I'm going to admit, I have no idea how my friend and I got into making cakes; I assume it just started out (like many other times) as a joke or a simple idea which escalated dramatically reasonably quickly.
All I remember is that the two cakes below were some of the first ones we made. My parents made an interesting point the other day; That I can't draw pretty much anything more than stick figures, but things like these I seem to do quite well with. Decorating cakes, I suppose, is just a natural progression from carving pumpkins.
The cake to the Left is a Cake-rendition of the league of legends logo, If I remember rightly we just made a simple jam-Victoria sponge and iced a circle on top. It was for our friends birthday since we all played quite a lot of LoL at the time. it turned out quite well considering we had no idea what we were doing; main problems were the thickness of the icing (must have been nearly an inch thick in some places) and the fact it was just the top.
The cake to the right was a chocolate cake, I don't think we had any occasion to make it for, we just had some free time and quite enjoyed making the one before it. It was around the time Portal 2 came out, so we put 2 and 2 together and came up with a Portal Cube cake.This was MUCH harder than the last one we did because of the layering of the pieces, not only were there different, more complicated shapes, but also the layers of the portal cube meant we had to layer everything in the right order to get the bumps in the right places without it dipping and bending the layers on top. for instance the blue parts are strips, and there are invisible blue squares to hold up the rest of the cake in the corners.
I can't remember if there was an occasion for the above cake or not, I assume there wasn't. We did a bit more experimenting this time though, instead of baking a cake from scratch, we bought one of those packet mixes; it was red velvet chocolate which was great. We also made our own peppermint butter icing, which was also delicious. As for the icing, I think we tried to draw around things as much as possible so that everything was reasonably even. we made everything a bit modular as well, such as the feathers. It worked out a lot better and cleaner than we expected. We still didn't understand the concept or how to ice cakes down the side as well as on top, it seemed a little beyond our capabilities really.
This cake was delicious. I mean it's personal preference, but I personally love lemon curd/lemon, so this was amazing. I think we also added in lemon to the icing as well. I'm not sure what brought around Spongebob, I think we were just trying to find something yellow to go with the cake, but I'm not sure. I think we might of iced the whole cake on this one; I really liked the outcome, the nose was very hard to get right.. but we did the best we could. I think we did quite well with the colours of this one as well, becouse at this stage we were still using regular food colouring in red yellow and blue, which meant if we wanted a colour which wasn't one of those three we had to do a lot of mixing to try and get a colour we wanted, such as the red mouth which had black mixed with it.
This monstrosity was a step too far out of our comfort zone; it didn't turn out too badly, but it wasn't the best we've done. This was actually supposed to be a mushroom from league of legends. This was also our first attempt at carving a cake too. We decided we needed a more dense cake to carve, so we went with a fruit cake. The problem we found with the fruit cake is that it was really heavy, I mean heaviness comes with density but it was just a bit too heavy. the base was a spicy fruit cake which was delicious but after a while it just squashed and became almost nothing underneath the weight of the top part of the cake. Another problem we had with this cake was the icing, we were relativity new to icing but our job wasn't made any easier by the colours we were using; you have to use a lot of colouring with the icing to get the colour you need, which makes the icing wet and nasty to work with. we ended up using a lot of toothpicks to keep everything in place and it just felt a bit like we had failed and were cheating.
I like baking and decorating cakes, even without an occasion; its always a challenge and almost always results in us learning something. It's great doing it with a friend because each person can fit different parts of the puzzle and abuse each-other about mistakes and all sorts. Another bonus is of course, being able to eat delicious cakes.
Stay tuned for more cakes!
No comments:
Post a Comment