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A friend who was in to anime waaaay too much gave me the brief "do it like those 3 storey ones that look like wedding cakes that japanese girls make!" FAIL. So stickly too. I can't deal with home made buttercream icing. I will also point out that this was one of my first times icing with a proper bag and not those tubes you buy. Gawd, it looks worse every time I look at it. *shudder*
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| # ¿ Jan 7, 2009 22:46 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 17:19 |
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It's the time of year for gingerbread! I got this recipe out of Delia Smith's Book of Cakes, so I'm counting it as cake. Behold a piece I like to call "Martin and the clocktower versus the zombie hoards of Canterbury" The one armed zombie refused to stand up so I'm going to eat him first.  
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| # ¿ Nov 22, 2009 15:24 |
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I made cake today with my gluten intolerant best friend. It looks like a couple of 7 year old girls decorated it. Or does it!?  Click here for the full 1229x922 image. ...yeah, it still looks like a couple of 7 year old girls made it. This was my first time making rainbow cake and I love it! It looked so grotty when I got it out of the oven, but cutting into it was magical.
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| # ¿ Jul 25, 2010 19:21 |
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tekopp posted:I made some cakes for my daughters "Welcome to the world"-party this weekend. This is gorgeous and very chic, it doesn't look overworked like a lot of cakes end up looking. Did you use one of those giant doughnut-style cake tins or carve from a normal round cake?
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| # ¿ Sep 18, 2010 21:28 |
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But I can't make it now, I just made these: Bog standard butterfly cake with butteroyal icing. Yes I am aware they look less like butterflies and more like bunnies with banana hats drowning.
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| # ¿ Oct 24, 2010 21:24 |
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clarabelle posted:I'm not entirely sure what shortening is. Either we don't have it in Ireland or it's called something else here Traditionally in England, we coat fondant cakes with apricot jam first to make it stick, so you could try that.
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| # ¿ Oct 31, 2010 09:45 |
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Tuesday Morning posted:This thread always cheers me up and makes me distressingly hungry at the same time. No, it's good. I'm crap at aesthetically pleasing baking, all my stuff looks rubbish. So I come in here, long for cakes, and don't get fat eating them because I know mine will always look lovely.
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| # ¿ Jan 14, 2011 20:29 |
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Cota Froise posted:Right goons: a challenge for you. For an upcoming party I would like to be able to create a cake which is both vegan, wheat-free, and which will work well when iced with fondant of some sort. I can manage the shoddy decorating all by myself, but I need a recipe. Is such a thing feasible? Or even possible? I have made gluten free vegan cakes before, but they were mini puddings rather than a cake you could ice and slice. I don't know if they would work as a large cake, you could try! Nightmare Guest Cocoa Puddings 280g tin of coconut creme 1 tablespoon sunflower/vegetable oil 100g granulated brown sugar (Demerara) 50g soft brown sugar (Muscovado) 1 heaped teaspoon baking powder 25g cocoa powder dash of vanilla essence 100g rice flour -preheat oven to 180c -Stir coconut creme and oil together until uniform consistency -add the sugars and vanilla essence and beat until dissolved -fold in remaining ingredients -pour into small pudding moulds, ramekins or cake cases (makes about 6-8) -bake for 15-20mins -Serve hot with sorbet
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| # ¿ Jan 17, 2011 17:31 |
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I made some cake! Not being used to my parents' oven, it went a little over, but it didn't taste dry, it just went kind of biscuity. I call it chocolate island cake. Click here for the full 1152x1536 image. You just bake two 7 inch cakes and then using two different sized cutters, cut a ring out of the top cake. Then use chocolate melted together with butter to glue the sides together and fill up the pool, and then pop the island piece back in. What do you do with the ring of cake? Stuff it full of sorbet and give it to any nearby male relative.  Click here for the full 1152x1536 image.
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| # ¿ Feb 23, 2011 10:36 |
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His Divine Shadow posted:Just made this. I thought maybe it was a cake, or a pie in english but apparently it's called a crumble. Made with lingonberries (picked & turned into jam by us), my mom used to make these and I got the recipe from her, first attempt. Slightly overdone. They do look gorgeous, but if you called that a crumble and served it to people in the UK, they would be very confused. A crumble here is like a pie but with a flour and butter crumbled topping instead of pastry.
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| # ¿ Mar 1, 2011 20:34 |
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clarabelle posted:Ok, there's something I don't get. Cream cheese frosting sounds vile. Why would you put cheese on a cake? It's traditional on carrot cake. I've only made a carrot cake once in my life, didn't wait for the cake to cool fully before slapping the cream cheese on and god that was disgusting. Never again.
