Roller Skate Cake

Ah, finally a break from nail polish posts! Not that I’m complaining but I do like the break things up a bit. And I haven’t posted a foodie post in a while.

Last Friday was my friend’s birthday and seeing as she plays roller derby, I thought it would be perfect to make a cake made in the shape of a roller skate! I went to Pinterest and searched for a similar cake, most of them were ones that are standing up but eventually I found this one with a tutorial of how to cut the right shape. I waited for my cake to cool completely before cutting, then put on a crumb coat and let that sit in the fridge and then applied the final icing coat. I cut a start out of tin foil to act as a star stencil and used strawberry laces as the real laces! I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and even happier to report that it all got eaten too! Worth carrying into the bar in an empty Stella Artois box.

Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Banana Bread #BEDM

I love banana bread and the fact you can easily mix it up and make it something different. I was looking at some recipes on Pinterest and decided to mix two together to make a cinnamon chocolate chip banana bread. Sounds like there’s a lot going on, but trust me it all works! I snapped a picture of it for my Day in the Life post a week or so ago.

Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Ingredients

2 large or 3 medium ripe bananas, mashed up

1/3 cup melted butter

3/4 cup caster sugar

1 egg, beaten

1stp vanilla extract

pinch of salt

1tsp baking soda

1 1/2 cups plain flour

1/2 – 1 cup chocolate chips (depending on how many you want)

2tbsp sugar and pinch of cinnamon, mixed together

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C/350°F

2. Butter and flour (or line) a loaf pan, I used an average sized one, not too small but not too big. Probably 9 x 5

3. Mix together the melted butter, mashed bananas, caster sugar, egg and vanilla extract.

4. Sift the baking soda and flour into the mixed ingredients and add salt. Then gently fold in dry ingredients, being careful not to over mix. Then add in the chocolate chips and stir gently.

5. Add 1/2 the mixture to the pan. Sprinkle about 1 tbsp of the sugar and cinnamon mix evenly over the batter. Add the remaining batter on top and then sprinkle with the rest of the sugar and cinnamon mix.

6. Bake for 50-60 mins. Keep an eye on it, if using a different sized pan it might take more or less time so adjusting accordingly.

7. Leave to cool on a wire rack before cutting in. I usually always try when it’s still a bit warm though!

Tiramisu Bundt Cake #BEDM

I have a confession. I made this way back when I hosted a tea party for Pink Ribbon Month. I just never got around to posting it. But it was way too good not to share so I thought I’d take this opportunity to do so now!

Tiramisu Bundt Cake

Adapt from Baking Bites

Ingredients

3 cups plain flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup espresso or very strong coffee
1/4 cup Kahlua

Kahlua Mascarpone Frosting
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
4-oz mascarpone cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup Kahlua
2 cups confectioners’ sugar

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C/325°F. Grease and flour bundt pan.

2. Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a bowl and set aside.

3. In another bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light. Beat in eggs one at a time, followed by the vanilla extract.

4. Mix in the flour and milk alternatively into the bowl, ending on the last of the flour. Remove one cup of batter and place into bowl. Remove another cup of batter and place into another bowl.

5. Into one of the small bowls of batter, add the espresso/coffee and mix until combined. Add the Kahlua into the other small bowl and mix until combined.

6. Spread half the plain batter into the bundt tin, smoothing the top so the layer is even. Then add the Kuhlua batter evenly around the tin, adding the espresso layer evenly on top of that, before finishing off with the plain batter on top.

7. Bake for 55-60, until a toothpick/knife comes out clean when placed in the centre.

8. To make the icing, combine all the ingredients together into a bowl and mix on medium speed until even and smooth. Ice the bundt cake.

This cake is so yummy, perfect if you want to shake things up when making a coffee cake. The Kahula and espresso layers give a nice marbled layer going through the cake when cut, I wish I thought to get a picture!

Halloween Treats

1st November! I would say I can’t believe it’s already November but this Michael McIntrye video sums up why I don’t want to say it. I didn’t get up to much yesterday for Halloween, I made some treats for my younger siblings, so I thought I’d show some of them here!

Eyeball Monster Cookies

I got the inspiration from this yoyomax12 video but used the recipe in this Todd’s Kitchen video. I made the dough, baked the cookies and once they were out of the oven, I pressed white chocolate buttons into them. Because the cookies are still warm, the white chocolate will melt but if you leave them for a few hours, the chocolate will set as the cookie cools. I used a red food marker to draw on the eyes, except for the one in the second picture, I used a tube of red gel food dye just see how it would turn out. I think using icing would work just as well for the details.

Rotten Egg Cookies

Same cookie dough as above, but instead I used mini Cadbury’s Screme Eggs (Creme Eggs but with a green inside).

Chocolate Orange Hidden Bat Cake

 

So this was a bit hit and miss. I made an orange yoghurt cake in the small bread tin. Once it had cooled, I cut it into slices and used a cookie cooker to cut out bat shapes out of the cake. I then made a second yoghurt cake, this time chocolate with some black food dye added to make it darker. I spoon a small, even layer along the bottom of the same bread tin, placed the bat shaped cake slices on top of the batter and then spooned the remaining batter on top and  baked. For the orange icing, I made a cream cheese frosting with the zest of an orange and the juice of half an orange and dyed it orange. I dripped it over the bake and topped with some chocolate sprinkles. When I cut in, I saw the bat had kinda worked. I think you need something that’s either straight or rounded along the bottom, the fact that it was zigzagged and uneven probably made it harder to balance.

