Happy 1st Birthday - Chocolate and Strawberry Cake

Hi all,

I hope your having a lovely weekend! I went to a friends wedding yesterday and it was such a beautiful day. The rain also stayed away which was great!

The most important part of the day, the dessert (!), was a scrumptious chewy pavlova with strawberries. I don't know how they got it so chewy!

I have now been blogging for 1 whole year so this is birthday post just for me.

Happy 1st Birthday Cake Fairy Blog!

I've written 47 posts which is about 3-4 cakes a month and I've loved writing them.

What better way to celebrate my blogs birthday than with my favourite combination - Chocolate and strawberry!

I found some freeze dried strawberry sprinkles in the supermarket on Friday and thought I had to use them. I'm not the only one who picks out the freeze dried strawberries from cereal boxes, right?! I just love freeze dried strawberries. I especially like the chocolate covered ones.

Vanilla Savoy Cake


This is such a great recipe, my new favourite. The cake is so fluffy and delicious. It has no butter in it which I actually like as I find getting butter to room temp so difficult in my flat and I hate butter lumps. The air that is whipped in to the eggs makes the cake rise.

4 egg whites
4 eggs yolks
200g caster sugar
100g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and put a shelf in the middle of the oven.
2. Grease and line two 8in tins with greaseproof paper. I can never be bothered to fully line the tin (oops) but I find just putting in a circle at the bottom is enough the get the cake out with no problem.
3. Using an electric whisk, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together until pale yellow and very fluffy. This takes about 6 minutes. Don't skip on this step because it is key.
4. Add the two vanillas and whisk in until fully combined into the yolk mixture.
5. Whisk the eggs whites until you have firm peaks. This is where having two electric whisks is very handy!
6. Sift the flour in to the yolk mixture and fold in.
7. Fold in the egg whites. As you can tell I'm quite impatient but you do have to make sure your folding delicately to keep the air in the batter.
8. Pour the batter in to the two tins and put in the oven to bake for 20 minutes.
9. Make the buttercream and strawberry puree while the cakes are baking.

Chocolate buttercream

As usual my buttercream recipe is from Cupcake Crazy Gem's trusted top 10 frostings.

Strawberry purée

You can find the recipe here. Just substitute the Martini for water. I don't sieve my purée just because I quite like the texture and pieces of strawberries but you can if you like it that way. You can also just use your favourite strawberry jam.

Assembling

1. Take the cakes out of the oven and leave to cool.
2. The cakes usually come out fairly flat but level the cakes out with a bread knife if you need to.
3. Cover one cake with the strawberry puree and sandwich the other cake on top.
4. Cover the cakes in chocolate buttercream, smoothing out with a palette knife.
5. Scatter over the freeze dried strawberries.

Enjoy with friends!

Happy Baking.

Batman Cake

Last weekend I made my first fondant covered character cake for my nephews 6th birthday. I have been promising him this for ages, every time I spoke to him he wanted a different cake. He started out with a Pterodactyl cake which I was slightly nervous about! He then settled on Batman, which I hoped would be a bit easier.


I did a bit of research online to see what other batman cakes were around and decided on a round cake surrounded by a skyline with the batman sign projected on top.


I'm sure none of my decoration methods were particularly professional, I went for the "make it up as you go along" method which consisted of some print outs and clear plastic to make stencils and toothpicks to mark out my design.


For my first attempt, I have to say I was pretty pleased with myself. It did take many evenings of work but turned out pretty well.


I had to roll the blue icing out 3 times because it kept sticking at the last moment. Any tips to stop the fondant sticking to your surface? I covered my counter in icing sugar and kept moving the icing around but it still stuck.


The black icing made me nervous because the colour seems to run easily and I didn't want my blue icing to get stained. Cue, doing everything slowly and a lot of talking to the icing - yes I do that!

I made a French savoy sponge from my new "The art of french baking book". Correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is also called an Angel cake. The sponge has no butter in it (I figured with all the Fondant icing I should try to take out some fat!) and is made by separating eggs. I found the sponge light and dense, okay that makes no sense but it was delicious and...... spongey.


I made two 8in round cakes and sandwiched them together with sugar free strawberry jam. I didn't hand make it as usual just to save some time. I like smooth sugar free jams best.


I covered it in vanilla buttercream, made with vanilla bean paste which made it super yummy. The first layer was the crumb coat, nice and thin, I then popped it in the fridge overnight.

I smoothed out the cake with more buttercream the next day. I could have spent hours doing this, it never seems to be as smooth as you want it but I had to crack on.

Next I rolled out the blue fondant. I bought white fondant icing and massaged blue food colouring in to it a few nights before, a nice tv watching task. I had to use far more food colouring than I had anticipated and I had originally wanted the blue to be darker but, quite frankly, I got bored. I brushed the cake with water to make the buttercream sticky in preparation for the fondant.

I covered the cake and it was tense. As you can see I didn't get the icing flush to the bottom as I was too scared I would cut away too much. I knew I was going to cover it with black icing so I wasn't worried that much.

Next I added the skyline. I just did this to eye so no fancy tricks to share. I marked the windows with little L shapes using the end of a knife.

I made the back of the batman sign by tracing the image on to a piece of clear plastic and cutting around it. I then marked the bat by poking holes through a paper print out to give the outline on the fondant which I then cut around. You can see tiny holes on the edge of the bat so I will have to work on that!

Again I made the projection bit by eye and stuck it on by brushing it with water. I stuck on some yellow windows with the left over yellow and finished with a few white chocolate stars.

I had both my niece and nephew stay for the weekend. As I had missed their birthday's because I was in Japan we decided that the Friday would be Tom's "birthday" and Saturday would be Anya's. We went for a quick dinner to Nandos on the friday then finished off with the cake. The little man seemed to appreciate it! Every few hours he would run over the the cake and say "Can I see the Bat? Don't touch it!". It took me a while to persuade him that we could cut in to it and eat it!

Happy baking. Cake fairy x

Giant Brownie Cupcake with Peanut Butter Frosting

My beautiful friend had a 1950's Hollywood murder mystery party and I made the dessert. My first giant cupcake!

I wasn't the murderer but I did do an awful awesome "ill defined foreign accent" haha!

She requested chocolate brownie cupcake with peanut butter icing! Delish!

I got the cupcake recipe from here, but had to multiply it by 3.5. Immense amount of batter but worth it.

The peanut butter icing is from this great blog by Crazy Cupcake Gem!

I'm not gonna lie, it was slightly too rich for me but then I'm not a huge fan of peanut butter but if you like it then you'll loooooooove this.

Just a note: Don't leave your giant cupcake next to an oven that's on while your eating the main course because you'll have a melty drippy mess on you!

I'm back and feeling happy. Happy baking!