Easter Imprint Plunger Cookies

I’m ever hopeful that one day I will develop the knack of decorating cookies so they don’t look like a child has done it, and have resigned myself to thinking I need to book a place on a Biscuiteers course.

But in the meantime I decided to have another go at making and decorating some Easter biscuits. I used a standard sugar cookie recipe like this one:

2800g plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

170g butter, softened

150g caster sugar

1 egg

a few drops of vanilla flavouring

Cream together the butter and sugar and then beat in the egg and vanilla flavouring. Next fold in the flour, baking powder and salt.

Knead until you have a ball of dough and wrap in clingfilm. Ideally place in the fridge for at least an hour (though I often skip this part!).

When you are ready to use the dough, roll it out on a lightly floured surface and cut out using cutters.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C - the baking time will depend on the size and thickness of your cookies, but you don't want them to be overbaked, so I would recommend 10-12 minutes then checking if they look like they need longer.

For Christmas I got a set of Easter cookie cutters (which seemed odd to my sister who got them for me, but as I pointed out, my birthday is right after Easter so I would have had to wait a year before I could use them!).

I like these cutters because they have a design that imprints into the dough, and you use the little plunger to push the cookie out. When they are baked, the design did lose a little definition but could still be seen quite clearly.

I used the design as a guide for icing, piping royal icing in different colours and snipping the tiniest piece off the end of a piping bag rather than using a nozzle. Even then I found it really hard to decorate them neatly!

Easy Traditional Christmas Cake - Mary Berry

Every year I say I'm going to make a Christmas cake and Stir Up Sunday comes and goes (I'm never sure if that is just for Christmas puddings or Christmas cake as well), and then by the time I am ready to do it, it's only a week or so before Christmas. The idea of a Christmas cake - essentially a rich fruit cake - is that you soak the fruit in booze (usually brandy) and then feed the cake with more alcohol over several weeks. So it's not really something that I want to make at the last minute, though I'm sure some recipes for doing just that exist!

This year I've been really busy at work, and often working on weekends, so haven't done any Christmas baking at all - apart from this cake. This year I did manage to get myself organised early. I couldn't actually make the cake on Stir Up Sunday as I intended - I got out all the ingredients and then read I was supposed to soak the fruit in brandy for three days, so put them all away again! I soaked the fruit from mid-week and made the cake the following weekend.

Since then - about three weeks ago - I've only remembered to feed the cake with brandy twice, but used quite a lot both times so hopefully that will be enough!

I have the Great British Bake Off Christmas recipe book which is full of things that look amazing - I received it as a gift one Christmas but haven't made that many things from it. When it comes to Christmas cake though -  very traditional, British cake - who else but to follow than Mary Berry? As the BBC Good Food website puts it, she has been making Christmas cakes for longer than GBBO co-host Paul Hollywood has been alive (probably!). Her recipe for a classic Christmas cake is available online here.

This is the recipe that I used, but I covered the cake using 500g marzipan and used 2/3 of the suggested quantity of royal icing. It seemed a lot and the amount I used was plenty to cover the whole cake, though whether it would have been better with a thicker layer remains to be seen.

As I was short of time, I decorated the cake with royal icing and a cake topper I was sent to review by My Cupcake Toppers - read more on this below.

Here are a few pictures of the different stages, from soaking the fruit (top right), then moving down and across the cake batter, and in the main picture, the cake once it had come out of the oven. A little darker than I would have liked but I'm sure it's fine!

I turned the cake upside down to remove the greaseproof paper and decided to ice it this way up so it would have a flatter top.

This looks like fondant but it's actually marzipan - I bought a pack (I know on GBBO you would be expected to make your own!) and covered the cake with it.

I made up some royal icing using icing sugar, egg whites and lemon juice and covered the cake. It's easiest if you do this on a cake turntable if you have one, and use a crank knife (a palette knife with part of the handle at an angle) so you can run the knife around the edge of the cake and smooth it all off.

Here it is looking a bit smoother!

 

As I was quite short of time I was very glad to have just received a few things from My Cupcake Toppers to review. This is a website where you can buy pictures printed onto icing or rice paper - everything from Christmas to TV shows to your own design. I'll talk more about these when I review the ones they sent me to go on cupcakes tomorrow.

One thing I hadn't seen before was the option to have a large 7.5 inch round cake topper printed onto icing, that I could cut around and place on my cake. I chose a snowflake design and when it came - protected in a stiff envelope - I found that the icing was a flexible sheet (rather than hard and brittle) meaning I could easily cut around it and place it on my cake. It worked perfectly (delivery was very swift) and looked really good on the cake.

