Retro Baking - Ginger Loaf

I remember my grandmother occasionally making ginger loaf, and I've always been keen to give it a try myself. I found it to be really soft and cakey, yet not too crumbly. I doubled the recipe and split it between my two tins, but if I was repeating the recipe (which I will). I would double the recipe and only put it in one tin because they looked a little flat because my tins are quite large.

I used this recipe from the Chelsea Sugar website:

Ingredients

50g butter
1 Tbsp Chelsea Golden Syrup
1 egg
1/2 cup Chelsea Soft Brown Sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ginger spice
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup milk

Method

In a large microwave-proof bowl or saucepan, melt the butter and Chelsea golden syrup together.
Add egg and sugar, mix well, then add all other dry ingredients except the soda.
Mix the soda with the milk and stir in. Pour into a baking paper-lined loaf tin and cook at 190°C for 30 - 40 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack, slice and butter when cool.

Sesame Street Cake

And for my second project this past week I decorated this cake for my precious godson, Andrew who turned 1 last week.

The top tier is actually a dummy tier. And the bottom tier made from a layer of strawberry cake (made by Andrew's Mum), and a chocolate layer (made by Andrew's Dad). So all I needed to do on this one was construct it, ice it, and make the little figures. Hope you can tell what they are all supposed to be! (I think it you click on the photo it should enlarge if you want a closer look!)

And this is the cake once cut... it reminds me of that Neapolitan ice cream that you can buy.

Happy birthday little Andrew... you're an awesome wee guy!

Hot rod Cake

This was the first project of the weekend... my task was to create a hot rod cake. I was given the following two photos to work from.

And this is what I came up with:

For this car I decided to try out a brand of fondant called Satin Ice. Basically everything on the car that is black is Satin Ice. I liked that it came in a little plastic tub. I liked that it seems a but more robust than other fondants I have used. It had a slight vanilla taste to it which was quite nice. It is a bit more expensive I think than other brands I have used, but I think it's a good product for extra special projects.

I also brought a little pot of silver paint which looked really effective on the "metal" parts of the cake.

The recipient of the cake seemed really pleased with it and was already taking photos for facebook before I had left from dropping it off.

White Cake Mix

Well I must first apologise for not blogging for a while. I have been busy putting on a special party for my wee man who turned 1. He had an under the sea party. I think he enjoyed himself!

On that note I present... the cake!

The top tier was my normal rich chocolate cake that I have used for most of the birthday cakes I have made so far. The bottom tier is made with a white cake mix I purchased from kiwicakes. It's a special cake mix that contains no butter or egg yolks, so it is much whiter than the usual vanilla cake you see. For a cake mix I was quite pleased with it. It was moist and soft, and had quite a subtle taste to it. I think it would be nice in a wedding cake or other formal cakes that have white icing on them.

I made the piece of cake in the picture into a little turtle "smash" cake... which eventually ended up like this: