Come fly with me, lets fly, lets fly away…

I must apologize for my lack of blogging recently, it has been a hectic few months - sitting exams, graduating and moving to the beautiful Bristol! 

This is the cake that I was commissioned to make for one of my lecturers leaving party.

The map was pretty fiddly to do but I loved the vibrant colours (it was MUCH brighter in real life!).

The cake was a traditional vanilla sponge with vanilla buttercream and jam filling, and I am told that it was yummy!

I shall keep this post short and sweet because I have lots of things to do today but I have a couple more cakes to blog about very soon :)

Love you guys ♥

So the competition final was on Friday lunch time.

I was super excited about it! I wore a Bambi print top for the occasion.

They put on a lovely lunch and everybody was super friendly :) 

Well I am sure you want to know how the show went down so I shall not keep you in suspense any longer…

1) Kaffeination Ltd. – Matthias Schmid and his team (£4000)
2) Dukaan – Imtiaz Ul Haq (£750)
3) Beach Bacchanal – Alexandra Gibson (£250)

Just when we thought it was all over, Lynne announced that there was a special judges commendation this year…

Special commendation (£150 towards an industrial food mixer)
Bambi Bakery – Olivia Boston-Smith

Yey! I cried, big fat happy tears. This was to be expected, it is my natural response when I am overwhelmingly happy! Hells, I even cried when I found out I had a place in the competition final!

I get to buy my Kenwood! Yippee! Until December, the mixer I owned cost about £1 - a wooden spoon! Then my housemate got a Kenwood hand mixer as a Christmas present and she has kindly been letting me borrow that ever since. Don’t get me wrong, the Kitchenaid mixers are beautiful, however in business, function will always triumph over fashion. The Kenwood is a timeless classic though, the Elizabeth Taylor of the stand mixers! 

Congratulations to everybody, there were some really amazing ideas and I wish you all the best of luck for the future :D

xoxox

P.s. I have another little project up my sleeve but for now it is a secret for now. I love secrets :)

Life’s too short to not eat cake.

I made these beauties this afternoon. Rose cupcakes with rose frosting, and beautiful moist banana cupcakes with dark chocolate frosting.

Yes, you’re right. I should be doing my dissertation right now… but they are for charity so it’s all ok!

These cakes are delicious. Of course I made more so that there was some for me to eat. The rose is divine, so sweet and sophisticated. The banana tastes like there is a frickin party in my mouth, and everybody is invited. 

Nom, nom.

Everybody reading this from the office: Gillian will be selling these cupcakes for her charity tomorrow for £1 each. 

TTFN ♥

Somewhere over the rainbow,

Skies are blue,

And the dreams that you dared to dream

Really do come true

This cake was a last minute order for a boy named Tom’s 18th Birthday.

It is a very simple, almost boring looking cake on the outside, with a crazy secret on the indide. The rainbow cake returns. It really is the Jekyll and Hyde of cakes!

You may notice my writing is not entirely perfect. This is because writing is my weakest point anyway, and during the decoration of this cake we had five powercuts! How can I work in these conditions?! 

I have been informed, that the cake was a huge success, and even the lady’s cake loathing husband enjoyed a slice or two! 

♥

Whats the use of worrying and feeling blue,

When days are long keep on smiling through,

Spread a little happiness till dreams come true!

The making of the epic rainbow cake. For this cake you will need to dust off your calculator and brush up on your math skills! Before you get carried away and start mixing, you must weigh the bowl that you will be making the batter in.

To start, grease and line as many 9” sandwich tins as you can get your mitts on. I line my tins with foil instead of baking paper as it sits flatter against the tin. I made up a double quantity of red velvet cake batter, however this had to be white cake so I didn’t put any cocoa in, and instead replaced this with 3tsp of vanilla extract, and I did not dye the batter red. I used this red velvet cake recipe http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/475341/Red-velvet-cupcakes. 

Now the math begins. Weigh the entire bowl of cake mix. Subtract the weight of the mixing bowl. Divide the remaining number by 6. Take a smaller bowl, pop it on the scale and press the tare/zero button to set it to zero. Weigh 1/6th of the batter into that bowl. Mix in one of the rainbow colours, I started with red and worked my way through the colours in the poem order (Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vein) so I didn’t mess up and miss any out. It is important to use a gel / concentrated food dye if you want a super funky bright rainbow. 

Repeat the above step for all of the cake mix and bake in batches of however many tins you have for 15 minutes, or until it springs back when you poke it. I had 3 tins but only two would fit in the oven at once. 

Leave to cool - this is super quick because the cakes are so thin.

Mix up a double batch of cream cheese frosting - 100g unsalted butter, 250g full fat cream cheese, 600g icing sugar. Fill and crumb coat the cake.

You now have a choice, you can either mix up a batch of frosting of your choice to smooth on / pipe frosting roses on etc. or roll out a nice thick layer of sugar paste and smooth over the cake. This can be left plain white or decorated in any which way you please. I painted mine with food dye because I had never done this before and wanted to for so long!

I hope you have a go at making this cake, it is actually amazing and is literally the epiphany of joy. Spread a little happiness :)

♥