Ethan's Birthday - An Occasion for Angry Bird 2.0

Ethan's Birthday in Jan 2012 - the first birthday of the year!!! 


Wanted to share with all the Angry Birds Cake 2.0.  Admittedly, this design was partially copied from an image on the internet, and I think its an improvement from my earlier attempt.  The stone wall was a bit of a pain to make, as individual stones of different sizes and shapes needed to be rolled, pressed in and stuck with edible glue.  


The bottom layer was Red Velvet Cake with chocolate fudge icing (it was served during a BBQ party so cream cheese would have been impractical).  The best Choc Fudge icing EVER is Nigella's - can be found on her website - easy to make and delicious as with all her other recipes.  The cake on the top layer with the piggies is banana cake with choc chips [Failsafe banana cake recipe : 250gms butter beaten with equal weight of sugar (although if you are icing the cake, sugar qtt should be halved) and equal weight of flour; 4 eggs]


Finished product as below.

I was reminded that there are ALWAYS 3 eggs....oops

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ETHAN!!

Christmas Cake 2011

This post is approx. 1 month late!!  


In addition to a good rich heavy fruit cake (still looking for that recipe), we think Christmas is the perfect time to make a red velvet cake.  So moist, red and Christmas-y, enough said. 


Most red velvet recipes found online require an insane amount of red food colouring (coupled with some cocoa powder).  But there were some who recommended beetroot in replacement of red food colouring for a more natural alternative.  Think 3 tbsp of red food colouring (even organic ones) is simply too much, dont you? Beetroot must be the way to go.   


The Christmas cake adventure began with the making of the cake toppers.  We decided on a simple theme of an angel watching over a small nativity set. Surprisingly, pretty easy to make. Lots of guides available through a search on google. The heads were put in by skewering it to a toothpick to ensure that they stay on.  I have found that the fondant figurines need to be kept in an airtight container and stored in a relatively cool area (not the fridge) or they will "wilt" quite quickly.  Had a bit of a disaster with the first few angels as the wings became so soft that we couldn't get them to stand at the requisite 45 degree angle.  The trick - toothpicks!

For the red-velvet cake, we used our tried and tested carrot cake recipe, but replaced the carrots with beetroot, which has been put through a food processor and turned to mush. The batter looks really lovely! Surprisingly, beetroot does not leave any strong flavours, actually it imparts no flavours on the cake at all. So a tablespoon of cocoa powder or some lemon juice should be added for better depth of flavour.  After several tries (and failure) in getting that deep red colour, we cheated and added 1/2 tsp each of red and pink food colouring anyway.  

Red velvet cake batter

The cake was iced with cream cheese icing and the finished product is as below.  Could have looked better actually - looks pretty amateur (well..). The cake itself was simply delectable! Very much like the texture of the carrot cake, it was surprisingly moist yet light.  Kept pretty well in the fridge too.  The children loved the cake toppers, unfortunately, and they were promptly beheaded and de-winged almost immediately (poor baby Jesus...). 

This is actually not the Christmas cake but the test product the week before.  In the excitement,
we all forgot to take a picture of the cutout of the actual cake.  

Blessed Belated Christmas!