I finished the cake with some Christmas washi tape from Hobbycraft around the edge of the cake board and a Santa and Christmas tree made of royal icing I bought from Sainsbury's when they were reduced to 25p each in the January sale last year!

Here are a couple of pictures of the finished cake...

And a few days later after I cut into it to give the first couple of slices to family friends as we were seeing them for dinner. I'm no expert - until recently I didn't really like Christmas cakes at all - but it tasted pretty good, like a Christmas cake ought to taste!

I'm sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at Jibber Jabber UK, as her theme is winter wonderland.

Brush embroidery: a step-by-step guide

Last year I signed up for a wedding cake decorating course at Sutton College of Learning for Adults (SCOLA) – I’d already done a brilliant one at South Thames college where I decorated these cakes.

 

 

When I saw a course at SCOLA, which is actually my local college, that was aimed at an intermediate level I thought it would be a great way to practice and gain new skills. And then I got engaged and decided I was going to partly make and decorate my own wedding cake, so hoped the course would come in very handy!

 

In the first session we covered brush embroidery, though I was a little disappointed overall. I have done this before and think that what we did at South Thames college was much better – both in terms of the design but also the fact that at South Thames, we covered a dummy cake with sugarpaste and did the brush embroidery on the cake itself, whereas at SCOLA, we did it on a covered cake board. I think doing it vertically is harder and looks a lot better than doing it horizontally and I wasn’t particularly proud of how it turned out.

 

Brush embroidery can look very pretty. You use royal icing – which can easily be made from regular icing sugar and egg white. We were advised to use egg white powder as it’s safer; you can buy packets of albumen or meriwhite – a powdered egg white substitute – from cake decorating shops, but as I only needed a small quantity and wasn’t sure I had time to order online, so I bought some Dr Oetker egg white powder from Sainsbury’s. You can buy boxes of royal icing sugar which you just need to mix with water, as there is egg white powder in it already, but my cake decorating tutor said it doesn’t dry quite as hard and while it’s convenient and good if you only need a small amount, for decorating a wedding cake she would always make her own.

The tutor provided us all with a template of a rose, which we were instructed to copy onto tracing paper and then to trace onto the covered cake board. I asked what we would do if it was going onto a cake to be eaten – I’ve been told before you can’t put pencil on real cakes, and instead have to do a very slow, painstaking process of marking out the pattern with a pricking tool. So I was surprised when my tutor said a small amount of pencil on a cake was fine – and I’ve since read online (eg on the Paul Bradford Sugarcraft School website) that using pencil on cake is perfectly safe. I’d be careful to make sure the pencil isn’t visible though – if you were serving the cake and someone could see the pencil marks they might worry! Other options would be using an edible ink pen, or using a cutter to make an impression on the fondant before it hardens – though I know you won’t always have a cutter in the shape of the design you want!

 

We folded our own piping bags which is hard to explain but very useful if you are able to do this (a lot cheaper than buying piping bags, and the disposable plastic piping bags I use for buttercream are far too big for royal icing work). We coloured some royal icing by spreading it onto a tile (just a regular bathroom tile) with a palette knife which was an interesting technique I hadn’t done before, and worked well.

 

You don’t need a nozzle in your piping bag, just snip off the end so you have a very small opening and can pipe a fine line. We followed the outlines of the rose which were numbered so you start from the outside and work in – apparently this helps give more of a 3D effect but I didn’t really notice it. They key to getting the brush embroidery right is to only do one line at a time. Royal icing dries very quickly and if you piped the outline of this whole flower, you would find the icing had dried before you could do anything.

 

So here’s what you do: pipe a line, and then take a small artist’s paintbrush and gently brush the icing inwards. Try to keep the edge of the line intact and brush from the middle – it’s not easy when you have a thin line but it looks better this way. When you’ve finished, pipe the next line and repeat.

 

 

I didn’t really like what I did for two reasons: firstly, when I mixed my green royal icing it was a bit thick so I added some drops of water, but added too much. You can see from where I piped the stem of the rose that the icing was a little too runny which means it filled the narrow stem without me being really able to do any brushing. Secondly, I think the template is too big – the outline of the petals are so large that you are barely able to see any of the brush embroidery and it’s mainly white space.

