Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts

Saturday, 15 June 2013

Baking: My Disney Birthday Party, Part 2: The Cake

As a continuation of this post, I decided to take on the challenge of baking myself a Disney castle cake.   I thought about doing a three tier cake with ice cream cones for turrets, and even after looking around online that still seemed like the best idea.   I decided to rent a set of tins from a local cake shop for the occasion.   No sense in buying tins that big when I wouldn't use them often.   So I bought large amounts of cake ingredients and set about baking three cakes.  












That's where the trouble started.   The baking itself should have been the easy part, but it still went wrong.   I used a simple sponge recipe, and one that I'd used lots before, but for some reason on this scaled up level the big cakes sank.   I have no idea what went wrong!   Maybe you need special recipes for very big cakes?   Something to research and improve anyway.   Luckily though the cakes were solid enough that I could just turn them upside-down and hide the sunken bits.   Next came the piling the cakes on top of each other part.    Easy enough, except that the top two cakes were too wide to leave much space for ice cream cone turrets, so I had to cut them both down to size a bit to make room for them.  Next came the icing.   I'd chosen to do the castle in pale blue, with darker blue turret roofs, and purple decorations.   I decided to use fondant icing, dyed with fondant icing pastes. 



                                        Fondant icing with pastes and edible glitter and stars

                                          The three colours of fondant icing I used.  


Icing the cake went smoothly enough.   The icing for the turret roofs had to be cut into skirt shapes before it could be put onto the ice cream cones, but still, it went well.   I then decided to stack up multiple cones so that the turrets would have walls as well as roofs.   We decided to ice the cones with butter icing, because it would stick well.   So we made and dyed some butter icing.   Annoyingly, because of butter's yellow colour, it's hard to get the exact colour you want, and our butter icing didn't quite match the rest of the cake.  Ah well.   I'm sure no one noticed.


  

So iced turrets were set onto the cake in as castley an arrangement as we could manage.   Next the whole thing was decorated with edible glitter, edible gold stars, flags, doors and drawbridges, windows and purple icing flowers.   Perfect!   Very Disney.   I also bought fountain candles to be like the Disney castle fireworks.   Good effort all round, I feel.  




Monday, 28 January 2013

Coconut meringue cake

This is one I'd been wanting to try for a little while.  I used:

125g butter
225g white sugar
3 eggs
125g self raising flour
125g dessicated coconut (plus some extra)
80ml milk





I softened the butter, beat in 125g sugar, separated the eggs and beat in the egg yolks.   I added the milk, flour and...a certain amount of coconut.   The recipe I found didn't have any coconut in the cake mix itself, but I wanted some in there too.  








So, that was the cake mix.   For the meringue topping I whipped the egg whites until stiff, and folded in the remaining 100g sugar.   I then added 125g dessicated coconut.   I thought it looked like quite a lot of coconut for so little meringue and I was right.   The meringue went completely flat and I was worried about whether it was going to come out ok.   But I spooned the cake mix into a cake tin, and carefully put the meringue mix on top of it and baked at 180 degrees.  




The cake came out pretty well.   It was very moist and tasty, and the meringue layer held together ok.  







However, I felt I'd like it better if the meringue on top was more of a meringue and less of a thin coconut crust, so I made a second attempt.   This time, I added the whole 125g coconut to the cake mix and just put a handful on coconut into the meringue mix.   I feel the second attempt worked a lot better!   Tasty, moist coconut cake with a light meringue topping.   Delicious!   Sadly, however, I seem to have failed to take a picture of cake number two.   Sad face.   You'll just have to take my word for it!