Saturday 28 September 2013

Yet More Cake

The last week and a half has seen a bit of a cake explosion in this house.  First of all I made this cake for Jo



It wasn't a "special" birthday but a much deserved cake as Jo very kindly offered to look after both Max and Penelope for a couple of hours, not only with both her own children, but also on her birthday just so I could go and get rid of the "sparklers" in my hair.  Now that is friendship!

Jo suffers from coeliac disease (and coincidentally so does her husband) so I made the cake with Dove Farm's gluten free self raising flour.  It's just as easy to make cakes with gluten free flour as it is to make them with ordinary wheat flour.  Jo says it is best to use stronger flavours (chocolate, lemon etc) with the gluten free flour so I made chocolate cake.  The inspiration for the cake came from a Lakeland catalogue that had a picture of this cake. Jo loves owls (as her blog demonstrates) and this seemed ideal.  The first cake was a bit of a disaster though as the middle fell out so I started again and used some smaller pyrex dishes as moulds.  The icing circles on the front of the owls were a god-send as they covered a multitude of sins!!

Today's cake was a birthday cake for my niece.  "Hello Kitty" was requested and this was the result


I made three round sponges, using a bog standard victoria sponge recipe.  Two of the sponges were used for the main part of the face and then the third was used to carve out the ears.  The remainder of the third cake was used for... well... ummm... eating!  Liquorice was the handy tip for whiskers.

Both these cakes were iced using various colours of ready to roll icing from Windsor Cake Craft.  They have an online shop but they also have the most marvellous shop near to me.  It is cake making heaven!  Who knew there were so many sizes of cake boards or colours of icing?

In between times it was the Macmillan coffee morning in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.  Jo organised this at the playgroup we all go to and I chipped in some rocky road, using this recipe (substituting raisins for cherries and gluten free digestives for amaretti biscuits), and a lemon loaf from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.  Jo had made rocky road, a strawberries and cream victoria sponge and a carrot cake.  Our other friend, S, made a coffee cake and some chocolate fairy cakes and there were some other contributions too.  We raised £151 and 1 rupee!  A great cause and an excuse to eat cake :)

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