 

I think this cake looks a lot better where we did very small flowers (incidentally, we embossed these by using a patchwork cutter before the fondant set) – and I also think it looks better in white on a white cake, even though it’s harder to see from a distance. It looks more elegant and intricate and for me just has a better overall effect. Still, it was good to be able to practice brush embroidery again and has given me some ideas for what I can do on my own wedding cake!

 

Royal Icing Run-Outs

Royal icing run-outs are a lovely way to decorate a cake, and also are a great help to the busy or novice cake decorator, as you make them in advance. This helps save time when you bake and decorate the cake; also (and perhaps more importantly for some people) you create these on a cake board, and place them on the cake when they are set – so if they go wrong you can start again without messing up the cake!

 

I’d never really done this before (though I had flooded biscuits with royal icing which is a similar technique) so it was an interesting thing to cover in my cake decorating class at South Thames College last term.

 

To start you need a template; this can be something you’ve drawn yourself or printed out from the internet but it’s much easier with a pattern to follow. Ideally one with strong black lines and spaces in between; some of the class used a Hello Kitty picture while I did this butterfly.

 

The first question is how to make royal icing for piping and flooding? There are a few ways, usually using egg white though you can find vegan recipes online (try here for instance).

 

If you can get albumen from a cake decorating shop (this is another name for egg white but can be bought in pasteurised powder form) you can make smaller quantities, but if you are using actual eggs, here’s a recipe that will make a bowl of royal icing:

 

175g icing sugar

1 large egg white

1 tsp lemon juice

 

Carefully beat the egg white with the icing sugar until you can then use a hand mixer without the powder going everywhere! Then add the lemon juice and mix until incorporates; the mixture should be slightly stiff. It will set if left out so cover with clingfilm whenever it’s not in use.

 

Using a small piping bag, which you can buy or make by folding greaseproof paper (you probably need to watch a YouTube video rather than read my attempt to explain).

 

Decide which colours you want to use and separate the icing into as many bowls as you need, and colour with a little gel food colouring (preferable to liquid colours).

 

 

Place a piece of cellophane over your template. The easiest way to do this is cut open an A4 file pocket. It’s a good idea to lightly rub down the cellophane with oil or trex so the icing doesn’t stick.

 

 

You don’t need a nozzle on your piping bag – the bag will probably be too small anyway. Just snip off the end and carefully squeeze so you have a line of icing to follow the outline of your template.

 

Allow to set for a few minutes then add some water to thin down whichever colour icing you want to use to fill in the sections in the middle of the design. Use a piping bag again for precision; you can use a cocktail stick to help nudge the icing into any corners. The filler icing needs to be in a quite thick layer so you can pick the design up when it’s set. For this reason, you need to make sure that you don’t leave any gaps.

 

All lines need to be connected to the outside outline as well – so with the butterfly I had to change some of the patterns on the wings so they were connected to the outer line. Otherwise you will find that when you pick up your run-out when it’s dry, some of the design will remain on the board!

 

Leave to set overnight or longer – we had to leave ours a week between cake decorating classes but it shouldn’t take that long! You can then carefully lift the run-out off of the cellophane, and use it on top of a cake. These also look really good standing up around the side of a cake depending on what design you have chosen.

Purple Lilac Flowers Three-Tier Wedding Cake

Wedding cakes are the pinnacle of cake decorating- time consuming, difficult, but the most impressive and elaborate of cakes. And apparently the only area of cake decorating where people can make any sort of decent money!

 

I’ve taken quite a few lessons and courses over the last couple of years so wanted to build on my skills with something new – and wedding cakes seemed the obvious next step, as it would cover a range of techniques including piping, sugar flowers, stacking cakes with dowelling and other things I’ve never done before. And then I was asked to make a cake for a friend’s wedding in October so it seemed like fate!

 

I found a wedding cake decorating evening course at a college about five minutes’ drive from my house which was perfect, and signed up a few months before the course was due to begin. About two weeks before, I rang to check what I needed to bring – as I have history with this college. I did a novelty cake course there two years ago which was great, then last year I had been set to take another course which they cancelled at the last minute, and forgot to contact me – I only found out because I rang the day before to ask what to bring. Surely that can’t happen again, I thought… only to be told that not enough people had booked onto the course so it wasn’t going to go ahead.

They were running other cake decorating courses starting in January but said they were all full and they couldn’t squeeze even one more person in, which I thought was a bit unfair as their late cancellation meant I probably wouldn’t be able to get on to a course at another college. Luckily, I did find a course that still had places and wasn’t too far away – South Thames College’s Tooting branch, which is right next to Tooting Broadway tube. I can get there quite easily from work but unlike my local college, where I would have been able to go home, get the car, and then drive back with my cake – I had to get a very bumpy bus home.

