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.

Cowboy Pie

This pie is based on an idea I saw in a Slimming World book or magazine a while ago but isn't actually particularly Slimming - I wanted an excuse to use my cow print rolling pin again! It came from Etsy and was a Christmas gift last year I think but I've only used it a few times. The rolling pin leaves an imprint of a cow pattern on anything you roll out!

I decided to theme a pie around it and use it to roll out the pastry to go on the top. The cow theme would work for cottage pie (which uses minced beef) but I decided to make what I call a cowboy pie - based on sausage and beans which have associations with cowboys sitting around a camp fire!

Preheat the oven to 180C. First fry or grill a couple of sausages per person until they are just cooked and cut into chunks. You can also add some diced chorizo or pancetta to the pan and fry. Put into a pie dish (either an individual dish or a large one - I did an individual one for my husband) and pour over half a tin of baked beans and mix together.

You can see how the rolling pin leaves the cow pattern on the pastry. I used ready-made shortcrust pastry though you can make your own.

Top the pie with the pastry and trim the edges; make a small hole for any steam to escape

When baked the pastry should turn golden brown (though it doesn't look very brown in this picture)

You also can't see the cow pattern very well any more in this photo, but it was there!

This is what the pie looks like inside - my husband said it was good. It's a nice change to the way you might normally serve sausage and beans, anyway!

DIY Wedding: Homemade Table Confetti

All the weddings I can remember recently have decorated the dining tables with confetti – not the same kind that you throw over the bride and groom, but shiny metallic pieces shaped like hearts or bottles of champagne and so on. It is a relatively inexpensive way to brighten up a plain tablecloth and add some interest and colour to the table settings – even better if you can get it to match your colour scheme or theme.

 

Places like the Card Factory sell cheap table confetti at 99p per bag – one bag is enough per table. But if you want something specific – a more unusual colour or shape – it can get expensive. Even just spending £3 per table when you have 12 tables will cost almost £40, which seems a lot for something so tiny that most guests won’t even pay close attention to.

 

We had a bit of a cow theme for our wedding – as our last name is Cowe. We didn’t go over the top – at least I don’t think we did, other people may disagree! We had a cow-print wedding cake, and each table was named after a different breed of cow, and the wedding stationery – which I made myself-  had cow print hearts and mini cows which were actually table confetti.

 

I had some of the cow confetti left but it was £2.25 for a small bag so I used what I had left, along with some purple hearts – again this was a little more expensive as most places had pink, red and silver, but I really wanted purple to match our colour scheme.

 

 

I decided we needed more and found a mini hole punch for crafts in the shape of a cow on Ebay, so bought some purple paper and made my own! It did take a little while but I left it in the kitchen and every time I went past, punched out a row of little cows, so it didn’t take much effort at all. Then I was able to combine the black and white cows, purple hearts and purple cows into little bags which I sealed for our venue coordinator to sprinkle one on each table. I think it was worth the effort!

 

 

 

 

Making My Own Wedding Cake

Photo by Lisa Dawn Photography
Cake by the bride and her sister!

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

When my husband and I were planning our wedding, I told him I really wanted to make our wedding cake myself - to say he wasn't keen was an understatement. Even though I'd made my friend Ros' wedding cake last year and really enjoyed the experience, he was worried I would get too stressed and be taking on too much.

So I was wondering what to best do when my sister told me she'd like to make the cake as her gift to us - which I wasn't expecting at all - but that she was a bit nervous at taking on such a big cake. Which gave me the perfect opportunity to suggest we do it between us!

I knew from the start that the cake itself would be quite easy and quick to decorate as there was really only one design of cake we could have, as our last name is Cowe - pronounced cow - a cow print cake! It sounds silly but I think the cake overall looked really elegant, and as we only had a few other cow print touches (the whole wedding wasn't full-on cow print) it worked really well.

My husband loves chocolate cake and also really likes fruit cake though I'm not as keen on fruit cake myself, so we decided to have each layer a different type of cake - fruit on the bottom, chocolate in the middle and lemon on the top.

We decided that for ease of transportation and being able to prepare the fruit cake in advance, my sister Clare would do the top and bottom of the cake and I would do the middle.