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| # ¿ Mar 18, 2011 21:30 |
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Help me, cake people! I tried something a little more challenging than the bog standard sponge cakes I usually make. I tried to make a Japanese strawberry shortcake, following this recipe from La Fuji Mama. It was fine when it came out of the oven, looked a little inflated like a cushion, but I thought it had risen amazingly. I turned my fact to finish my lunch, looked back and it had shrunk into what I can only describe as a giant piece of toast!  It has the consistency of a pancake. I want to know where I went wrong. The first step of the recipe is to beat the egg whites and sugar together 'til stiff and glossy but I couldn't get them to go that far. I only have a bog standard hand whisk, not an electric mixer, but I've made meringues before with no problem so I don't understand why the whites and sugar together weren't cooperating. Help?
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| # ¿ Mar 29, 2011 21:54 |
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cocoavalley posted:I know of two reasons why meringues can fail - a bit of grease on the tools, or egg yolk that got into the whites. I always use a steel bowl that has been chilled, but I don't remember where I learned to do that... Oh, I used the bowl to sift flour into first before sifting it again into another bowl, so there was a little flour residue on the bowl. The grease on the tools thing might be accurate too, my whisk is a bitch to clean so I might have missed a spot. Third Murderer posted:when you say hand whisk, you mean like a balloon whisk? Like you make meringues by literally beating the egg whites manually? Yeah, I mean a whisk. Not a balloon one, but one with a spiral of wire at the bottom. I've made meringues before and they weren't much hassle, you just sit down in front of some entertainment and whisk away. How do you expect to fit in your skinny jeans if you don't burn off half the cake calories making the drat thing?  I would get an electric mixer, but I'm a student living in halls. I literally have no storage space because I actually cook and have things like pans and stored ingredients, as oppose to some of my flatmates, who's inventory consists of a fork to pierce the film on a ready meal. Thanks for the tips anyway. I may go buy some more eggs and have another crack at this.
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| # ¿ Mar 30, 2011 08:35 |
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I know that's how it was done for centuries but seriously by an electric hand mixer or something.
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In the mean time, if at first you don't succeed and it's 9.30 the next day and you need a cake to be presented to a professor 3 miles away by 12.30- stick with what you know! I went out and bought some more eggs, and just made a Victoria style sponge but with one more egg than I would normally use for the amount of cake mix. Because I very gently folded it all together, there was loads of air in it and it worked perfectly with the whipped cream and strawberries. The cream looks a bit rough because I don't own a spatula so had to use a combination of cutlery. The sponge was a good alternative though! It disappeared with speed once unveiled at university. I'm going to have another crack at the Japanese style sponge when I'm at my parent's house for Easter break; my mum has a great little electric mixer and the right sized tins and everything.
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| # ¿ Mar 30, 2011 18:12 |
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Thank you to everyone for help with my problem. I didn't know that a stainless steel was good for whisking up eggs, my mum only has pyrex and ceramic bowls and my mixing bowl is plastic because I have a bad habit of dropping them. But I will take everything you've told me into consideration for next time! And now for something completely different...  It was Mother's Day in the UK last Sunday, so I made my mum a carrot cake, based on Delia Smith's recipe but modified a bit (no sultanas or walnuts, unrefined cane sugar as well as muskavado, cooked at 180c in a 7 inch tin for 30mins instead of 150c in a loaf tin for 1hr40). I dusted the top with a mix of icing sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger. The end result was moist but not stodgy. Even better, it was the first carrot cake I've ever liked!
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| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 20:01 |
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Robo Olga posted:
I like Delia Smith's wholemeal chocolate cake, it's so moist and lovely with the fudge topping. The recipe is in Delia Smith's Book of Cakes (which is a great book to own anyway if you can get a copy). But yay yay yay today I conquered the Japanese style sponge! I followed the Cooking With Dog video but swapped out 15g of the flour for 15g of cocoa powder and added a tablespoon each of cocoa and Nesquick powder to the cream to make it chocolatey. Also the strawberries at my local all looked disgusting so I swapped them out for raspberries.  The sponge was insanely light but wasn't dry or crumbly. The whole cake was so light I felt like I could just keep eating it (my family erased a whole 7 inch cake in one evening. What fatties). It was a bit of a faff following along with the steps like heating the egg mixture over hot water, gently folding in the flour etc, because I'm just so used to throwing a sponge cake together without thinking.
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| # ¿ Apr 14, 2011 22:08 |
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Nagelfar posted:These are so cute I want to hug and cuddle them before eating. Macarons were never the craze here in Europe, are they really that hard to get right as some say? What? They are massive in London right now, everywhere does them! I had one the other day that was champagne and roses, it was beyond divine.
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| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 09:19 |
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Nagelfar posted:I apologize, mainland Europe which is not Paris nor London. Sorry, I meant "what?" more as "Really?", but it sort of came across as "are you stupid?"  To those of you saying that they look like adorable little burgers, La Fuji Mama has a recipe for Big Mac macarons. They are extremely cute!
