Well, it's been a while since I've been able to hop along to my little blog. We've been SOOOOOOOO busy! This bank holiday Monday we had Baby R's Blessing Ceremony in the garden, with our friends and family present to celebrate his arrival and officially name him. It was a really fantastic day. I'll do a post just about that later in the week, when I have a bit of time.
However, this post is just about one part of the epic preparations - THE CAKE. I had big plans for this cake. I'd never made a tiered cake before, but I found some really lovely ideas on Pinterest and I had a clear picture in my head of what I wanted to create.
So on Saturday, Rachel and I got baking. We made a vanilla sponge...
...and a chocolate sponge...
Once the Baby R in question was safely tucked into his cot that evening, we prepared to commence operation ice-that-cake. However, when we stacked up the two sponges, the effect was less than breath-taking. To be honest, it looked puny. Pathetic, you might say. So instead of operation ice-that-cake we carried out operation emergency-baking-session and made two MORE sponges. Thank heavens we'd bought 12 eggs!
The plus side of this was that my Mum was on-hand to supervise the entire ice-that-cake operation on Sunday. We rustled up some butter icing and layered the 6" vanilla sponges. Mmmmm...
Then we added some Nutella to the icing to create chocolate icing for the 10" chocolate sponges. I will confess that I'm slightly faking my joy in this photograph. Have you ever baked and iced an entire cake, knowing that you can't eat more than one crumb? It's depressing. I had to stand well back when I made the icing in case I inhaled the sugar, whereas usually I play the suck-the-sweet-air game. Putting the cake-mixy bowl straight into the washing up bowl without so much as one lick made me want to weep. It was a crime against cake mix! Stupid anti-yeast diet. Grumble grumble.
I enjoyed watching the Nutella swirl into the icing, even though I had to ask other people to test it to see if it was chocolatey enough.
Mum took over when it came to putting the icing on the sponge, with her wet-knife technique to prevent the icing from tearing the sponge apart.
Then there was the nerve-wracking lift and placement of the top layer:
Followed by the liberal application of apricot jam. Splish, splosh!
Then some very theraputic icing stroking. To smooth it into place, you understand. It's not some weird form of sugar worship or anything.
I have to confess that I was rather proud of how neat and tidy the icing looked. See? PROUD! (That's sign language for proud I'm doing there... not a monkey impression.)
Finally we had arrived at the really fun part. Playing with COLOURS! Mum had kindly got us some coloured icing, and had chosen six colours that are really MY colours. To the extent that, when I'd pulled three colours out of the bag (blue, teal and red) I was able to predict the next three! So I was keen as mustard to get playing with them.
Very accurate playing. Rolling pin. Ruler. Cheese knife. Careful, careful cutting.
Soon we had a whole host of colourful stripes waiting...
...to be smeared with glue...
...and placed onto the sponge, in a suitably random arrangement!
Mini ta-da moment:
I love this action shot. The moment where the top layer met the bottom layer! It looks like Mum threw it from afar, but she did place it down quite carefully.
Next we needed bottle tops and a pastry cutter to make circles of various sizes. If it looks like I'd stopped pulling my weight by this point, its because...
...I had a wriggly baby on my lap, fighting for control of the camera.
Later, I managed to pass said wriggling infant onto his grandmother so that I could enjoy the final touches, however. This involved printing the six letters of Baby R's name and choosing an order for the six icing colours.
Then there was some careful drawing around to create the letters.
Are you ready for it?
Here comes the top shot!!
TA-DAAAA!!!
For my first venture into tiered cake construction AND fondant icing, I am extremely proud. I had to take LOTS of photos in the few hours we had together, before we had to cruelly hack it into pieces to be eaten. That was a bit traumatic for me.