 

Though despite that, had I known how good the course at Tooting was going to be, I’d have signed up for it immediately.

 

The course is taught by Anna Murphy, who went through the syllabus on the first session but also asked us what kind of decorations we would like to do. She also gave us a printed list of everything we would need for the course – which is much more helpful than other courses I’ve done, where you are told each week what you need next time. If like me you can’t get to a cake decorating shop and have to order online, you then have to pay over the odds for express delivery every week to make sure it arrives in time for the next class. Anna gave us the full list from the outset but also said she would often be able to provide equipment which we could pay for, as it’s sometimes cheaper for her to order in bulk. She also took a small contribution for sundried which meant that rather than bring all our sugarpaste colours every week or decide in advance which colour we wanted to use, we could help ourselves to hers.

 

We covered a lot in each session, which ran for two and a half hours, and are working on three projects over the ten weeks. I thought I’d share with you the first project and how we went about it.

 

We started off by making flowers from flowerpaste. We simply used different sized flower cutters, and a balling tool to rub the petals to make them curve inwards. We left them in a drying tray which is a really useful (and cheap) piece of equipment, as it ensures your flowers hold the curl as they set hard.

 

In the following session we used royal icing and a number 1.5 or 2 nozzle to pipe a few dots into the centre of each flower. Some people did theirs in black but I decided to use the same colour as the flower as I thought the black might look a bit strong.

 

 

 

 

We covered two cake dummies in sugarpaste – one useful tip I learnt if you are using dummies is to rub them with a very fine layer of Trex. This means if you need to remove the sugarpaste and start again, it comes off easily and cleanly (you can’t do this on a real cake though!).

 

 

 

I’ve often had problems covering cakes with sugarpaste and I think not using sugarpaste that is brand new does cause a problem; no matter how tightly you wrap it, an open packet will dry out – even if it’s just because the sugarpaste dried out when you were initially kneading it and rolling it out. So it’s fine to keep offcuts for later and use them in modelling or smaller projects but to cover a whole cake I would advise always using a new packet. Especially if it’s a wedding cake!

 

We were quite robust when it came to smoothing the fondant on the sides and top of the cake; again this is something you can only really do with a dummy. You do need to smooth the cake as best you can when you are using a real cake, but if it’s a sponge cake and you have crumb coated it with buttercream you will have to be very careful.

 

Anna advised always having a two-inch difference (at least) between the sizes of tiers in a cake and also a 2 inch wider cake board, which we also covered in sugarpaste. I admit this is something I don’t usually bother doing and just leave the board silver but it does look very pretty covered in white with a matching ribbon around it.

 

 

 

We then left those cakes until the following week in a large box, so the fondant was very hard when we came to piping.

 

To begin, we traced over a design on tracing paper and made some piping bags out of the same paper.

 

 

We made up some royal icing and first piped in the centre of the flowers we had made previously. Anna wanted us to do the centres in black, which everyone else did, but I thought it looked too stark and did mine in purple instead (though I know that wasn't realistic).

 

 

We put the design into a clear A4 file pocket and piped the design over the top. This is a really good way of practising before you do it on the cake!

 

 

When we were ready to do it for real, we put the tracing paper around the cake and traced over the reverse, which meant a faint line appeared on the cake. If you were doing this with a real cake rather than a dummy then you wouldn't want to use pencil; instead you use a pricking tool. Anna said you would need good light to see the marks though so it was easier for us to do in pencil.

 

Finally I was ready to pipe onto the cake; by now I was already exhausted and aching! My piping wasn't perfect but it was better than I have ever done before so I was pleased with it. I also realised that when I make royal icing at home I don't do it properly and it does need to be really thick!

That same week we did the top layer as well; we were asked to buy or make a cake and as I was a bit short of time, and Anna had specifically recommended a Sainsbury's Taste the Difference chocolate sponge - and the college is right above a Sainsbury's - I decided to do that. We actually needed two cakes, to stack on top of each other, though we didn't need the whole cake - we used a large circle cutter to cut out the middle of the cake. And took the rest home to eat!

We then covered the two cakes in chocolate ganache and left them in the fridge to set; I think Anna transferred them to the freezer and then defrosted them for the following week.

