Tiny fruit cakes

You may have seen my earlier Tiny Christmas Cakes post, well they're all decorated and ready for eating on Sunday.

There's such a variety of ways to decorate a Christmas Cake and doing them this way I got to do them all!

You could leave plain and just have a decorative glace fruit topping and a little cellophane:

Or traditional Royal Icing:

Some fondant icing for those who prefer their teeth intact:

Beyond the simple by taking a plain iced white cake, indenting some lines to resemble brickwork and and arch you get an igloo. So simple by with a great effect. Finish off with some sugarpaste penguins to complete:

As not everyone likes fruit cake, a small amount of chocolate madeira batter and some chocolate flavoured teddy-bear coloured icing makes these little puddings:

The smaller cakes are harder to cover in fondant, and finger prints more noticeable but a good way to practice skills. I'm definately doing this next year, not loads of cake left over and plently of scope for my imagination!

Tiny Christmas Cakes

Hello all, yes I know it is still October and normally I refuse all mention of the C-word until at least 1st December but some things just have to be done in advance.

In the past few years I've made an 6 or 8in cake which I've shared out between family once I could bear cutting it. That said there's always enough that people get a bit fed up so this year I have made 3 small 8oz cakes from Mary Berry's book. It seems to be here normal cake scaled down so you could divide a 6in recipe by about 8 I think.

The recipe reccommends using half tins of baked beans: exhibit A

Hmm, never thought I would be putting pictures of baked beans on a cake blog!

Careful of ring pull ones though. I forgot with all of mine and had to use the tin opener anyway as they leave a ridge inside. It was quite awkward so I'd suggest using a tin opener on the bottom to get a clean edge. Also I found the Heinz tins easier as others don't seem as sturdy and they have straight as opposed to rigded sides. You prep them as normal, I used 2 layers of baking paper.The cake recipe was fairly standard. I put some dried cranberries in to give it a Christmassy feel.

And voila, 3 8oz fruit cakes

I did like only having to wait 1 1/4 hrs and not the usual 3hrs+. They also came out really easily by pulling gently on the paper cuffs. I had had visions of taking the bottoms off with a tin opener.

I'll probably make some little madeira ones in these tins for the fruit cake haters. Now just to decide how to decorate? Do I do them matching or different, I can't decide. Any ideas?