Apples & Oats

A delicious home made apple & porridge oat muffin

Carrot Cake

It was recently my dad's birthday and him being a keen gardener I decided to make him a carrot-shaped carrot cake, complete with carrot root fly. My second ever attempt with fondant icing - which came out much better than my 1st go. I made the carrot cake using a muffin recipe from this Cupcakes & Muffins book, though minus the walnuts because they remind me of brains and I don't like the taste. While the cake was cooking I made a very easy version of fondant icing by chucking some icing sugar and egg whites in a bowl, mixing them together then adding some glycerin. To make the orange part I put Wilton Icing Color Orange in the icing and kneaded it in until I got the colour I wanted. For the green i used Wilton Leaf Green Colouring. - I like using the Wilton brand. It colours well and doesn't have a taste.
The first time I rolled out fondant icing it kept sticking to the rolling pin and the chopping board I was rolling it on. A friend suggested using clingfilm, I didn't have any to hand so used greaseproof paper with good results. After a bit of fiddling getting the fondant onto the cake, I used a baking wheel roller to make the leaf like fronds at the top of the carrot then dusted it with Rainbow Dust Metallic Paint Dark Gold. My skills don't yet extend to sculpting so I used this mold to make the fly out of white chocolate.
It ended up tasting really nice.

Pizza Cake

So I quite enjoy baking and saw this book on novelty cakes that I just had to get. And because I love pizza the first cake I decided to make from it was... Pizza Cake! My first attempt can be seen below. It consisted of a sponge base, buttercream for the tomato sauce and orange coloured marzipan for the cheese. After a few attempts at other things, I decided to give it another go without the mistakes of the first time. The first mistake was the red food colouring I used. I tried several different brands and the results were either a lovely pink colour or if I managed to get the buttercream close to the red I wanted, then it tasted too bitter to eat. The best one I found was called Wilton. I originally got it from hobbycraft but it can be ordered quite easily from here, or get a bunch of them from here. My second mistake was the "cheese" I grated it into a bowl before adding it to the top of the pizza and I found it clumped together when I picked it up. (Freeze the marzipan for at least two hours before using it. It grates much easier that way) I also decided to make it a bit more adventurous looking and added cherries for tomatoes and coloured marzipan for different toppings. As you can see from the photo below it looks delicious and it tasted even better.

1st Attempt

2nd Attempt

1st attempt at a poppy seed cake. Nom nom nom