Sunday bakes - 'Many happy returns' marzipan lace cakes

Goodness it’s been a while since I last posted, happy New Year to all!

So since I last posted I’ve gotten old(er), so I thought for this post I would put up my birthday cakes. They were just little ones that I made for my office, but I tried out my hydrangea flower designs and my new lace mats to decorate them.

I chose a mixture of cinnamon, and vanilla and marzipan flavours, just to keep it simple and focused on the decoration (I left it a little late, so only had an evening, to get these done). As I was a little short on time I used my oven to help speed up the lace-drying process. You can get the sugar lace dried enough to take out in an hour, but you have to keep a watchful eye on the temperature and how long they are in there, otherwise it will discolour or even burn.

Aside from a few small burning mishaps where I got distracted by bowl licking and forgot to keep an eye on my lace, it's very easy to make. You can buy the speciality icing sugar in most baking shops, or online and after mixing with water to make an elastic, gummy paste you use a palette knife (or just the biggest, smoothest flat knife you have, I’ve used a normal dinner knife before) to ‘plaster’ the silicon mould. It’s important that you fully fill the mould, or your lace will have gaps but also be aware that any left-over icing between the dips will stay there, so you might have to spend a little time making it smooth, or trimming any strays afterwards. If you are in no hurry you can leave this to dry out over a few hours, or overnight, but as I mentioned I was in a rush so used the oven for a little while it was heating and cooling and the top oven while I was baking the cakes.

The flowers again require some specialist icing, bit this time I bought it ready made. I’ve opened this pack already but you can re-seal and store in the freezer if you don’t want to use it all at once. I used a hydrangea cutter with built in texture, added the centre part and painting with a dust icing paint.

There are two different cakes, Cinnamon flavour and vanilla and marzipan flavour. They both use vanilla sponge basic mixture so I’ll just add in alternatives for each when I get to that bit of the recipe.

Ingredients

140g Caster Sugar

40g butter

120g self-raising flour

A few drops of vanilla essence, or a tablespoon of cinnamon

120ml milk

1 egg

A block of marzipan

A block of fondant icing

Icing

250g Icing sugar

80g Stork spread
25ml milk

2tsp Cinnamon jam
1tbsp Ground Cinnamon

Method

Cream the butter and sugar together until it’s as fluffy as you can get, this will be a little crumbly. Add the egg, essence (or cinnamon) and whisk up before slowly adding the flour, sifting through a sieve. Add the milk little by little to avoid lumps and whisk thoroughly before spooning into cake cases and baking for 20 minutes at about 180.

Ice with your preferred icing, I have chosen cinnamon butter cream with a small splodge of cinnamon jam for the cinnamon cakes and a layer or marzipan and then fondant icing for the vanilla and marzipan cakes, this is mostly to give a good surface for the lace.

Take these into work to thank everyone for being kind as you age and to buy you favours for the next year.

Sunday bakes – Sugar Peony cake

As I mentioned on Friday, this year for Mum’s birthday we went big. This included her birthday cake. I decided to take the opportunity to try out my new sugar craft tools and have a first attempt at a sugar peony.

I chose a set of 4 individual peony petal cutters and a universal petal veiner.

I love the open coral peonies so I wanted my sugar peony to have this colouring. The general consensus on the web was that the dust paint was by far the best for this kind of work. I used a beige sugar paste as my base because the colour was the closest to the lighter end of the colour I wanted. 

I started with three small pea-sized balls of paste that were then rolled in my hand into an elongated teardrop shape and scored three times to the tip. I took some 28 gauge craft wire with a small loop in the end, dipped in the edible glue and fixed the paste onto the end. 

Once the centre pieces were dried I used a flat-tipped brush and painted the base of each with moss green, fading into blossom pink.

I grouped the pre-made stamen thread into three bundles and using the wire I spaced them around the dried and painted centre pieces splaying them out evenly with my fingers. 

Now the centre was ready I started work on the petals.

I used the second largest cutter and cut 10 petals out of the paste, which had rolled to about 1.5mm thickness.

Use the ball tool to give texture and to thin the edges even more.

I had a lot of trouble at first because the petals kept sticking to the mat so I started using cling film under the petals which seemed to help.

I had cut off some sections of tin foil and used my thumb shape to create mini cup shapes for the petals to rest and dry in. This gave them their closed shape. After working out the edges in circular movements, thinning the petals using the ball tool, I secured each petal on the end of a piece of wire using the same method as the centre pieces. I then curved them each slightly and placed them into the foil to dry. 

I repeated this for the 10 larger petals and left them to dry overnight.

After all the petals had dried I used the wide-tipped brush and painted the base of the petal in yellow, brushing upwards and then blended in the dusky pink finishing in a light coral.

Once all the petals were painted I began to add the petals to the centre group. Before I added each petal I bent the wire back just under the paste so the petal was tilted back at about a 45 degree angle. The first layer of petals were 5 of the smaller petals. 

The subsequent layers were offset and the wire secured together using tape. Ideally this would be florist tape but, like a fool, I forgot to order some so I made do with some microfiber dressing tape. Once all the petals were in place I tweaked the way they sat slightly until I was happy with how they looked and the cake topper was finished!