Cookies and Mallow Chocolate Heaven Cake

Cookies and Mallow Chocolate Heaven Cake

The plan had been to make the best carrot cake in the world for my birthday. However after eating most of the original cake myself and having a good amount of the one I made for Jeff's mum, I wanted to try something else for my birthday.

The idea was for a cookies and cream cake. And I kid you not, I had a dream that I used the marshmallow icing and woke up thinking it was a wonderful idea!

I used recipes from the Primrose Bakery recipe book. For my first attempt, I used normal cake tins and made a two tier cake with icing in the middle and on the top. Second time round I thought I'd try out my Wilton Heart Cake Tins which I haven't used since the Candy Cake. I doubled up the cake recipe and made two batches of the icing to do it all. However, I think this cake is a little too soft and moist to hold it's shape with the heart insert. Plus it was gigantic!

Heart Insert

So here's the basic recipe for the two tiered cake I made.

Chocolate Cake

• 115g good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
• 85g unsalted butter, at room temp
• 175g soft brown sugar
• 2 large eggs separated
• 185g plain flour
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp bicarb of soda
• Pinch of salt
• 250ml semi skimmed milk at room temp
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 170C (fan) and grease and line 2 cake tins.

Break the chocolate and break into pieces and melt. I use the microwave on 30 second blasts, the stir until it is completely melted. You can use a bowl over simmering water though.

In a large bowl cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is pale and smooth.

In a separate bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg yolk for several minutes.
Slowly add the egg yolks to the creamed mixture and beat well. Next add the melted chocolate to the mixture and beat well.
Combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl.
Combine the milk and vanilla extract in a jug.
Add a third of the flour to the chocolate mixture, beat well.
Pour in a third of the milk and beat again. Repeat these steps until all the flour and milk have been added.
In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until soft peaks start to form. Carefully fold the egg whites into the batter using a metal spoon.
Divide the mixture into the 2 cake tins.
Cook for 20-25 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean after being inserted in the centre of one of the cakes.
Leave them to cool in the tins for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool. Peel the greaseproof paper from the bases of the cakes.

Marshmallow Icing

• 120g granulated sugar
• 80g golden syrup
• 1 1/2 tbsp water
• 2 large egg whites

Cook the sugar, syrup and water in a saucepan over a high heat until the mixture reaches the soft-ball stage (115C). This took a few minutes.

Remove from heat.

Meanwhile, in a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until soft peaks start to form. With the blades still beating on a low speed, slowly pour in the hot sugar syrup in a steady stream on the egg whites.

Continue to beat on a low speed until all the hot syrup is in the mixing bowl.

Increase the speed to medium high and continue beating the mixture until it becomes thick, glossy and cool.

Spread a layer of this icing in between the two layers of cake and spread or pipe the rest on top.

Cookies!
Because I wanted this to be a cookies and cream cake, I added 6 crushed oreos on top of the first layer of icing. And I took out the centre of about 6 oreos and blitzed the biscuit then sprinkled it on top of the cake.

This is the basic 2 layered version

I would love to hear what you think of this cake. Please leave a comment.

Frozen Cake and Pizza Party

Frozen Birthday Cake

I got the idea of having a Pizza Party for Elizabeth's birthday from kneadwhine, who took her little boy to Pizza Express for his birthday last year. I remember thinking, "I could do that". And I did!

Elizabeth was happy with the idea, but to be honest I could have convinced her to do anything for her birthday. She was just so excited about it full stop!

She invited 4 friends, so there were 6 children in total. All of them RSVP'd with their favourite pizza topping.

I had to buy in 4 extra rolling pins, 1 extra pizza baking tray and I bought 6 aprons from Poundland.

I made two lots of pizza dough in the breadmaker. And I used Tesco's pizza sauce and ready grated mozzarella.

For their toppings they had a selection of ham, pepperoni and pineapple.

I used 3/4 of the second batch of pizza dough to make dough balls to serve with the pizzas. They also had some salad sides and some hula hoops and cheesy crisps.

Pizza Birthday Tea

They all made their own pizzas and while they were cooking they played party games with Grandma in the living room.