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| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 18:02 |
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I use natural extracts, made a pretty nice pineapple icing the other week that way. Whenever I've used real fruits in frosting, it's gone weird and separated.
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| # ¿ Jun 28, 2011 23:52 |
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Clarabelle, that's adorable! Did you just use food colouring to colour?jomiel posted:I made strawberry cake #3 this weekend from La Fuji Mama recipe: I made both and had a disaster with the fuji mama one sinking horribly (see failure here). As far as I saw, the cooking with dog result didn't sink at all- I followed along with the video exactly step by step as I made it. There's no harm in trying...
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| # ¿ Jul 5, 2011 23:27 |
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jomiel posted:Would it be a problem if I use the Cooking with Dog recipe in my 8" pan? It would just be a bit flatter, right? You could give it a try but sometimes an inch makes all the difference, and with a different surface area you might have to re-adjust cooking time. See if anyone you know has a 7" pan? I've just remembered that one thing Cooking with Dog mentions is dropping the pan a couple of times once it's out of the oven to loosen it up (or something to that effect) and then covering with baking paper and turning it upside down to prevent shrinkage as it cools (from 3:30 in the video). Perhaps you should try that with the Fuji Mama recipe?
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| # ¿ Jul 6, 2011 09:50 |
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clarabelle posted:Cake Pops! That's so pretty! Was it fiddly to do? Here's what I made today- triple decker vanilla sponge with coffee meringue topping/filling.   It's so sticky and the recipe I followed made way too much topping, but I'm happy. I sprinkled cocoa powder on top for a cappuccino effect.
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| # ¿ Aug 7, 2011 17:32 |
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What the hell is "cake flour"? I use self raising or plain + baking powder for all my cakes. I've never heard of cake flour!
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| # ¿ Aug 20, 2011 22:02 |
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clarabelle posted:Question: does anyone know the laws regarding selling baked goods on the internet? I'm pondering selling my cake pops online, but I don't know what laws/guidelines I have to be in compliance with. IIRC, you are in the UK (moved here from Ireland? I might be getting my wires crossed). If so, to sell food you will need a Food Hygiene Certificate. On the topic of taxes, I think you're allowed to earn a certain amount tax free but if you make it into a proper business you will have to do all the paperwork that self employed people have to do.
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| # ¿ Sep 1, 2011 09:21 |
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The Heartless posted:Today I did four dozen cupcakes for two little girls birthdays. They're a basic white cake, that I colored pastel colors and made rainbow. I finally perfected my white cake recipe (harder than I ever thought, seeing as how basic it is) so I was really pleased with the end result. Basic vanilla butter cream, also. I know it's totally a low content waste of a post, but: those are so pretty!  Even I would have flipped my poo poo for those as a kid, and I hated girly stuff. You've got a great mix of colours there.
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| # ¿ Sep 11, 2011 00:35 |
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My poor flatmate was slogging away cleaning an opaque layer of grossness off the oven and I told him that I'd make him any cake he wanted if he got it back to transparency. He wants a lager cake. Not a stout or Guiness cake, one made with lager. I know he was taking the piss, but does anyone have a beer cake recipe?
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| # ¿ Jan 30, 2012 00:24 |
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I know these are tacky and not very culinary, but I made cake icecreams this evening. Tomorrow (or rather today as it's past midnight), I'm going to see a ceramicist called Anna Barlow, who makes amazing unmeltable icecreams in her kiln. These are a crappy nod to her work and the world of kitsch, as well as a thank you for having me over. 
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| # ¿ Mar 13, 2012 00:48 |
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clarabelle posted:Got a kitten-filled kitchen They're too smiley to eat! Has anyone been having problems with icing now that the weather is hotting up? England is having a heatwave and I'm worried about making stuff with buttercream only for it to go bad. We only have a fridge freezer combo-unit between 5 people in this household, so putting stuff nicely in the fridge is not an option.
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| # ¿ Mar 28, 2012 13:44 |
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sharkattack posted:Peanut Dacquoise with Peanut Butter Mousse: Peanut butter, chocolate, and meringue, you say? I think I may just have found my dream cake. Is there a recipe I could have?
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| # ¿ Aug 7, 2012 17:32 |
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sharkattack posted:Haha, absolutely: http://www.spachethespatula.com/pea...hocolate-glaze/ Thank you! I know what I'm going to make for my birthday! Clarabelle you are so skilled. I really want to get better at decorating cakes, but I'm too poor to buy any new equipment right now (e.g an off-set palette knife, icing bags/tips, even a rolling pin and mat) and I find it so hard to be patient with cakes. All that waiting for things to cool, I just want to eat them.
