Little Charley Bear Cake

As my little girl stated approaching two (ok, as soon as she passed one ;)) I started thinking of what sort of cake we could do for birthday number 2.

A couple of months before she was obsessed with Little Charley Bear from cbeebies, so I started researching how I could do a Charley cake. Almost straight away I found the Wilton 3D teddy bear cake pan, but wasn't willing to buy it, an wa pleasantly surprised I could hire it for just £2 from my local cake supplies shop, Munchkins Cakes!

So with this booked I started looking at recipes for the cake itself. The instructions are American, and so say to use a packet of sponge mix and a packet of pound cake mix! After a little research it seemed that I needed to make quite a dense cake to hold the weight, so a pound or Madeira cake. I chose this recipe,and decided to make a double batch. This was barely enough to fill the outside, let alone the inner core, so if you attempt it with this recipe try tripling it!

After collecting the tin, I got to work. After applying cake release and attaching the pieces of the tin together with the clips, I used foil around the joins to prevent leakage. Not a bit of mixture got out!

I filled the tin with 6 cups of mixture as suggested, but felt it wasn't enough so put another one in (the rest of the mixture) and left the core empty. This just about filled it when cooked, but a little more would have been perfect.

I followed the instructions exactly when it came out of the oven, and it was almost perfect. Just a small part of the face stuck, and this was easily eased out and stuck on afterwards.

Once cool I stuffed him with a foil core and painted him with apricot jam to seal and hopefully help the buttercream stick.

I used a grass tip (like a wilton 233) to pipe buttercream fur, in a Little charley bear pattern, and fondant for the eyes and nose. It took a couple of rest breaks as the piping is quite hard going, and the nozzle kept getting blocked, or air trapped, and jamming.

I was pleased with the result and it cut well. I cut his back off first to keep his cute face intact for as long as possible! The cake tasted good, and wasn't too dry.

Good luck if you decide to attempt him, it isn't too hard to do!

Birthday cake #1

I'm making a special cake for my little ones party at the weekend, but couldn't let the day itself go by without a cake! She's a little chocoholic so it had to be a good time to try Jo Wheatley's chocolate birthday cake recipe from 'A Passion for Baking'.
And had a little practice of teddy bear fur ready for the main cake too.

The cake is really tasty but a little crumbly, but I did freeze it and this is really only noticeable when the little one eats it!

Wrapped present cake

Another Ruth Clemens inspired cake, for my mum this time. I found the marbling didn't work as well as I hoped, but it looked good once done.
The main thing I should have done is make sure I had plenty of fondant, as when you roll it too thin it's a nightmare to work with!

Daddy's Birthday cake

This cake was for my lovely husband's birthday while we were on holiday, so had to be 'manly' but also travel well! The cake itself was a fruit cake I made months earlier from a Delia kit which was reduced after Christmas, which turned out well despite my over cooking it (forgot all about it and went out!)

The design was from the book by Ruth Clemens "The Busy Girl's Guide to Cake Decorating", and worked out well.

Christmas cake 2011

I decided to try a little fondant modelling on this cake, and followed some instructions online (I'm sorry I don't know where from) to create these cute little penguins. I made some cupcakes first as a practice run and loved how they turned out so made two big penguins for the cake.

Duplo first birthday cake

Creating my daughter's first birthday cake took a lot of thinking about. I wanted to use the top tier of our wedding cake I had kept (as we hadn't had a Christening) but also needed to have  fairly plain sponge cake so the birthday girl could eat some! 

So one of the bricks is the fruit cake, and two are layered sponge with buttercream and jam.

I'm fairly pleased with it, as it's the first time I've done anything much with fondant.