of people were coming to the party, and that meant I could make one layer vegan and the other layer use dairy. As we didn't know if the baby is going to be a boy or a girl I decided to choose a pink and blue colourscheme, and make mini building blocks spelling out the word baby; the mum-to-be's name also has four letters so I decided to write baby on one side of the blocks and her name on the other. I also bought a spray of stars as a cake topper from an online shop.

For the bottom layer I used Delia's lemon curd cake recipe.

You need:
175g self-raising flour
175g butter, softened
1 tsp baking powder
175g caster sugar
3 eggs
grated zest and juice of one lemon

Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line a 9cm cake tin. Cream the butter and the sugar then beat in the eggs. Fold in the flour and the baking powder and add the zest and juice of one lemon.
Spoon into the prepared cake tin and bake for about 25 mins. Cool in the tin then on a baking rack.
I found the recipe for the vegan lemon cake on About.com. It was a cupcake recipe but works fine as one large cake, albeit with a longer cooking time. I also adapted the ingredients slightly to use a different type of oil.

You need:
1/2 cup plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup soy or almond milk
3/4 cup caster sugar
juice and zest of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease and line a 7 inch baking tin. This was going to be the top layer of the cake so I needed it to be smaller than the bottom layer.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl and add the salt. Mix in the vegetable oil and soya milk then add the caster sugar and mix well. Finally fold in the lemon juice and zest. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes. Allow to cool in the tin then transfer to a cooling rack.

I made a simple lemon buttercream; for the bottom layer, I creamed butter and icing sugar and added some lemon curd. For the vegan layer, I creamed Pure - a vegan margarine - with icing sugar and added lemon juice.

Split both cakes; fill the bottom layer with the buttercream and fill the top layer, which is the vegan cake, with the vegan buttercream.

To decorate the cakes, I rolled out some white ready-to-roll fondant - which helpfully also happens to be vegan. Cover both cakes separately and trim off around the edges.

Cover a cake board as well and place the larger cake on the cake board.

I wanted to make stripes going all the way around the edge of the cake but wasn't really sure how to do it. I coloured some fondant with pink and blue gel colour (I usually use Sugarflair or similar) and rolled it out. I then cut strips with a pizza cutter, measuring the width so they were all the same. I then laid the strips over the cake, alternating each colour. I went right across the cake so found that the strips built up to quite a height in the middle.

I wasn't really sure what to do about this so used a knife to carefully cut out the centre. It looked OK but I would like to know though if anyone has decorated a cake like this and what you are supposed to do?

I also found that even though the bottom cake was two inches wider than the top, by the time I had covered it in fondant there didn't seem to be much difference and the bottom cake needed to stick out a lot more. I was restricted though by the fact that I needed to put the cake in a box to carry on the train so the largest size I could make for the bottom layer was 9 inches and I didn't have a tin smaller than 7 inches for the top layer. It's a shame that having to take cakes on public transport so often restricts what I can make!


I made alphabet blocks in pink and blue with the letters 'baby' on them for the top of the cake

I also spelled out my friend's name on the other side of the blocks

Here's the spray of stars I bought, which I think looks very pretty.

I also bought two rolls of ribbon online, one saying happy birthday and the other congratulations, to combine the two occasions.

The finished cake. It's a shame the bottom layer wasn't larger but it looked quite pretty anyway and tasted very nice. I preferred the vegan layer to the regular layer!

I'm sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at Jibber Jabber UK; she has chosen a theme of vintage cakes this month and I think a Delia Smith lemon cake falls under that category, even if I have given it a twist.