Mother's Day Cake

oops, a little bit late posting this but here's the cake I made for my mum on Mother's Day last Sunday.

I used the orange madeira recipe from before, but covered it in buttercream as a change from fondant icing. The sides were originally supposed to be piped in a basketweave pattern to make it a basket of flowers, as I bought this tip a while ago and wanted to try it out. Initially it went well but the combination of a warm kitchen, warm hands and not enough icing in the buttercream meant it started to melt so I had to smooth it.. It bothers me that you can see cake in this picture.

I practised making sugarpaste flowers again and tried 'pincing' the tips of the petal shapes and really like how it makes the petals look 3D. I'll be doing it this was in the future!

I chose the colours first and then happened to see flowers that matched when I went to buy some, so they matched which was nice.

So for all of you mothers, I hope you had a lovely day on Sunday.

Birthday Cake

It was my first attempt at a 2 tiered cake, and proved really interesting. I ended up making 4 cakes, 2 layers per tier. To fit everything in I ended up making the top tiers on Monday and freezing them; it was a good opportunity to see how this worked. They turned out fine, I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

The top layers are orange madeira cake with orange buttercream, and the bottom layers are chocolate madeira with umm nutella chocolate spread! The orange cake had orange juice in it and was lovely and moist. The chocolate one I'll reserve judgement on. It used real chocolate and I think it hardened a little before I got the mix in the oven, plus it was a bit dry. I might try it again and use some more milk.

Anyway, the recipes are from 'Ultimate Cake' by Barbara Maher. It's not a bad book. The instructions are well explained and the pictures helpful, but the pictures are at the front and the recipes at the back which I found a little odd. Also, though not very important I suppose, but the colour scheme is a bit weird, pale pink and green cakes make me feel a bit quesy, but maybe that's just me. I suppose the indictor of how good I think it is, is that i've had it a year or two and only made one other cake out of it. Unfortunately I couldn't find the recipes online.

In the past my cakes tend to have a camber on the top, so I trimmed the top off them both and inverted the top one before covering in jam and fondant icing. This gave a really good flat top.

I used dowells for the first time, but they weren't exactly level, so it was lucky madeira cakes are fairly sturdy! I need more practise I think.

I went for a pink and brown theme just because I think it looked nice, and as you can probably see it was for a 50th birthday.