We covered it in fondant in the third class of our 10-week course - and then had to do the painstakingly slow piped design on the even-bigger bottom layer of the cake. I knew the finished cake would look great but it would have been nice to actually try out a different technique on the bottom layer rather than doing the same thing all over again. The next cake we are making does have a different design on each layer though so that will be good - and I can't deny this one does look great.

We stacked the three cakes on top of each other, on the cake board and then stuck on the flowers with some royal icing.

And here's the finished cake! It took about 7 hours over the three weeks, which is a long time when you consider that didn't involve baking any cakes! I am really pleased with the finished cake - by far the most beautiful and elaborate cake I've ever decorated - and I can't wait to start on our next project!

 

While I didn't actually bake this cake, I think decorating it counts as eligible for a blog challenge. I'm hosting Alphabakes this month and the theme is V which includes Valentine's - and how much more romantic can you get than a wedding cake?

 

 

I'm also sending this to Cake of the Week hosted by Casa Costello as she doesn't insist it's something you've actually baked from scratch!

 

 

Advent Calendar Christmas Decoration Cookies

It's never too early to think about Christmas in my book. I love the festive season and start my Christmas shopping pretty much in the January sales... by September I've arranged with my parents where I am spending Christmas this year... and by October I'm planning what to make for dessert on the big day and thinking about edible gifts to make for family and friends!

Even if you tend to leave Christmas until the last minute, there's one thing you simply must think about before December 1st - advent. Whether you have religious beliefs or not, or children in the house or just adults, I think it's great to count down to Christmas.

When I was a child we sometimes had chocolate advent calendars, where there was a little chocolate behind each window (and we were allowed to eat the chocolate before breakfast) but I also loved my mum's traditional calendar that had festive pictures behind each window. When I lived in Germany for a year as an au pair, the mother of the family had a little treat for each day of advent for her children - and for me! We might get a chocolate santa, or a Christmas tree decoration or a small ornament. I have a hollow advent calendar with little drawers that I am planning to fill with something every day for my boyfriend this year. As for me, I've got my eye on this....

But with Christmas costing enough as it is, you don't need to buy an expensive advent calendar. I love baking so I had the idea of making Christmas cookies to count the days in advent, and I found this set of cookie cutters on the Dot Com Gift Shop which are just perfect for this project. You get six cutters - a Christmas tree, an angel, a bell, a star, a santa hat and a Christmas candy cane, for £5.95 - so at just under a pound each that really is good value. What's more, the set comes with a ginger biscuit recipe on the back of the box, which I decided to use for my cookies.

You need:
350g plain flour
1 tsp bicarb of soda
2 1/2 tsp ground ginger
115g butter
175g light brown sugar
1 egg, beaten
4 tbsp. golden syrup

Sift the flour, bicarb of soda and ginger together in a bowl then work in the butter until you have a breadcrumb consistency.

Add the sugar and mix in.

Mix the beaten egg and golden syrup together and stir into the mixture to form a dough. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 180C and lightly dust your work surface with icing sugar. Roll out the dough and use the cookie cutters to cut out shapes.

The cookies only take around 10 minutes in the oven but it depends how thick you have rolled your dough. I recommend setting the timer for 8 minutes and checking them. Don't forget they will still be a little soft when they come out of the oven and will harden as they cool. If you want to be able to hang the cookies on the Christmas tree, make a small hole after the cookies come out of the oven while they are still a little soft.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool. They tasted absolutely delicious!

You can decorate the cookies however you like, and if you have children it's fun to get them involved. A great idea is to make advent cookies - use royal icing mixed with a few drops of water and food colouring and a piping bag (which you can make by snipping the end off a plastic freezer bag, or buy piping bags from somewhere like Lakeland). Pipe the numbers 1 to 25 on the cookies and decorate with sprinkles and silver balls. You can also use the cookie cutters to cut the same shapes out of fondant - you can buy coloured fondant, but it is usually cheaper to buy white roll-out icing from a supermarket and colour it by kneading in a small amount of food colouring. Cut out the fondant shapes and stick onto the cookies with a little royal icing. Place each cookie in an individual cellophane bag, tie with ribbon and hang from the bannisters or on the Christmas tree and enjoy a cookie every day as you count down to Christmas!

I made an extra large cookie for December 25, and used coloured edible pearls to write the number. You've got to have a special one for Christmas day after all! The other cookies are all made using the cutters from the Dot Com Gift Shop. I think I will be making good use of these in the run-up to Christmas, and they would also make a great Christmas gift!