I was asked by my 8yo to bake her birthday cake and decorate it with a flower fairies theme. After much hard work, hours spent trying not to utter profanities and a few tears shed, here's the cake:
Everything, apart from the cake board is edible, even the fairies. It was a labour of love though, and worth it just to see the look on her face when she saw the finished cake on the morning of her birthday. I shall blog a tutorial for the fairies sometime this week, perhaps over Easter. It's the school holidays at the moment so life is rather busy in our household for the next couple of weeks with all 3 girls at home full-time.
I would like to thank Squires Kitchen who sent me some colouring pastes, dusts, and other goodies to help me make my daughters cake.
They have a fabulous website for all things cake and sugarcraft so take a look if you need sugarcraft equipment or materials. Their products are high quality and I recommend their product wholeheartedly. I used their florist paste to create the large and small roses on the cake and it was easy to work with and did the job beautifully.
Happy Birthday!
I used a plain Madiera Cake recipe to bake my daughters birthday cake as a couple of the guests didn't like chocolate cake. This recipe makes a firm cake that is also lovely and moist. It is also robust enough to carve into shapes should you need to.
This recipe made a 23cm (9inch) round cake, you could make a 20cm (8inch) square cake instead.
450g self raising flour
400g softened butter
400g caster sugar
7 medium free range eggs
50ml milk
Grease and line the cake tin then preheat your oven to 150C/Gas Mark 2.
Sift the flour into a very large mixing bowl, or the bowl of your stand mixer. Add everything else all at once and then beat on a low speed until well combined. Once the ingredients are well combined, increase the speed of the mixer to medium and beat well for 1 or 2 minutes.
Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the top.
Cook in the centre of your oven for 2 - 21/4 hours until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. You can also test if the cake is cooked by lightly pressing the centre with your finger, if it springs back, then it's done. The top should be golden brown.
Leave the cake to cool in the tin for about 10 minutes or so, then turn out to cool completely on a wire rack.
Once the cake had cooled completely I split it in half and filled it with buttercream. I then covered the sides and top in buttercream as well to seal in the crumbs. I put the cake in the fridge to set the buttercream firm and then coated the sides and top for a second time and refridgerated the cake again. Doing this makes the cake much easier to coat with sugarpaste.
For a great tutorial on how to coat your cake with sugarpaste check out this tutorial from Ruth who blogs at The Pink Whisk.
I decorated the cake from the centre outwards to avoid having to manoevre around delicate sugarpaste decorations whilst trying to put more on the cake. I also did the flowers around the bottom of the cake before I started on the sides so that it could firm up.
My next mission will be my eldest daughters birthday cake. She wants the Mystery Machine van from Scooby Doo, apparently. Luckily my youngest daughters birthday isn't until October so I have time to recover from these two cakes before making a third. LOL
That looks amazing! You are so talented! But now you have left me with a dilemma...i trialled a madeira cake recipe yesterday for a train birthday cake. It was alright and will do the job, but not great. The mixture was quite stiff and didn't spread to fill the cells in my silicon train shaped cake pan all that well. So do I try your version or stick with the one I have? Oh me, decisions, decisions!
ReplyDeleteHiya! :o)
DeleteI've used this cake recipe with molded cakes before and it worked well, not too stiff to pour out. I poured in a little cake batter to start with and gave the mold a jiggle to make sure it filled the nooks and crannies before slowly filling it completely. If you fill the mold slowly then the weight of the mix will make sure there are no bits of the pattern without cake batter in them. You could be adventurous and bake a couple of square ones and then carve it into a train shape. Mind you, with kids parties to plan, less faff is usually the preferred option. ;o)
Thanks :-) In the end, I borrowed some inspiration from your recipe (usually milk to slacken the mixture a little) and cheated a bit by using Stork instead of real butter, which made for a much easier batter to work with. It's Operation Cake Decoration tonight - will be nothing as professional as your stunning efforts though! ;-)
DeleteI'm sure you cake will be fab! I'm glad using milk slackened the mixture and made it a little easier to work with. Post a pic & blog it once you are done :o)
DeleteThat is beautiful, well done you
ReplyDeletewouah ~ impressed ! it s really beautiful :)
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful cake. I'm sure your daughter loved it. She won't realize the work that went into it until many years have passed!! My mom made me some great cakes that I did not truly appreciate until a few years ago!
ReplyDelete