I don’t know if you noticed from any of my recent posts, but I love making cakes… Well, one seriously unfortunate side effect of what I will be calling research and development, searching for that perfect recipe, means that you make a lot of cake to test and quality control. Also means about 6 months down the line your hips start swaying about when you walk in a way they never have before and the clothes that have fitted you since you were in your teens all of a sudden seem to have a problem going over said hips. Now this isn’t a whine that I’m fat or a rant about how everyone should be on a diet at all times or any of that rubbish. I just messed with the balance. I’ve always looked and mainly weighed that same since I hit my teens, a weird little fact that saw me fully able to be served alcohol in the off licence at 13 with nothing more than a smile for ID and since the tightening of the drinking laws, another 13 years later, I’m getting ID’ed for a bottle of red and a lighter in Sainsburys. It’s always the body I’ve lived in. Well now I have cakes in my freezer on constant rotation and a car to drive me to KFC whenever I fancy it, which is a lot. A LOT. I’ve also got to the stage where my body is craving apples instead of chocolate so I must have really done it some damage in the last year and I’m getting lazy, something I never thought I’d be. So I got veggy box. Continue reading
I braved the North Circular and all I got was this PME Apron! My Diploma Course and more cakes.
13/05/2013Yeah yeah, I know, I come back and then disappear again for weeks. Sorry. Again. I have been busy though, I’ve been baking and making and even compiling some blog posts that clearly haven’t made it to the public domain but they’re lurking, they are lurking. Most exciting I started the PME Professional Diploma in Sugarpaste. That dream of being able to boast I am a certified Master of Cake is well on its way! I seem to have made so many cakes recently that I actually haven’t had time to get photos of all of them(translation, got to the end of them after an all nighter and proceeded to ignore them). Me and he hit our 3 year anniversary which I have to admit was educational, I got to learn that you have to be compromising in a relationship and trust the other half knows what they are doing despite completely differing opinions (yes babe, I know you read this. No this isn’t meant to be a dig, just a subtle reminder I am always right. Always xxx). Moving on then.
So the course then, well, I live on the outskirts of West London and I have to drag my poor little Betty (my 18 yr old Peugeot 106, not a euphemism for whatever went through your brain just then) over to Enfield in North London. For any of you that don’t know London roads and think it doesn’t seem far, it takes about an hour in London traffic, with London drivers, through London, past a lot of traffic lights, at 8am on a Saturday morning. Actually, it’s not too bad, its early so the roads are that ridiculous yet and I get to sing really loud for an hour without deafening anyone else and Mr navigation doesn’t seem to mind so far. It’s actually at the PME headquarters, the course itself is a five-week course that runs between half 9 and 3pm and is advertised as not for beginners. I have to admit that I was nervous to start with but turns out, I’m not half as bad as I think I am! For anyone thinking of doing it, first lesson we went over skills like covering a board in sugarpaste, covering a dummy the ‘proper’ way, using impression mats/pins, we cut out a section of sugarpaste and replaced it with another colour and putting sugarpaste borders around the cake. All in all it wasn’t anything I hadn’t done before and managed ok bar one incident where I completely lost all control over my hands and couldn’t cover the damn cake, I re rolled that paste out 3 times before I was happy with it but in the end it looked good. I was expecting it to be very fast paced and except for my little episode, I seem to be one of the first in the class to finish each task. Maybe it is fast but if you are going to take this course and have covered the basics anyway, I think you’re be fine although I did get the impression the Instructor wanted things moving a bit quicker. Like I said, we were shown the ‘right’ way to do things and although I did struggle with covering the cake, it was because my way is different because its what I find easier but it’s always good to know the standard. We also learned the 101 uses for the creative plaque cutters (slight exaggeration there), how to make fabric effect flowers and very briefly covered use of colour but only how to use a colour wheel and to be fair, what was more to say on the matter!
This week, we had a different tutor and the theme was novelty cakes. We had the option to do a pram along with the Instructor or a handbag, being a wimp I chose to cake along with Tony (the Instructor), you know, so I didn’t miss any of the things we had to use. We started out carving and shaping the cake, covering it with its many weird angles and corners and then decorating it with textured pieces of sugarpaste, frills and a weird hand modelled baby that ended up looking like the cigar smoking, arse slapping, foul-mouthed baby from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, well mine did and you have no idea how tempted I was to make a mini cigar and big ol’ black angry eyebrows for that baby! We did discuss very briefly about setting up a business in terms of insurance, health and hygiene certificates and paperwork/contracts when it comes to customers although it did seem to come down to mostly ‘Ask your local council’. This course is expensive, the course itself is just under £200 and they send you out a course list of equipment 2 pages long (and yes, they do know the difference between non PME tools… slightly embarrassing seeing as most of my stuff came from Ebay though you really can tell the difference in quality when the real thing is next to the knock offs). My bank account has taken a serious beating and everyone, although very friendly, seems to just want to get on with it (which I prefer to be honest) so it does feel like you are on a serious course actually learning and you do, for instance, the most memorable fun-filled fact that sticks in my mind is that you shouldn’t use cornflour to roll out sugarpaste that’s going to cover a cake directly because it can react with the ingredients in the cake and literally explode… LITERALLY explode. That (forgive the pun) blows my mind! Lets see public liability insurance cover that one! HA!
Anyway, putting these skills to good use, these are some of the cakes I’ve made recently. The first one is this Fiat 126 or what was meant to be a Fiat 126. So Steve at work comes up to me and asked if I can do a cake to give to his girlfriend the following week, no problem, he wants a nice elegant cake and I can’t wait to do it. The next day, he asked can I do a Fiat instead because she is Polish and they all drive them over there and yes, he would rather a vaguely racist novelty car instead of an elegant and romantic cake. Yeah, I thought that too but apparently she loved it, though I only have his word for that! First ever carved cake though and Steve’s girlfriend actually recognised what it was meant to be straight away so it’s not all bad.
