Cakes I've Made Recently

It's been a busy time and I haven't had time for blogging.  To be honest, I've been kind of avoiding my computer.  I think I got all techno'ed out whilst working long hours earlier this year.

Anyway, thought I 'd share some things I've done recently.  Will also share - in a day or so - my Christmas Cake recipe.  It's just waiting to be iced so I'll wait to upload the photo until it's done.

This cake is one I made a few weeks ago when we had a friend coming over.  It's a basic chocolate cake made from Dana's Gluten Free Chocolate Cake recipe (Sophie Gray's Destitute Gourmet - Enjoy Book).  I highly recommend this book for anyone starting out as a gluten free baker.

It's a nice easy recipe - all you do is throw everything in the food processor and press the button.  It's usually cooked in a ring tin but, as you can see, I made it in two round tins.  I've also tried making this in a loaf tin but it was a little too dense - it wasn't cooked in the middle when the outsides were cooked so I don't recommend this.  Makes a lovely special occasion cake.  I iced it with buttercream icing and a large icing nozzle.

The other cake worth mentioning was Jesse's birthday cake.  This year he has developed a fascination for Doctor Who so the Tardis was really the only choice.  It took a bit of thinking about, and a bit of testing.  I made three chocolate cakes (the loaf tin one above was one of them) before I got it right.  I originally wanted to make a standing up cake like this one but my gluten free cake was just too soft to stand up so I went on to make a flat cake.

I iced this one with royal icing, brushing it first with warmed strawberry jam to make sure the icing stuck.  To get the icing to be blue, I added half a bottle of blue food colouring to the icing and kneaded it through.  The colour wasn't dense enough so once the icing was on, I painted it with more blue food colouring.  The white bits are some of the icing I reserved for that purpose.  I pressed the windows with a piece of Lego and then painted around them in black food colouring with a very fine paintbrush.  I also painted the letters in black in the same manner.

It's not exactly symmetrical and it could have been more square on the corners (picture doesn't do it justice though) but the 11 10-13 year old boys who attended Jesse's party thought it was pretty cool.

Playing with icing and this cake has spurred me on to try other things so watch this space to see what happens next.

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