Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake

I've never made carrot cake before, which is crazy because I love carrot cake! So I decided I would make one for my birthday, which is still ages away but I thought I should do some recipe testing before hand. I had envisioned working my way through several recipes giving marks out of ten etc. But I think I'm in love with this one! I cannot stop thinking about it. I want more! It is moist and tasty and the icing is light and fluffy.

The Cake

I followed the recipe from Lorraine Pascale's Baking Made Easy although I didn't want a big cake, so I reduced the quantities by two thirds to just make one of the three layers she has pictured. Which was a perfect amount. These are the quantities I used:

• 175ml vegetable oil
• 3 eggs
• 175g soft dark brown sugar
• 140g carrots peeled and grated
• grated zest of one orange
• 175g self raising flour
• pinch of salt
• 1 tsp bicarb of soda
• 1tsp mixed spice
• 1/2tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180°C - I had my fan assisted oven on at 165°. Prepare a 23cm/9in round tin by oiling the insides and lining the bases with baking paper.

Put the oil, sugar, carrots and orange zest in a large bowl and mix with a wooden spoon.

Mix the flour, salt, bicarb of soda and mixed spice together then sift into the bowl.

Add the vanilla and lightly mix everything together until the mixture is uniform but still soft and runny. Pour it into the tin and bake for about 40-45 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Leave it to cool for 5 minutes then turn it out onto a wire rack and peel off the paper.

The Icing

I basically followed the recipe for cream cheese buttercream in Karen Sullivan's Step by step cake decorating book. Again I changed the quantities for my own purposes.

• 65g unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2tsp vanilla extract
• 200g icing sugar
• 90g cream cheese

Cream the butter and vanilla together with an electric whisk. Add half of the icing sugar, beat well, then add the other half and beat it again.

Add the cream cheese, a little at a time, beating vigorously until fluffy.

The spread it over the cake and enjoy!

If you tried the carrot cake, let me know what you think. Leave a comment below.
Also, I'm always looking for new ideas for baking/cooking, if you have any suggestions, leave a comment!

Recipe Recommendation Lemon and Raspberry Cake

Made this thanks to @RichardPBurr . Looking forward to eating it after tea. #MothersDay pic.twitter.com/KV39tL9ye2

— Fiona (@ChosenMum) March 15, 2015

I'm sending you elsewhere for this week's update. I follow Richard Burr on twitter. He was a finalist (and my favourite) in the last series of Great British Bake Off. He posted a link on twitter for a fantastic cake to make for Mother's Day. It's a lemon sponge cake with raspberry buttercream icing.

Here's the link: Mother's Day Recipe.

If I was to make it again I would be tempted to use at least one less lemon and I would only make about two thirds of the quantity of icing, because I had enough left over for half a dozen cupcakes.

I found that the lemon in the sponge overpowered the cake and I could not taste the raspberry in the icing.

But it was a gorgeous cake overall and I went back for seconds (and thirds!)

I was delighted to be included in Richard's tweet later in the day about lots of people making his cake.

Chuffed to bits with how many people made my #MothersDay cake this weekend. Go to http://t.co/5MvgwZAtOe for recipe 🍰 pic.twitter.com/8vhXANZrUu

— Richard Burr (@RichardPBurr) March 15, 2015

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.

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.