Congratulations William and Kate

Yep...I'm a royalist from way back, so I've been rather excited by all the wedding festivities this week. I couldn't let this wonderful occasion go without baking. On that note, this is the cake I baked to eat during the wedding:

Pizza Dough

I love pizza. I especially love the old-school home made spaghetti and cheese pizzas. You know... the ones that Mum used to make when you were a kid.

I occasionally make home made pizza for my family, but I've never really like the scone dough type base that I normally use. So tonight I thought I would try to make a proper pizza base - using yeast (a product that has always scared me!).

Here is the result:

Yummy much?

The toppings included spaghetti, onion, ham, sausage, corn, herbs, pineapple, tomato and cheese. I quite liked the yeast product that I used. It comes in boxes of 12 handy sachets, so no measuring required.

The recipe I used was found here. I found the recipe a bit complicated to follow, but once I sorted out which parts were important, it was pretty easy.

My First Wedding Cake

A few months ago one of my friends approached me about making a wedding cake for her son and future daughter in law. I was a bit nervous about taking on this project, but it's something I've wanted to have a go at for a while now.

The theme was "Ivory, royal blue, and lilies". The bride emailed me this diagram of the cake that they had designed:

The first thing I needed to do was figure out how to make lilies. Not an easy task, and led to a little bit of frustration. I managed to find a tutorial online, and with a bit of fiddling around I came up with this:

I wasn't too sure how big the tins needed to be, but after chatting with some of my cakey friends I decided to use 12, 10, 8, and 6 inch tins. I was pleased with those sizes. The pans looked well proportioned when I stacked them on top of each other.

I also had to learn the ins and outs of stacking cakes. I realised that you need to support each tier of the cakes using cake cards, and dowels for support. If you don't do that, the cake will fall, or at the very least the icing will buckle.

Anyways, I had to change the design a little bit to make it look ok, but here is the final product:

In the venue they had blue table runners that matched the blue on the cake, so it looked nice once it was set up (and yes it was a tad difficult to transport to the venue + up a flight of steps!)

I haven't talked to the bride yet, but apparently they loved the cake, and it tasted good too. And as a bonus a number of guests also commented that they liked the cake and wanted to know who made it. So hopefully I may get to make some more cakes in the future.