Party food: Teddy Bear Biscuits

Although the Little Charley Bear birthday cake was the main baking I undertook for little one's birthday, I did work on some other little treats for the party guests.

One which will be a definite favourite for years to come has to be Jo Wheatley's Iced Biscuits. The dough is really easy to work with, and the biscuits come out not too sweet: perfect for icing.

I followed the recipe up the the point where you freeze the shaped biscuits for a short time, and open froze on silicon paper (from Lakeland, a must have in my kitchen!) before popping in a freezer bag until the day before.

The best thing about these is my little girl could help cut them out in to bears and put them on the tray, as the dough is really easy to handle.

I can see this recipe coming out for a different themed party every year, as well as when I have Jo's cookbook put on my lap with the order to: "Mummy Cook!"

Party food: Cheesy Feet!

I had these cheese biscuits at a friend's house for her 2 year old's party about 6 months ago. A few weeks ago my Mother in Law gave me some foot cutters so I knew I had to make these for the party.

I was surprised (I don't know why) that they were from a Nigella recipe.

They are really easy to make, even for a hot-handed pastry killer like myself, as they are all done in the magimix. I even grated the cheese with it first, then used the mixer to bring it together.

The first batch I made were fantastic, and really reminded me of mini cheddars. The 2nd batch puffed up a but too much, but this was probably me measuring the baking powder wrong, or the fact the dough sat in the fridge for a few days.

Do leave a comment if you have any ideas why they puffed up!

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!

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.