Tesco had some ready made party game packs. I bought 3, a Pin the tail on the Donkey, Sleeping Lions, and Musical Mats - which was a musical chairs substitute. They also played pass the parcel. I was really impressed with the games from Tesco, and everything can be reused.

After they had their birthday tea, Elizabeth took all her friends upstairs to her room to show off her bunk beds. I came upstairs and found all 6 of them on the top bunk!

When they came back down there was time for one more game before the parents arrived. It all went brilliantly! Everyone was well behaved and happy. There was lots of giggling and smiling faces!

And to top it all off, Elizabeth had this cake (which I made):

Frozen Cake
I've been developing this idea since Rebecca's Scooby Doo cake, when Elizabeth said she wanted a Frozen Cake for her birthday. I wanted to make a palace, but it was just too difficult. I think I would have either had to have cake covered in sugar glass, which wouldn't have looked great, or I would have had to use non-edible crafts.

So I ended up with this design as a compromise by having the sugar glass at the back as ice shards and by making it in three tiers to give the height of the palace. And in the end it was MUCH easier than the Scooby Doo cake because I didn't have to make templates or cut out intricate designs and lettering by hand.

I first purchased snowflake cutters from amazon. Then I printed off several sugar glass recipes from the internet. I tried it with food colouring and without. And for the finished product, I wish I had put the colouring in because the glass caramalised a bit too much and so looks too yellow. I also tried a bit of chocolate tempering. I got it right a few times, but as the cake wasn't being served as soon as it was made it was a bit pointless. The chocolate kept it's shape, but it didn't snap when broken.

Ice Shards

If I was doing it again I think I would skip the glass shards. They didn't really add to the overall look of the cake. I wanted them there to make it look more like the palace, but the cake was lovely without it.

I already had sandwich tins that were 20 cm. I managed to find two smaller ones, because I didn't want the cake to be massive. The top layer actually used a pie tin.

I used buttercream to sandwich the layers together and to spread on the cake before covering in the ready to roll fondant icing.

I briefly experimented with royal icing, but ran out of time to perfect it, so the piping on the cake was done with Dr Oetker's Designer Icing Pouch. They are great! They come with 4 piping nozzles. And one pouch did all the white piping on that cake.

And I added the snowflake shapes using white fondant icing and sticking them on by brushing water on them with a pastry brush.

The Frozen figures were bought off amazon. I didn't make them. However I will try modelling with fondant icing soon!

Bullyland Figures

Even if it wasn't the Frozen Palace, it was obviously a Frozen Cake. And Elizabeth was really happy with it and her friends were dying to try it.

Happy Birthday Elizabeth

What did you think of the Frozen cake? I'd love to hear your comments or suggestions.

Birthday Cakes

Cakes, Cakes, Cakes

I've been challenging myself to be creative when it comes to birthday cakes.
I've made some progress as you can see.

Elizabeth's 2nd birthday January 2012

Vanilla Layer Cake from Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery

Elizabeth's 3rd Birthday Cake, January 2013

Chocolate Layer Cake from the Primrose Bakery

My birthday, May 2013

same as above

Rebecca's 2nd Birthday, November 2013

This is Lorraine Pascale's "I can't believe you made that cake" from Baking Made Easy. It's a great cake, really yummy and looks fab. Elizabeth insisted I make it for her next birthday too. I now constantly see variations of it on the internet.

What I learned from Elizabeth's cake Jan 13, was to leave the smarties until serving. If you put them on the cake too far in advance the shells lose their crispiness.

My birthday, May 2014

Red Velvet Cake from Lorraine Pascale's Baking Made Easy. I think I made the medium cake. I did NOT use enough red colouring, so it was really just a chocolate cake.

This was my first attempt at using Fondant Icing. I got the ready to roll stuff! I didn't make the flowers.

Jeff's Birthday, October 2014

And, of course there's the Candy Cake I made for Jeff's birthday last month. It's funny because since then it seems that "surprise cakes" are the in-thing! I got my idea from a conversation with Elizabeth about pinatas, and thought it would be cool to combine the cake with Jeff's love of sweets.

Rebecca's 3rd Birthday, November 2014

Finally, last week's Mystery Machine Cake that I made for Rebecca's birthday.

I think I've made some progress!