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| # ¿ Aug 10, 2012 11:12 |
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Tomorrow is my last day at work and this has been the best summer job I've ever had so I made them a cake to say thank you. It's 3 layers of egg-based sponge (I don't really know what the proper name is, I used the Japanese Christmas cake recipe, so it's sponge with soft peak eggs), sandwiched with chocolate fudge, and then coffee whipped cream on top. The cream started to separate and look really gross so that's why there's patchy bits.
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| # ¿ Sep 6, 2012 21:26 |
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Yeah, I think I may have over whipped and I think I may have added too much coffee. For comparison, here is a cake I made on Sunday with the exact same topping: My practice cakes always look better 
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| # ¿ Sep 6, 2012 22:50 |
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How can I make my buttercream icing really really white? I don't want cream coloured stuff any more, and when I make mine from scratch I always end up with that. My ratio is 1g of butter to 1g of icing sugar, with a dash of vanilla extract.
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| # ¿ Sep 25, 2012 19:21 |
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Cool, thanks for the recipes. I'm not sure what then UK equivalent of shortening would be, Wikipedia suggested the brand "cookeen" but I've never heard of that. Other online sources have suggested Flora White and Trex, but I've never heard of them either. That Martha Stewart recipe makes so much icing  Here's what I made tonight, before begging for recipes:  It's Fresher's Fair tomorrow and the cheer squad wanted some cupcakes to attract this year's talent. Our colours are blue, silver, and white, so I tried to make that but I only had liquid colour instead of gel and it was changing the consistency of the icing pretty badly so I couldn't go the shade I actually wanted. I sprayed them all over with this "edible" silver spray that smelt awful and is probably carcinogenic. Ah well.
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| # ¿ Sep 25, 2012 22:38 |
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qxx posted:I couldn't agree more. I can't stand fondant cakes. The point of amazing scultpurey cakes was to do something impressive with traditional cake components and have it still be delicious. Fondant is basically edible clay. It's cheating, trendy and cheapens the 'wow' factor of making a cool looking cake. I think that's a cultural/class thing though. In my childhood, birthday cake was a Victoria sponge covered with white fondant, so fondant is nostalgic to me. I don't know anyone who peels it off and doesn't eat it. My brother didn't believe me when I told him that some Americans do that- when we were kids we loved it so much that we used to eat ready roll fondant out of the packet. But it's not just for kids either, I think it's just traditional cake in England. Maybe I'm wrong and was raised by complete weirdos. Here's the fondant topped cake my cousin had for her baby's christening, from a professional bakery:  I don't think it's a particularly great cake, but it's an example of what's common where I'm from. Those baby blocks were solid fondant and some of the younger members of my family were literally fighting for them. Another cousin of mine had a square fondant cake for his engagement party- that was made by an old lady from him mum's church. My friends (mostly international students), don't really go for this kind of cake. If it's someone's birthday we all chip in and get some demoniacally delicious chocolate thing from Patisserie Valerie, like this:  Personally, my favourite is the Japanese style sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberries, but if I mentioned that to my grandmother she wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. Cake to her comes in 4 varieties: Victoria sponge, chocolate fudge, carrot cake, and coffee & walnut.
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| # ¿ Sep 27, 2012 10:42 |
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clarabelle posted:That said, I wildly object to people who cover chocolate cakes with regular fondant. That's a taste combination I'll never be ok with. Chocolate fondant is easy to get and tastes a lot better than the regular stuff (still too sweet, but far more edible) Well of course, that's just disgusting. If you're doing a chocolate cake you either leave it plain on top and just fill it (my mum used to do this and it was a bit dry but at least it wasn't sickly), or you do something like cocoa buttercream or chocolate fudge.
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| # ¿ Sep 27, 2012 15:39 |
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syntaxfunction posted:So I ask you all, what's your go to cupcake and frosting recipe when you want simple? I use Happy Happy cake's cupcake recipe: http://youtu.be/VZ7dNy_t8MA Only I miss out the cocoa powder and replace it with flour. from video: 130g Butter/marg 165g self raising flour 30g cocoa powder 170g sugar 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) pinch salt 2 teaspoons vanilla essence 110ml milk (semi-skimmed) -Beat butter and sugar together until fluffy, using hand mixer -add eggs and salt, mix well -add milk and vanilla, mix well -add dry ingredients, mix well (I use the hand mixer again) -fill cake cases 3/4s full (in the vid he says 12, I always seem to get 13) -bake in over preheated to 180c for 25mins Just ice them with a simple buttercream icing (1 part butter to 1.5 icing sugar) or whipped cream with caster sugar and flavouring in. My favourite is whipped cream with coffee in.
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| # ¿ Oct 18, 2012 22:59 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 17:19 |
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I would use full fat cheese, every time I used reduced fat stuff things have gone disastrously wrong. And yes, half the orange juice, add some orange zest if you want more orange flavour. If you did that you could probably cut down on the sugar a little and still have a decent consistency.
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| # ¿ Nov 4, 2012 20:34 |
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