Jubilee M&M cookies

One last Jubilee bake for the bank holiday weekend - I found some limited edition red, white and blue M&Ms in the supermarket and couldn't resist buying them. I'd seen M&M cookies before so went online to find a suitable recipe and threw them together in a matter of minutes!

I found the recipe I wanted to use on Joy of Baking, and halved the recipe but otherwise followed it quite closely. Essentially  you cream the butter and sugar:

Add the egg, then the flour, baking powder, salt and vanilla.

Here are the limited edition M&Ms:

Shape the mixture into balls and flatten slightly on a baking sheet. Push some M&Ms into the top. Here they are after a few minutes in the oven. I realised when the cookies spread that there was space for more M&Ms so I added some more.

Fresh from the oven -a quick and simple recipe but a nice addition to the jubilee table.

Here's a quick snapshot of my mum's birthday tea

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!

Jubilee cake balls

Here's another quick bake that was also designed to use up the cake pops that went a bit wrong! So as before, I turned a madeira cake into crumbs

Then used buttercream to form a soft dough

Rolled it into balls and when I couldn't get them to stay on the cake pop sticks (doh!) I covered them in some spare white fondant that needed using up:

I dabbed some edible glue onto the fondant and coated the balls in red, white and blue sprinkles. There you go: Jubilee cake balls!

 And since once again I was using up leftovers/ waste, I am entering this into Frugal Food Fridays, which I am guest hosting this month. Feel free to add anything to the linkup here!

Corgi cake balls

The Queen's corgi dogs - just in time for the Jubilee!

I'm planning a fairly ambitious bake for the Jubilee weekend (which is also my mum's birthday) but in the meantime thought I would share this with you. I made corgi dog cake balls! And here's how I did it.

Take one madeira cake that you've already baked, and turn into cake crumbs.

Mix with buttercream to make a play-dough type consistency.

Attempt to make cake pops. Fail completely. Discover the balls keep falling off the sticks and eventually give up and decide to do something else with the damn things.
True story... lol!

Roll out some leftover brown-coloured fondant, and cover the cake ball completely.
Look online for pictures of corgi dogs as you can't quite remember what they look like.
Make a nose and central face stripe from white fondant, and ears from the brown fondant.
Assemble like so.

Take chocolate chips you had bought for another recipe, and insert two point-first as the eyes, and another one as the nose.

Repeat as desired. Do you think they look like corgis? They definitely look like dogs!

 

I'm planning to include these with my main Jubilee bake but in the meantime I am entering them in the Blogging Jubilee Baking Competition hosted by Homemade by Fleur. The competition is sponsored by Appliances Online .The deadline is June 3rd so you still have a few days to get your entries in!

Because this used up leftover fondant, and ingredients I bought for another recipe, and cake that I would have otherwise thrown away as the cake pops failed, I am entering this into Frugal Food Fridays. I am guest hosting the challenge on behalf of Helen from Fuss Free Flavours from now until the end of June.