Scooby Doo Mystery Machine

Scooby Doo Mystery Machine Cake

This year the girls have both really been into Scooby Doo. So when thinking about Rebecca's birthday cake, I came up with the idea of making a Mystery Machine cake. It seemed like the easiest Scooby Doo design to make.

I had pictures of the van which I drew and used to cut out templates for the decorations on the side of the cake.

I used two loaf tins to bake the cake, using the same sponge recipe as I used for the Candy Cake.

While that was baking and cooling, I started cutting out the designs for the sides of the cake using my templates and ready rolled and coloured fondant icing.

I sandwiched the cakes together with buttercream and covered all the cake with buttercream. Again I used the recipe used to make the Candy Cake.

I then covered the cake with a blue fondant icing, and used water and a pastry brush to add on all of the decorations.

It wasn't as neat as I would have liked, but I was pleased with the final results. More importantly, Rebecca loved it!

A couple of points that I had issues with.

* I don't know how to smooth down the sides of fondant icing. When you put it over the cake, there are always flaps and they end up making the cake look messy. I will research this more next time.

* Next time I will make the designs to stick onto the cake after the cake had it's main layer of fondant icing on it and add them as soon as they are ready. Because I made them in advance they were hard and some of them broke when I picked them up.

Candy Cake

I started thinking about having a Pinata type cake for Jeff's birthday after a conversation with Elizabeth about what Pinatas were. When I looked on the internet at other cakes like this, most seemed to cook the cakes in normal cake tins and hollow out the middle. I thought they often looked a bit messy once you cut into them.

On a recent shopping trip Jeff pointed out a cake tin where bakes the cake with a hollowed out shape of a heart in the middle to fill with mouse or ice cream or a different cake. He had seen it being used on Nerdy Nummies. I thought this would do the trick. So I ordered this one from amazon.

I also googled some images of cakes to get ideas for decorating the outside of the cake. I liked the idea of having sweeties on the outside but I didn't want it to be over the top, or too like the "I can't believe you made that cake".

And this is what I ended up with:

I had to redo my cake because there was not enough cake mixture to rise above the shape of the heart inside. And second time round I ran out of eggs, so I have a mixture of large and medium eggs. But the cake was really fluffy and moist that I might do the same next time!

Cake Ingredients:

• 375g soft unsalted butter
• 375g caster sugar
• 3 large eggs, 3 medium eggs, one egg yolk (6 large eggs will probably do)
• 375g SR flour
• 2 tsp of baking powder
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 3/4 tbsp milk

Method:

• Preheat oven to 160 degrees
• Grease the two baking trays
• Mix all the ingredients except the milk together in the food mixer. I mixed them for about 5 minutes until the mixture was fluffy and airy. Then I slowly added milk until the mixture was a soft drooping consistency.
• Add the mixture to the tins so that they cover the shape of the heart.
• Cook till it golden and the sponge springs back when touched. About 25-30 minutes.
• Leave them in the tins for a few minutes before popping them out of the tins and placing on a cooling wire.

When they cooled down I added sweets to the bottom layer of the cake. I used Haribo Starmix and some Tesco Jelly Beans. They had to be raised above the level of the cake because of the top half of the heart. I did not add enough. I felt that I could have tried to put a lot more in.

I would have liked there to have been more of a spilling out effect when the cake was cut. There probably would have been had there just been the jelly beans inside. Or if I had gone with smarties or skittles or something.

When served it didn't look very elegant because of the hole. But the taste made up for that.

Then I glazed the cake with some runny apricot jam, because I know that can be good for keeping the cake from crumbling when you add the icing.

Vanilla Buttercream Icing Ingredients (from Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery)

• 110g soft butter
• 60ml semi-skimmed milk
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 500g icing sugar

Method

• Mix butter, milk, vanilla extract and half the icing sugar together until the mixture is smooth. Then gradually add in the rest of the icing sugar.

I spread half the buttercream icing onto the cake. Then put it in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

Then I spread the other half on.

I pressed skittles around the outside and put lolly pops on the top. Of course the lolly pops sang into the hollow of the heart, so more sweets inside would probably have given them more resistance then they could have stood up a little higher. But overall I was very pleased with the result. So was Jeff. And the girls actually went "wow" when they saw it.