Claire's Cake Bake & Other Foodiness

Elodie had a little party for her friends last Sunday, so I made a little buffet and cupcakes for pudding.  Well, their mums & dads needed feeding too…

This year I’ve been quite busy and have not had as much time in the kitchen as I had hoped for in my 12 months of maternity leave!

I did not get a chance to make the usual Christmas cake so my Mum made the cake and I offered to ice it. This is my third Christmas cake and I reverted back to a traditional Holly decoration… simple but I quite like it.

It was Anthonys 30th birthday last month so I planned to make a birthday cake for him. I wanted it to be themed with his present – a Mini Cooper Racing Experience.

After a few ideas (like making a cake model of a Mini!) I decided it was best to keep it simple. I already had a silicone rectangular cake tin, so based on that, I thought a simple sponge with white icing, a 30 in black icing which would be the track and a mini cooper cake topper. How easy…

First of all I needed to find a firm sponge so I tested out a Madeira recipe from a cake decorating book I have. It worked well and Anthony even did a taste test for me under the guise that it had come from my mums work! hehe…

Next, I wanted to make my own icing. So after taking over my mum and dads kitchen and covering it in icing sugar I came to the conclusions I wouldn’t be able to (a) make a piece big enough to cover the cake/roll it out to an even thickness or (b) get it from the worktop to the cake (it was rather sticky!). I decided quite quickly that I’d use a ready rolled fondant icing instead.

Making the cake
I made the madeira sponge 3 days before the big day and the sponge turned out well. After leaving it overnight I turned up at my mum and dads house (our kitchen is too small) ready for some cake decorating… with my mum looking after Elodie I set about triming the sponge (cakes in silicone tins splay out at the sides!). Triming the cake was a time consuming and delicate job as I was scared a huge chunk of cake would come off!

Once I’d managed to make the cake more rectangular I set about splitting it in half and filling it with a thin layer of raspberry jam and buttercream. With a little help from my mum we managed to put the cake back together in one piece.

Next, I covered the cake in a very small amount of warmed marmalade to allow the icing to stick and started to ice it… I have to admit at the point I was rather lucky with the ready roll icing – I could only get a circular one which just fitted over the rectangular cake with a little nip and tuck ;)

I had bought a block of pre-coloured black fondant icing. With some careful rolling out I cut out my 30 and with my mums help again, we transferred the numers to the cake (they were very flimsy!).

It had taken a few hours to get to this point! So I was relieved to put the finishing touches to the cake (white icing for road markings and a black ribbon to hide the bottom of the icing!) and we put it away in a cake tin until his birthday.

Anthony seemed to like his cake but I think he enjoyed the driving experience even more – I thought I was giving him something to pacify his love of Minis when all I seem to have done is make it worse :) Ah well…

Here are some pictures of the cake and one of Anthony enjoying his present…

My mum kindly offered my services a few weeks back to bake some cakes for the cake stall at the Zoes Place Summer Fete.

It seemed like a great idea at the time, come Saturday evening post-baking it seemed altogether exhausting.  We arrived to set up our stall very last minute, but despite the rush, it was nothing less than a huge success.

Every year Zoe’s have a cake stall & the local Greggs bakers supply them with numerous freebies to sell so we had a front stall of homemade cakes and a side stall of Greggs baked goodies.  I am pleased to say that the homemade cakes sold out quickly & we were left with lots of Greggs muffins and cookies but by the end of the day everything had been eaten.

Between us, we made:

• 3 sandwich cakes
• tray of rocky road
• tray of mars bar rice crispy bake
• 24 sponge cakes with icing
• 24 rolo cupcakes
• chocolate muffins
• blueberry muffins
• chocolate cornflake cakes

We’re not sure of the final figure but it looks like we made just over £200 which will be doubled by my mum’s work, so it was certainly worth an exhausting days baking.

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I hope you like it.

I am hoping my blogging friends from my blogspot blog will join me here, on what I hope to be, a more regular basis. So please can I ask you lovely people to re-save my link to: www.clairescakebake.co.uk and for those using a feed reader you’ll need click this link -http://feeds.feedburner.com/clairescakebake

This blog was designed by my wonderful web designer husband. I think he has done a great job so I just wanted to say thank you very much Anthony.

Whilst I am now up & running there are still a few bits to tidy up and set up, so whilst I’d encourage you to take a look around the different links, please let me know if you think somethings not quite right so we can fix it :)

Back to foodie related talk… Carry on reading & leave a comment…

Last time we went to Scotland we came back with a few bags of Butteries (or Morning Rolls as they are also known). Having some Scottish blood I would say it is only natural for my family to be hankering after these naughty treats.

They are a speciality to Northern Scotland – so with some of my family roots being in Elgin it is something my Gran & Grandad would have enjoyed on a more regular basis. We bought most of ours from the bakers in Aviemore but they have to be eaten fresh, so when we got back last Saturday eveing I took a quick drive round to my mum & dads so they could be enjoyed the next morning.

Carry on reading & leave a comment…