She'd just moved house and was renovating the new house so between an unfamiliar oven, and effectively a lot of building work going on, and a sister who kept asking whether she'd done the practice cake or not yet (to be fair she did leave it quite last-minute as she had so much else going on - unbeknown to me, she had also just discovered she was pregnant!) she did a brilliant job.

Clare decided to buy the fruit cake from an online shop and cover it with marzipan and decorate it herself, and then bake the top layer the day before the wedding and decorate that too.

I made a 9 inch chocolate cake for my middle layer using the same BBC Good Food recipe I'd done for Ros's cake as it worked so well, and once again the cake was beautifully moist and chocolatey. It came out of the oven perfectly, and I made a chocolate ganache buttercream which I spread round the sides and over the top, and then covered the cake with fondant.

This tilting turntable from Lakeland which my mum gave me for my birthday came in handy too:

I baked the cake first thing on the Thursday morning (getting up at about 6.30am) and left it to cool while I went out to collect the wedding dress, and decorated it in the afternoon. We then travelled from Surrey to Wiltshire on the Friday and had a wedding rehearsal and left the cake, along with various other things, at the venue, and got married on the Saturday afternoon. The cake lasted really well and was still really good when we ate some of the leftovers on the Sunday!

When I was thinking about the cow print decoration I knew I wanted the black patches to be different sizes and shapes but somehow still uniform - to not look like they had been cut out haphazardly and to have neat, sharp edges to make sure it looked professional.

I came across a 'make your own cookie cutter kit' from Lakeland which was absolutely perfect. It was reduced at the time from £9.99 to £4.99 and is currently £2.99; I bought two so I could send one to my sister. It was really easy to bend the metal strips into different cow print shapes and secure the ends with the tape provided, and the cookie cutters worked perfectly on the black fondant (I used Renshaw).

Each cake had a piece of ribbon around the bottom and another around the edge of the cake board in the exact same shade as our bridesmaid dresses; I got the ribbon from Fantastic Ribbons. We also had to purchase cake boards, cardboard boxes to store and transport the cake, and I bought this cake stand from Windsor as I wanted one where each tier of the cake would be separated, so you could see the cow print on the top.



We thought about having our names laser cut out of plastic as a cake topper - similar to the one Ros and James had, and we were going to order one over the internet until I decided I wanted something home made. We investigated whether we could make our own using my Silhouette die cutter but realised it would only cut thick card and not any kind of thin plastic, so decided instead that we would have a more traditional bride and groom cake topper - but with an untraditional twist: two cows!

I've made several animals from fondant before including a cow and a sheep so I knew I could easily make two cows to go on top. This link gives step-by-step instructions.

I gave the groom a purple tie to match the wedding colours and bought a Barbie wedding dress and gave the veil from it to the bride!

The cake was absolutely delicious, and we found that with a 12 inch bottom, 9 inch middle and 6 inch top cake we had plenty to feed 75 guests with some leftover, which we gave to the neighbours in our street.

 Here are some of the pictures our professional photographers, Lisa and Scott from Lisa Dawn Photography, took on our wedding day. I want to say a big thank you to my sister Clare again who has said "never again" when it comes to making a wedding cake, but I think she did a fantastic job and it meant a lot to me that my sister and I could make the cake together.









DIY Wedding: Handmade Wedding Invitations

 

If you’re getting married and are into crafts or baking it’s very tempting to decide you are going to make everything for your wedding yourself – but even the most ambitious bride (or groom) will realise they are just not going to have time. There is so much to do in the run-up to a wedding: OK, you’ve booked a photographer, but you have to give them a list of what family photos you want; OK, you’ve found a florist but you need to choose the flowers, find out who in the wedding party wants buttonholes or corsages, arrange when the flowers are going to be delivered, and decide what to do with them afterwards – every task on the to do list seems to split into multiple sub-tasks.

