Thursday 10 January 2013

ISP Celebration Cake

This cake was made for our ISP team at Broadcom, to celebrate the first productisation of VideoCore IV ISP in a Samsung mobile phone.  This was really quite a big deal and I wanted to give something back to the team.

I first made the blocks of cake, with a tin like this.  I bought it from John Lewis, but I don't know if they still make it.

Each batch of 8 took 5 eggs/315g butter/315g caster sugar/315g sr flour/75g plain flour. After mixing the batter, I separated into eight bowls (about 150g in each) then coloured them separately. I used these colours: http://www.cakecraftshop.co.uk/shop/products/id/sgfa100s.htm which work really well. Sad to say that apart from pink we had all the colours I needed in the kitchen already... After cooling, I cut the cake into the largest square-ish prism I could do.  The shades of grey were going to be done with icing rather than colouring the cake directly.

This is what 2kg of butter icing looks like.

Apply butter icing to cakes. Each cake was surrounded with about 85g of icing, leaving a small piece sticking out to stand proud of the black icing.

I mixed up lumps of black and white roll out icing to make the shades of grey along the bottom.

Strips of roll out black icing cut to fill the gaps at the top.

Edges surrounded. If I did this again, I'd do the icing around the edge before the edge strips at the top, since that would look a bit better.

Turns out I followed the wrong macbeth chart, but never mind. Still tasted great. 

This is the chart I was aiming for.  The pink/purple colours probably changed the most when baking, so aren't so great.

This was me, holding up the correct version of the macbeth chart.  You can't see the crowd of people who both appreciated and ate the cake. They were there - really!