Next is Riley’s first birthday cake. His dad is an Arsenal fan and with the amount of people expected to turn up the day of Riley’s party, Laura (his mummy) and I figured it was best to go for a chocolate cake and a separate vanilla cake, then an extra 3″ cake for Riley to smash-up himself, and 12 cupcakes with “R” toppers and finally another cake for Billy (his Daddy) because his birthday was the week after. Remember I said about the all nighter, well these are the fruits so to speak so this was the only one I got a picture of it (not sure why it’s fuzzy, I’ll get a photo man next time 
) and it doesn’t even show the awesome (if I do say so myself) hand painted Arsenal badge on the side, Boo. However the 3″ cake was just plain buttercream with a piped swirl on top and Billy’s cake was a WWE wrestling ring complete with uncooked spaghetti for the ring’s ropes. It also had a little model of what was meant to be John Cena but, well we all know my modelling skills have some fine tuning needed.
After that was this little round of chocolatey goodness for Jen, well not Jen herself but her nephew, Cameron which along with the football pattern on Riley’s ’1′, reminded me again that cutters are good things to have, cutting individual squares and hexagons are a pain in the proverbial and the literal. Ah well, it’s nice to have the freedom to make any cake design I like for the moment, the second I set up a business and start selling, it’s copyright and all that. At least I can make my happy things for now.
This one was for today, Billy’s actual birthday, it’s a 5″ mini cake for just Billy, Laura and of course, Riley. Again, fuzzy picture but I swear I’m getting a new camera soon, and by camera I mean phone that I take pics with… Sorry cyberworld. Moving on, I did get to use some of what I learned in the clean and simple Craftsy course and got to use modelling chocolate for the first time. That was new, anyway that’s a lot of cake in 3 weeks!
And I really did get a PME apron, just in case you were wondering and as always, please ignore the mess =]
In the mountains in Kerry, Ireland
Yeah… Sorry about that! Been busy, I won’t bore you with all of it but most of it is to do with cake, as if there is anything better than obsessing about cake. I also go to see my lovely family in law when me and he went to Ireland for a week, I have to mention it because look, how amazing is that view! Also I didn’t have to climb this mountain this time in trainers when it was practically a bog, this time we drove up and it was lovely. Moral of the story? If its been raining for 3 months solid (it’s Ireland who am I kidding it’s always raining), when climbing a mountain, stay on the path because the rest is bog, you will lose your shoes, sink to the point you may be afraid you may be stuck up there for the rest of your life and when you do finally make it back down (hoooooooours later) you have to walk along the roads on a lovely day past everyone you meet up to your waist in mud, literally. Happy days. Continue reading
O
k so ‘Learning Curve’ is my way of saying Disaster Craig Revel Horword style. I was asked to do a cake about a month ago by a friend for her niece’s daughter’s second birthday (yeah, I think that’s right) and boy was I looking forward to this one. A 12″ cake with a children’s tv programme as the theme with this Upsy Daisy character but bar that, no design specifics. I had the perfect cake idea for the ‘slice’ idea and even got the Craftsy course by Colette Peters who, as if by magic, was making cakes with slices out! I spent weeks doodling sketches, looking for pictures and working out colour schemes and describing my ideas at least 5 times a night to Mr P (yes, he has perfected the ‘nod at the appropriate place without having to listen’ technique, you’re welcome baby) and even wrote a to do list an A4 page long with dates and time slots for each day. You hear that, for a love of list writing that borders on fetish, that’s like the porn of the ‘To Do’ world. Big. Smug. Grin. Continue reading
Ingredients:
The Stew:
- Cubed Beef
- Onion chopped however you like
- Garlic chopped/minced, what ever takes your fancy
- Carrots (between 1 to 3)
- Potatoes (between 1 to 3)
- Beef stock (cubes are totally fine)
- Herbs (I like rosemary an thyme)
- Salt and Pepper with any other veg/meat/herbs/spices you fancy.
The Dumplings:
- 100g flour, I like self-raising
- 50g suet or half the amount of flour used
- Herbs if you like, I use rosemary and thyme like in the stew
- few drops of water
When I started this blog, with the exception of being somewhere I could talk about cake for hours without people around me falling asleep mid-rant, I really wanted to properly learn and document how to cook but as simply and easily as possible with minimum effort, but also without fancy tools or specialist equipment. I mean I’ve only this year upgraded my rolling-pin to a proper wooden one rather than a labeless wine bottle! Soooo, slow cookers then. If you don’t have one fine, I pretty sure there’s nothing you can cook in the slow cooker that you can’t do in an oven but as the temperature drops, I find my love affair with it rekindled. For aaaaaaaaaaages, my slow cooker was the only bit of ‘kit’ I had and genuinely couldn’t get it to create anything resembling edible so it spent a few years under my bed taking up valuable storage space. My family (and a fair few friends) swear by them and I’m often regaled by tales of how my uncle’s slow cooker nursed him back to health after breaking his leg and living alone, miles from any family members who could help or stand by a cooker for more than a minute or so to make dinner. Continue reading
I got a request for a tutorial for the high-waisted skirt I posted a couple weeks ago... So here is my awesomely drawn tutorial.
You will need:
fabric for the skirt. I got my ombre effect fabric because (shh) the fabric was being used as curtains. The part that the sun faded is the ombre.
Thread
interfacing
a 7" zipper…
