Sunday, 10 June 2012

My whereabouts and bunting cake

Wow, I haven’t blogged in a while! I have missed it. Since I last blogged I’ve turned 25, visited Liverpool for my birthday weekend, been to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park (I love animals – the meerkats and squirrel monkeys were my favourite) and attended my friend’s beautiful wedding in Essex.  With a lot of baking in between!

I’m a huge Beatles fan so our weekend in Liverpool was inspired by them.  We went to the Beatles Story Exhibition in the day and to the Cavern Club at night.  Two incredible experiences.  Liverpool is a very cool and friendly city.  People were interested in why we were there and it had a buzzing atmosphere, day and night.  Our hotel was fantastic, so if anyone is thinking about visiting Liverpool, check out Hotel Indigo.  Very fashionable and well located (two minute walk from the Albert Docks and ten minute walk away from the Cavern Club). 

As you can imagine, I baked treats in aid of my birthday (which is also my Dad’s birthday so double the reason for treats!) I made a Maltesers cake and mini Snickers cheesecakes from Iced Jems.  You can find the recipe here.

Over the Jubilee celebrations I made my very first sugarpaste covered cake.  I tried to use skills I’d learned in my cake decoration class and applied the tips I’ve read about in all my books.  I think it went well for my first attempt, apart from a mishaps with small holes in the sugarpaste where it had maybe become too dry and ripped.  However, armed with damage control knowledge (sometimes demonstrated on Ace of Cakes) you can cover up the mishaps by placing articles over them!






The main inspiration for the cake was the cute cake bunting I bought from Ebay.  It was £5.95 from a brilliant and efficient seller.  You can find this gorgeous bunting here.

I used Mary Berry’s madeira cake recipe from her Baking Bible and substituted lemon zest for vanilla extract.  It had a layer of marzipan underneath the sugarpaste.  A very rich flavour, yet so satisfying.

9 comments:

  1. I can only say this is amazing! Beautiful beautiful decorations!

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    1. Thank you! I had a lot of fun making and decorating this.

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  2. Welcome back! Sounds like you've been busy! Happy belated birthday too. This is a gorgeous looking cake - I love the decorations and the bunting! :)

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    1. Hello! Thanks very much for the belated birthday wishes, it was my favourite birthday to date :-) I have a little obsession with bunting at the moment. On my cakes and hung up in my bedroom! xx

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  3. Very pretty cake - love the pastel colour palette and the bunting is cute

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    1. Thank you! I tried to stay along the lines of pastel shades :-) didn't want it looking too bright. I'm glad you like it! xx

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  4. What a lovely cake, the flowers are beautiful and I love the bunting!! Great job for your first covered cake! :-)

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    1. Thanks Laura :-) I really enjoyed covering the cake! I think I would fall apart, as well as the sugarpaste if I had to do anything bigger than this though! xx

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  5. Your cakes are lovely - I love each post more and more!

    What kind of cake decorating course are you doing - I'm struggling to find similar things here in London suprisingly, all I come across are one day courses or super expensive full yime ones :-/

    Love the bunting too, my sister would really love this so thanks for the tip.

    I've been very lazy with blogging for ages but you've inspired me to get going again!! xxx

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