Cakes

Coconut cupcakes 

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Coconut cake: 

  • 3 eggs
  • 50g desiccated coconut
  • 2tbsp cream coconut
  • 175g sugar
  • 175g self raising flour
  • 175g butter
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking powder

Coconut buttercream: 

  • 280g icing sugar
  • 100g butter
  • 3 tbsp cream coconut

I have decided that coconut cake is now my favourite cake. All you do is mix the above together and bake at 160 fan until golden. 

So so good! I slapped on the buttercream and sprinkled it with desiccated coconut. On nom nom. The batter makes 14 cupcakes or a small loaf. If I have a sad day… this is what I’ll be baking and eating. 

https://www.nigella.com/recipes/members/katxxxs-coconut-cake

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Eukaryotic cell cake

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Where are my fellow nerds out there? An old colleague of mine left her job today to become a biology teacher so I thought a biology themed cake was in order! I used lots of bright, fun colours and big shapes to create the intracellular components. Can you guess what each component is? 


I decorated the side of the cake with a thick plasma membrane and integral proteins to make it look swish. 

Good luck Molly, I’m sure you’ll make a fantastic teacher !!!! 🙂 

Courgette cake

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Another rainy day. I don’t need to make anyone a celebration cake so I took the opportunity to make a delicious courgette cake for myself. I used a recipe from the BBC good food website and exchanged a few ingredients for different ones. It was more of a ‘best before’ cake than anything else really. Sometimes you just have to bake everything in your cupboard and start afresh! 

  • 2 eggs
  • 125g unsalted butter
  • 85g brown sugar 
  • 350g grated courgette 
  • 1tsp vanilla extract
  • 300g self raising flour
  • 1/4 tsp nutmeg 
  • Pinch of baking powder
  • 40g chopped walnuts
  • 40g sultanas
  • 40g dried cranberries (soaked in orange juice)

I blended the sugar and butter together and then chucked the rest of ingredients into the bowl in no particular order. The cake mixture has an interesting texture, kind of sticky and not as dollopy as normal cake batter. I plopped it into a lined baking tin and baked for one hour on 160C fan. I poked it with a knife to check it was cooked and then let it rest. It’s important to let it cool because the courgette cake is delicate and can lose its structure and collapse. How I know this…. erm just a feeling really. Heh hem…


Pretty good with your feet up and a cup of tea. Pick up a book or Netflix? Hmmm. Tricky.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2534665/courgette-loaf-cake

Winnie the Pooh cake

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This week’s challenge was a baby shower cake with a Winnie the Pooh theme. I am a massive Winnie the Pooh fan and was delighted with the idea. Can’t think of a better way to celebrate a baby than good old Pooh bear. Peppa pig just isn’t as good in my humble option. 


Pooh in his thinking spot.


He’s bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, bouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun! 


Oh bother. 


I think there are enough characters guarding the cake’s lemony interior. May the baby shower be a roaring success. Good luck to the mum-to-be!!! 😀

WW2 cake

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I made a WW2 cake for my boyfriend’s grandad’s 90th birthday. Ken was from the East End but somehow ended up in the Welsh regiment of the British Army….. I’m sure there is a story there but I need to dig that one up! The badge on the cake depicts the ‘Prince of Wales’s feathers’ with the phrase ‘Ich dien’ which means ‘I serve’ in German. Ken likes to tell stories about the war without much prompting in addition to where he likes to walk his cat. Thus, it only seemed right to put his cat ‘Bobby’ on the side of the cake.

This cake is a sticky vanilla sponge with a very thick layer of vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam. Happy 90th birthday Ken!

BB-8 birthday cake!

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I made a coffee and walnut cake smothered in dark chocolate ganache for my boyfriend’s birthday. Matt is a huge Star Wars fan and fell in love with BB-8 when the film was released. I saw this as an excellent cake challenge. To make this cake, I used a half sphere cake tin and baked two halves and stuck them together. Icing the sphere was quite tricky but nailed it in the end! Several orange shapes later and a good dusting and BB-8 looked mucky enough to me. 🙂

I popped a candle in BB-8’s belly to give him his ‘thumbs up’. The birthday cake went down pretty well, check out the birthday boy!

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Check out this link for tips on making a BB-8 cake:

One big buttery cake!!!!

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Now, everyone knows I am very fond of butter but I have to say I’m even MORE fond of my sister!! D’accord, I decided to give her the gift of beautiful butter colours shaped to perfection. What a lucky girl. I’m pretty proud of this one… you can probably pick up on the positive butter vibes surrounding this blog post.

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I made 1.75 kg of vanilla buttercream for this cake. BY HAND. My electric whisk died during the first 30 seconds of making the buttercream. I developed several blisters on my hands from making this one – worth it though, but I am looking into another whisk.  I coloured the icing and then plopped it into large piping bags. I put the cake onto my turn table and piped a layer of each colour round the edge of the cake and spun the table. I tried to get nice even layers with a good amount of buttercream present. I then took my cake spreader at a 45 degree angle to the cake and smoothed it all over whilst turning the table. I put the cake in the fridge to harden up and then put some dowelling in it to support the top layer. Bit of piping round the middle and bon, c’est fini mes amies..

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Happy 24th birthday to my really FUN sister!!!! You deserve a fun cake. 🙂

I have to say the washing up for this was a BUGGER. But that is the price of butter love.

 

Hobbies cake!

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My dad turned 60 at the end of April and to celebrate I made him a very sticky chocolate cake. I have decided that this is my favourite chocolate recipe (see link below) and it’s LOADED with chocolate ganache. I decorated my dad’s cake with a sprinkling of his hobbies… scrap booking, dinosaurs, bird watching, being nosey (hence the binoculars) and a love of cars. My dad also has an unusual habit of placing glacé cherries on top of any starter he makes for fancy dinner parties… prawn cocktails, crab cakes, you name it, if he can float, balance or wedge a glacé cherry on it then it will be present! Naturally, I respectfully put a cherry on top…..

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3092/ultimate-chocolate-cake

‘I do!’ cupcakes

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How cute are these wedding ‘I do’ muffins? I was having a good play on pinterest and this was one of many ideas I want to try out. These muffins were eaten so quickly, I didn’t get to try one! So I’m going to take that as a confirmation of their deliciousness.

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To achieve the buttercream swirl, you need a good piping bag with a wide set star shaped nozzle inside. I sometimes find myself rushing when I pipe, but I remind myself that the buttercream only comes out as fast as you squeeze it, so I take my time to get it right! The roses are made from fondant icing, I made five flat circles out of pink icing and then curled them round each other whilst they were pliable to make a rose – no glue required! I made a lot of mess making the little brown ‘I do’ signs, there were tiny paper triangles all over the place. I think everything looks better on a doily. 🙂

Giraffe & monkey wedding cake 

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Another wedding cake request came my way this Spring. The bride and groom requested a giraffe and monkey because that’s how they see themselves. There was also a poem at the wedding which explained it better than I did just then.


This three tier cake was vanilla and jam flavoured with a layer of Regal icing. I added texture to the wedding cake with lots of Royal icing. It was really easy to do and it travelled very well. The wedding was in Devon and the cake survived a 5.5 hour drive sat on a big grip mat!

Many congratulations to Mr & Mrs Thompson on their big day!!!!