The morning after the night before!!

Hi guys as you know from my previous post we had just reached a crucial juncture on the road to a terrys chocolate orange (TCO) cake. When we put the two halves together the cake wasn't nearly cylindrical enough, so on the Saturday morning we dutifully got up and made a 8" round chocolate orange cake to sandwich in the middle. Once that was cooked and cooled the fun bit could start.
We stacked all the cakes together, sandwiched with orange butter cream and started to roll out the huge block of fondant, the cake needed almost the full kilo of icing to cover it and by the time it was done the whole lot was quite sticky so we opened the kitchen window, covered the cake with a tea towel and let it stand for half an hour.
In the meantime i was decorating the cakeboard for our masterpiece. The wrapping from that "research" orange was coming in very handy, i cut a circle out of foil and cut up the foil from the TCO and stuck it all around the edge so that when the cake was sitting on it then it would look like it was the real wrapper.
By now the cake had cooled so the details were starting, i have some embossing tools for card making which i thought would be handy for doing all of the little details on the cake. First i scored lines top to bottom to show the segments and then i started all of the tiny little grooves to represent the orange peel look that the real TCO has...................... three and a half hours later!!!!! The beast was completed!
Getting the cake on to the board was another challenge due to the sheer weight of it but we managed with just a little fondant repair needed. Next came the 15 minute car journey with the cake on my knee, terrifying but we made it intact so all that was left to do was to pipe on to the board "its not terrys, its charlies!!!"
Lukily the birthday boy and all other guests were impressed and managed to eat an amazing HALF of the huge cake!



All in all i'd say we had another success but i have a feeling our next challenge will be a biggie, my little brother has just got engaged and is having a party to celebrate. We offered to make the engagement cake and his exact words to mam were " let amys imagination run wild"

Mwahahahahaha

Its not terrys, its charlies!

Another month, another family birthday! March saw the 15th birthday of my cousin charlie. The whole family was going for a delicious Chinese meal but due to financial constraints the hubby and i couldn't make it but promised we would be at my aunts when they all got back from the restaurant and we would of course bring a cake.
So i spoke to charlie on the phone and asked what flavour cake he would like, vanilla, orange, lemon, chocolate, chocolate mint, chocolate orange!!!
Mmmm chocolate orange sounds good he said, so instantly my mind jumped to Terrys chocolate orange.
As i came off the phone and told rob chocolate orange sponge he raised an eyebrow and said "Terrys chocolate orange?" isn't it wonderful how great minds think alike!!
So we took to google to see how such a cake could be made. As we are fairly new to making cakes shaped like things, our cake tins are all round, so yet again we got in touch with our local cake decorating centre and asked about cake tin hire. Luckily they had a tin in the shape of a half football which they hire out for £1 a day, we booked the cake tin and a kilo of brown fondant for Friday afternoon pick-up and set off to buy the real thing, for research purposes you understand!!
When Friday came we picked up our supplies and excitedly went home to start baking. "shall we just wait until Finn (our 2yr old) is in bed to start baking, they shouldn't take too long" asked the hubby i dutifully agreed, not particularly wanting to bake with a mad toddler running riot!!
So 7pm came, Finn went to bed and the mixing of ingredients began, Orange flavouring and cocoa powder were added to the mix and the whole lot was poured in to the football tin. Timer set for 25mins and kettle boiled we put our feet up and waited.
25 minutes later we popped a skewer in the cake and found it wasn't quite cooked, back in for another 10mins, then another 10 and another 10 and another 10 and another 10!! finally after a total cooking time of 1hr and 20mins the first cake was ready,unfortunately it was now after 9pm and we still had to put another cake in, but we didn't really have a lot of choice, so at 10.40pm we took the second cake out of the oven, let it cool and popped one on top of the other and realised we had a big problem!!
As one cake had sadly risen more than the other as a whole they weren't quite as spherical as we would have liked but at 11pm we didn't much care, we'd just fix it in the morning!!

How it all started.......

My cousin (James) turned 21 in February and my hubby (rob) offered to make his birthday cake so the little cogs in my brain began to turn and i thought what can we do to make this cake a bit more interesting.
PENGUIN!!!!!!
James loves penguins so i thought why not how hard could it be?
Turns out, pretty hard. cue the baking of 5 8" sponge cakes, a kilo of black fondant and quite a bit of stress.
I stacked all 5 cakes on top of each other, sandwiched together with butter icing, and began to carve, think bowling pin but fatter!!!
Once i was happy with the shape i butter iced the whole of the cake to smooth the whole thing out and help the fondant to stick and then covered the whole thing with black fondant. When the whole thing was covered i added white fondant to his tummy and white ovals for his eyes. More black fondant for the wings and the pupils and yellow fondant for the beak and feet.
I had bought some pastillage from my local cake decorating centre but as this was the first time I'd used it i was a little nervous, however i managed to make a 21 badge, a set of chopsticks and small gardeners world magazine which i painted with food colouring, since sushi and gardening are some of james' other favourite things.
The whole thing sat on a 10" cake with chunks pulled out of the edge, covered with white fondant and decorated with silver edible glitter to look like an iceberg.
Thankfully the finished article was a resounding success and James even told me it was his favourite birthday present which was a lovely thing to hear.

And so thats how it all started, my crafty nature which had seen me making my own cards, feltr baby booties and various other projects, had spilled over into cake decorating.

Now what was i going to do next.............