Jelly Brains in Jars

I got the idea for this from this mycupcakeaddiction video. I had the brain ice cube tray from last year (used them for cake pops). I liked how they turned out but my mother wasn’t very impressed!

And that was it for this year! I always lovely trying out new ideas for Halloween. I got a skull cake pan from Aldi and was going try a really colours Sugar Skull cake but never got around to it. Always next year!

Despicable Me Minion Cake!

No flash

Last month I went to see Despicable Me 2 with some of my siblings and it was then I decided I’d make a Minion cake for my brother’s birthday. Which is today, and I just couldn’t wait to blog about it! I used this Betty Crocker tutorial as a baseline for cake.

This cake broke my heart to make! It’s been ages since I’ve baked in my parents house and I’ve gotten so used to my own equipment. Nothing went right. No batteries left in scales, so I had to use some non digital ones that are very dodgy. Then the electric beaters just didn’t seem to have it in them to cream the butter and sugar. The cake baked fine, until I tried to lift it out of the pan and it cracked down the centre. ‘Not a problem, it’ll be fine once iced’. I left it to cool, when I came back, some of it had stuck to the plate (rookies mistake I know! But there’s no wire cooling wrack). Though because it was going to be on the bottom, it didn’t make much difference. The cake was fine to shape and the 2 layers of yellow icing went on fine. Blue icing was a bit of a pain to get right, bits of yellow kept peaking through. Black icing for piping was a disaster, it just wasn’t intense enough and of course there were no sandwich bags for making a piping bag, so I fashioned one out of grease proof paper (Mary Berry is probably not impressed me with, it was dreadful). Luckily it all came together in the end (despite it cracking again! Just smoothed it out with some more icing!) and it was really worth it as my brother loved it.

To make it, I made a few adjustments to the Betty Crocker recipe above. I made the cake and icing from scratch, using my ‘go to’ Madeira cake and buttercream icing recipes (I doubled the amounts for both). I followed the icing guides in the article.

For the eye, I twisted off one side of an Oreo and then built up 2 other insides of Oreos to make the white thicker (not really necessary I don’t). I used a Cadbury Button for centre of the eye (and trouser buttons) and for the ring around it, I just scrunched up tin foil.

For the black straps, I used the ready to roll icing, coloured it black, left it hardened in the fridge, then rolled out and cut. Lastly I ‘piped’ (if you can say I even did that!) the black edging along the blue and yellow icing, added some liquorice for the hair and for the mouth!

The great thing about this is you can definitely change it up, you could do two eyes, you can change to mouth to a big grin or even a different facial expression. I’d love to see if I could make a few mini ones from a large cake, another time maybe!

It’s not as polished as the Betty Crocker one, I definitely need to get a palette knife so I can make my finish more smooth. And it’s not perfect, the above story shows why! But I’m happy with it!

With flash

Lego Cake

Ok, I decided I needed something easy to blog about to easy myself back in. And since I wrote about a cake week in one of my last posts, I thought that would be the best place to start!

I made this cake almost a year ago for my youngest brother, who’s a Lego freak. I bought this Lego ice mould back in 2011, unfortunately just after my brother’s birthday, so I kept it a secret for a whole year so to surprise him with this cake.

To make the chocolate Lego men, melt chocolate (in whatever flavour, I used milk and white), pour into mould and let set. If you want to be properly fancy, you can temper the chocolate but I didn’t. To give the white chocolate a yellow colour, I mixed in some yellow food colouring. I do not recommend this, as it causes the chocolate to seize up and go grainy. If you are serious about colouring the colour, either buy candy melts like the Wilton ones or look for out for powder or oil based colouring.

Chocolate Lego Cake with Buttercream Icing

Ingredients

100g sugar

100g butter, room temperature

125g self raising flour

25g cocoa powder

1 large egg, beaten

1 tsp vanilla essence

Buttercream Icing

75g butter, room temperature

150g icing sugar

Vanilla essence

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Cream butter and sugar together until soft and fluffy

2. Add half the flour and cocoa and half the egg. Mix together.

3. Add remaining egg and vanilla essence, and mix.

4. Fold in remaining flour. If mixture if a bit too dry for you, add a dash of milk. Spoon mixture into 2 sandwich tins

5. Cook for 12-15 minutes, or until a knife stuck into the centre of cake comes out clean.

6. To make buttercream icing, cream icing sugar and butter together until smooth. Add in vanilla essence and mix together

The amount of chocolate you need for the Lego men will depend on how many you want to make! It’s really up to you.

Hedgehog Cake!

Growing up, my Mum only ever baked one thing: hedgehog cakes. Ok, so there was the Halloween version of it when it became a rat cake but that was it. Every time our school had a bake sale, Mum would make two of these and they would be the first things to sell out. There used to be fights over them! It’s incredibly easy to make. My brother asked me to make one for him to give to someone as a gift so I said I’d give it a whirl.

To make, use this recipe here but instead of using it for cupcakes but it in one round tin. Once it has fully cooled, cut in half vertically. For the icing, use 100g butter, 200g icing sugar and one tablespoon cocoa powder and beat together until smooth and uniform. Sandwich the two halves of the cake together with the chocolate buttercream icing. Coat the entire outside with the rest of the buttercream icing, run a fork along the cake to add an extra texture effect (I forgot to do this) and then add flaked almonds as the spikes. To finish, add Smarties for eyes and a nose. Very simple but impressive! For the Halloween version, Mum used to make the inside buttercream icing red, the outside icing black and added liquorice for a tail.