The Big French Fancy

I was actually so excited when I saw this! A huge fan of French Fancies, I recently heard that the wonderful people at Mr Kipling have gone futher to make 'The Big French Fancy'. It turns out they've been available since November. How could I have let that happen.

Ok, the covering is sugarpaste and not fondant, but I can forgive that. The only bad news is that I've no reason to buy one for weeks, and it really is too big to eat on your own (serves 10). That is of course assuming anyone finds out..

It comes in pink and yellow.

Birthday Fairy Cakes

Just a few wee fairy cakes showing how 2 cutters and 2 colours of icing can make something quite pretty.

Iron Man Cake

Hello all. I have been busy baking, but just things I've done before so no blogging. Recently though I made a birthday cake for someone who likes comics. I picked an Iron Man theme because it's one of his favourites, plus red and yellow were the 2 colours I had most of. It was meant to look like a stack of comics. I look a few pictures to show you all.

Using a standard victoria sponge recipe, I made 2 sheet cakes in a traybake tin. I cut each of these in two horizontally to make 4 thin layers, which I stacked in a haphazard way, using jam to 'stick' them together. The soft layers draped over one another.



















Next I covered the top in black sugarpaste to be the background to the cover page of the top comic.

To create the plaque for the top, I printed out a picture of Iron Man from the Marvel website. Cutting round it created a stencil for rolled out red sugarpaste. Removing the yellow sections from the stencil, cutting them out of the plaque and creating insets from rolled out yellow sugar paste then meant I could add it to the top of the cake. The sugarpaste was also used to cover the flat sections representing covers in the pile below. I had intended to put more details on these, but ran out of time. I used white to represent the pages, running a knife down the side to show pages. This was really fiddly and I didn't realise how much time it would take until half way through. (It was only when I was finished that I noticed I'd forgotten to add coloured spines, and had used white all the way round but by that point didn't care!)
















The final task was colouring in the plaque with my edible black marker pen. I copied this from the printout. This actually wasn't as tricky as it looked, and waiting for the icing to dry a bit and harden made a big difference, otherwise it created grooves in the surface.




I was really pleased with it in the end, though if I had to make it again I'd make a plain square cake without the misaligned layers and put more detail in. I have to say though. it was a bit awkward to cut but tasted good!

The final cake looked like this: