Simple Cupcake Birthday Cake

I did this take cake for Poppy's 6th birthday, which (as usual) we celebrated with her friends before they all disappeared for the summer holidays.

First make lots of pink coloured cake.

I can't remember the quantities I'm afraid, but it looks enough to make two healthy round cakes.  Well, I say healthy...

So after cutting all the edge off you're left with a nice tower.

Hacking away even more gets you the right kind of shape.

After putting roll out icing down on a cake board for the base (great for covering up all sorts of tears on the cake board), slather on lots of buttercream icing.

Looks quite neat, really.

Then fully decorated.  Most of the top was cake, covered in pink coloured buttercream and then decorated with smarties.  The height wasn't very well planned - it was higher than the chocolate fingers I'd got to simulate the folders in the case, so I ended up cutting a load down and putting them on the bottom.  It's the kind of thing the average 6 year old won't mind, but bothers me!

Doughnut Birthday Cake

I made this for Evie's 9th birthday.  She wanted doughnuts, as in a pile of doughnuts.  However we had other ideas.

I've only the single photo of this cake.  For scale the cake board is a 10 inch round cake board.  We bought a cake tin for this, and then made two cakes in that.  These were sliced flat so they could be put together to make the doughnut, with jam in between the layers.  I made a batch of pink icing from water and icing sugar, aiming for a consistency that would seep over the edges but set before it just completely fell off.   Hundreds and thousands on top added that extra bit of sugar that was lacking before.

Elsa Birthday Cake

I made this cake for Poppy's 5th birthday.  I think we'd done a similar doll cake before, but no photos exist to convict the guilty.

First make the cakes and cut the tops and sides off.  Bottom two are 7" round, with 3 egg/190g, top was a 2l bowl, 4 egg/250g.

Cut down to size, lots of cake to keep the troops marching.

I was relying on the buttercream to get enough height, cutting each layer in half to be able to add more icing between each layer.

Made up 1kg buttercream, some left over.

Made a stand out of the roll out icing at the bottom of the hole, her feet stuck into that to get the height right, and more stability - the icing padding didn't quite add enough height to the cake. Rolled out 1kg pre-coloured icing, ended up discarding a third, but wouldn't really want to place it on with less. The 'ribbon belt' covered up the top which wasn't so neat.  This was made with an off-cut of the blue icing.

Grace did all the decorating, full credit to her for taking the time and creativity. All the skirt is decorated, with different designs on the sides and back.

Smarties Surprise Birthday Cake

I made this cake for Evie's 6th birthday.  Who doesn't like smarties...

Start with the cake, 2 7-8inch cakes, using 3 & 4 egg Victoria sponge recipe, with different food colouring. Dangerous thing, trimming cakes when children are up. Wandering hands tend to congregate.

Slice in half

Bottom three layers, hollow out the middle. Funnily enough, all the bits of cake from the middle seem to have disappeared. 

Make up about 1kg of buttercream, sandwich the bottom three layers, and add about 200g of M&Ms.  Yes, despite the title I wasn't particular brand loyal...

Finish off the buttercream, cursing that you haven't made quite enough (as it traditional).

Then decorate, using up some of the other 3 bags of M&Ms. Caroline Hendry was very disparaging of my pattern. Or just not surprised in my attention to order.

The cake cut open for the world to see.  Given by the serving, I think the loose sweets got eaten first,

Dog Birthday Cake

I made this cake for Grace's 9th birthday.  She wanted another dog cake but I didn't have much time so did a much more simple cake than the previous dalmation cake.   One of Grace's presents was sponsorship of a guide dog. He's called Truffles, is a puppy a few months old, and (thankfully) doesn't look much like this cake. Hopefully the same number of eyes, eyes and feet, and is approaching the same colour.

Tiger Birthday Cake

I made this cake for Jonas, my godson, for his 3rd birthday.

I haven't saved any notes from making this cake, hopefully the pictures are enough of a guide.  First make two colours of cake mixture, putting one in the tin first then stirring the other on top.  

I was trying to get tiger stripes inside the cake, but didn't stir it in enough to get the real effect, I would have done this differently next time, maybe adding the cake mixture in turns, overlapping each other diagonally.

Slicing the cake open to add layers to add buttercream icing.

I think the buttercream was all orange, given the other pictures, but the colour balance on this picture was all wrong...  There was initially 1kg of buttercream, and I needed to stop to make some more.

Using some of the cake off cuts to make ears.

Roll out 1kg of orange fondant icing.

Smooth down, cutting some of the edges off to make the smoothing easier, before removing the remainder of the off cuts.

Then rolling out some white fondant, cutting to shapes and sticking down with edible glue.

I made a bunch of black icing and then piped the pattern on top.  Eating black icing will give you a purple tongue...

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!