New Peppa Pig cake

Today was my niece's 2nd birthday and she's just discovered Peppa Pig so an obvious choice for the cake! Chocolate mud cake with oreo/cream/marshmallow cream filling. Covered in MMF and decorations in MMF.

Pippi Longstocking Pirate Cake

As usual I run out of time trying to clean house, decorate and finish the cake before the guests arrive, argh! So with the guests watching me roll out the mmf to cover the cake, here is the finished product:

Inside a pirate cake

The outrageous Pippi (Longstocking) Pirate Cake

Having had "baker's block" all week dear daughter asked for chocolate cake in her birthday cake, in other words the same cake I make every year. So it's up to me to make it a bit more outrageous than usual since it's a Pippi Longstocking cake as much as it's a pirate cake.

I've baked 2 moist chocolate cakes in 4 x 8" tins to make a very high 4 layer cake. I put the first on the cake board and iced it. I cut a hole in the next 2 layers. Then I cut one of the holes into 2 layers and placed one half in the bottom of the first ring so the candy filling doesn't get sticky from the icing. Then I filled the hole with smarties, m&m's and chocolate gold coins surprise-treasure-style.

Add the third layer with a hole and fill it up, not all the way, you still have to fit the cut hole-layer on top. Ice and top with the last fourth layer. Done!.

Here it is crumb-coated. Now wish me luck with making a fondant icing large enough to cover it nicely!

Tara's 30th - my first commission!

I happily accepted my sister-in-laws request to bake a cake for her 30th birthday party. We decided upon a white chocolate cake with white chocolate ganache and passion fruit filling. A bit of googling pulled up this yummy sponge recipe from Woman's Day and I used another recipe for the filling from the Australian Woman's Weekly. Scrumptiouso!



The colour theme of the party was yellow and grey, yay, my favourite "Pinterest colours" at the moment! And I happen to own a yellow cake stand!

I covered the cake in MMF. And for the first time I used ribbon on the cake since I knew I would be assembling it on a boat. 

Tara's mother had fortunately bought some candles and how well they fitted in with my last-minute-on-the-spur-of-the-moment decorations! 


We had to drive for a couple of hours to get to the boat cruise so I used a styrofoam box that belongs to a friend and used some ice-packs to keep it cool. During the drive I realised I hadn't glued the cake board to the cake tin so I had lovely images of squashed cake but somehow it survived!

White chocolate cake recipe

Ingredients

2 1/4 cup(s) all-purpose flour 

2 teaspoon(s) baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon(s) salt 

2 bar(s) (4 oz each) white chocolate, chopped 

3/4 cup(s) (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened 

3/4 cup(s) sugar 

4 large eggs 

2 teaspoon(s) vanilla 

1 1/4 cup(s) milk

Directions

1. Heat oven to 175 C. Coat three 20cm sandwich tins with nonstick spray. Line bottoms with wax paper; coat with nonstick spray, then flour.
2. Mix flour, baking powder and salt in medium bowl; whisk to blend. Place white chocolate in medium glass bowl; melt in microwave as label directs.
3. In large bowl, beat butter and sugar with an electric mixer 3 minutes until light. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until well blended. Beat in vanilla. Add melted white chocolate; beat until well combined, about 1 minute.
4. Reduce mixer to low. Alternately add flour mixture and milk, beginning and ending with flour.
5. Evenly divide batter among prepared pans. Bake 25 to 30 minutes until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool on wire racks 10 minutes, run knife around edge and invert onto racks to cool completely.

Read more: White Chocolate Cake with Lemon Cream - Woman's Day

White chocolate sponge with blueberry and passion fruit

My quest to find a yummy and moist white chocolate sponge cake has succeeded! How the batter survived long enough to go in the cake tin is a miracle. After hours of googling I found the recipe for white chocolate victoria sponge I used last year but that kind of cake isn't great for the celebration cakes I'm making. These cakes need to be refrigerated and a victoria sponge tastes awful after refrigeration.

I've got my first commission to bake my sister-in-law's birthday cake for her party next week so doing a test-run for my own birthday cake last week was a perfect excuse. I realised after baking my cake the night before didn't give me any time to practice the ganache crumb coat, oh well.

So I dug out the cream, philly and icing mixture to whip up some plain filling and decided to use fresh blueberries on one layer and passion fruit pulp on the other layer.

Peppa Pig Cake

In the two weeks leading up to my girl's second birthday I thought my child wanted a Dora cake until suddenly last minute we were back to the Peppa Pig cake, argh! Which suits me just fine but I had just ordered food colours for a Dora cake rather than a Peppa Pig colour scheme. And I now have a cupboard full of Dora birthday party stuff for next time (cross fingers!)

So going for a cake covered in MMF in the height of Australian summer was going to be another issue, maybe. Where on earth does one buy large packs of American style marshmallows. Nowhere. We even drive all the way to Costco in Sydney to buy some. Nope. Ah, the Reject Shop has tubs of marshmallow fluff, I buy 5 tubs in the hope that I can use this instead of marshmallows. I also buy one bag of icing mixture (what the?) and a bag of icing sugar before I go home to google what I actually need. Buy first, ask questions later is my motto apparently.

So it turns out the marshmallow fluff is a great investment for my MMF and the icing mixture less so. Oh well, I will have to commit to a fair amount of cupcake icing now to use up the icing mixture. 5 balls of coloured MMF later and we're set!

It's also my first time using CFC or Tylose and sort of just sprinkled a load of it onto some MMF. The time it took to harden (lightening speed) might indicate I've used far too much but hey ho, I needed the Peppa Pig to dry NOW so, great! I made a Peppa Pig and some letters, the rest I left to use as a gooey mess, as you can see from the shiny ball and "ducks".

I wasn't having much luck in the baking department, the bottom layer is my chocolate cake with supposed-to-be mascarpone/whipped cream filling but may have ended up with a wierd Philly/cream mix that wasn't great. And I really didn't like the taste of the cream here in Australia. I also lost a whole layer of cake when slicing into layers, the cake split in 3 and so forth. The top layer was first a pink victoria sponge that sank and only fit for the bin. The second panic version was a non-pink adaptation from my grandmother's gingerbread cake without the spices. I think people were just being polite when they said it was nice lol. And having to put the whole cake in the fridge and taking it out for the party meant that the whole MMF started looking fairly gooey and potentially started melting from the excess moisture. Nightmare!