 

I realised this from the outset, but at the same time wanted some handmade elements for my wedding. As well as the personal touch, it also meant we could save money on certain things – though you have to be careful not to go overboard, thinking you’re saving money by making every guest a take-home gift when you can probably order a job lot from China on Ebay. But I do think that saving money is not the point of a DIY wedding – it’s about putting time and effort into something, making sure things are made with love, and getting exactly what you want because you’ve designed and made it yourself. Also, if you are into crafts it can be quite frustrating to buy something and think “but I could easily have made that myself!”.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, when I get married my name will be Caroline Cowe – pronounced cow. I’ve embraced my inner cow and am looking forward to being named after an animal (even though it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t ever meet a Mr Al Packer) so my fiancé and I felt that we needed to have a cow theme to the wedding. A subtle, elegant cow theme – we are not talking full on bridesmaid dresses in cowboy boots or a bucking bronco at the reception, but instead a few cow print touches here and there.

 

The wedding stationery was a good way to include cow print, we thought  - it would hint at the fun and relaxed atmosphere we are trying to create at our wedding (it’s mainly outdoors and the meal isn’t a formal ‘which fork do I use’ affair). I started thinking about how to include the motif and design something simple that I could make in bulk without it taking huge amounts of time, and this is what I came up with.

 

 

For Christmas I received a set of three heart hole punches of varying sizes, and I already had some cow print paper in my craft stash (when it ran out and I couldn’t find any more to buy, we just photocopied it!). I used the largest hole punch to cut out paper hearts and stuck them onto blank white cards I bought from Hobbycraft.

 

  

The words ‘wedding invitation’ came from a sheet of outline stickers that only cost £1 in Hobbycraft and had 22 sets of word, so I bought three of these.

 

 

 I stuck the words underneath the heart, but felt it still needed something else. After we first got engaged on a whim I bought some cowprint paraphernalia from a website called Cow Cool Stuff (can you believe there are other people obsessed with cows as well?) including some cow table confetti which I planned to sprinkle on tables at the wedding.

 

 

 I found that the little cows looked really cute in a row across the bottom of the wedding invitations, so glued them on. On some of the invitations I interspersed the cows with hearts cut from cow print paper using the smallest of the three hole punches I’d been given.

 

 

 

We printed out the wording for our wedding onto A4 paper, and bought a guillotine, again from Hobbycraft, to cut the right size so we could stick it inside the cards, which were 6x6 inches. I glued the inserts into the cards, and glued a piece of ribbon (which I bought from Ebay, in the same colour as the bridesmaid dresses) along the centre of the card, and tied it in a bow on the front. Each card didn’t take that long to make and even though they definitely look homemade, I was really happy with them. We have used the same motif for our order of service and menu cards as well.

  

 

 

Butterscotch Cow Cookies with an engraved rolling pin

Browsing Etsy before Christmas I came across this awesome rolling pin:

 There’s a shop on Etsy selling rolling pins with all kinds of patterns; you can also ask for a custom design to be made for you. As regular readers might know, when I get married in June I will be Mrs Cowe – and I am already embracing my inner cow!

 

This rolling pin lets you make very simple cookies and then imprint the design on them which is so cute. I decided to make sugar cookies flavoured with butterscotch to try the rolling pin out.

 

The basic sugar cookie recipe is:

225g butter, softened

110g caster sugar

275g plain flour

And I added 1 tsp of butterscotch flavouring

 

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and sugar, fold in the flour and add the flavouring. You should have a pliable dough – roll out on a lightly floured surface.

 

You can’t use the textured rolling pin for the initial rolling as you can’t go backwards and forwards over the dough or the pattern won’t work. So instead I used a regular rolling pin – but remember to roll out the dough to slightly thicker than you actually want it, as you are going to roll it again with the textured rolling pin.

 

I found I needed to press quite hard with the textured rolling pin to get enough of an indent that would still show up properly when the cookies were in the oven.

 

I then cut out circles with a cutter, and re-rolled the remaining dough until it was all used.

 

Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper. The easiest way to move the cookies onto your baking sheet is with a palette knife which is a handy tool to have for decorating cakes as well.

 

Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until golden brown and leave to cool. It’s a little hard to see the cow pattern on the cookies from certain angles but it is very visible – I gave these to my fiancé and he didn’t spot the pattern straight away but when he did, he thought it was really cool!

 

 

I’m considering giving these out at my wedding which we have nicknamed Cowefest!

 

I'm sending these to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker. She has chosen the letter C this month.