Betty.

Dear readers, I have committed the most shameful act a baker can do. I used a boxed cake mix. But I had to, both for my own intrigue and to save you the pain of ever having to do so.

I chose of course Betty Crocker's infamous range of cake mixes for which you need only add 1 egg!

I felt ashamed as I peeled open the box and took out the mixture of god knows what accompanied by the squashed cupcake cases. If ever you needed a reason to bake from scratch, Betty Crocker has put it in a box.

Here's all you'll need...

Who needs to cream butter and sugar when you can add water to some brown powder?

The Egg.

Egg, mix, and water.

Having mixed my 3 'ingredients', there is no sense of achievement in mixing together an egg, water and some powder. None of the sense of time, effort and love that goes into making a cake from scratch. There's no weighing of ingredients, sifting, beating or creaming. It's a completely souless experience.

I'm all for saving time, but really once you have your flour, sugar, eggs and butter, baking at its most basic is mixing them all in one bowl. In fact in the time it took me to get Betty's Box open, cut open the plastic bag and tip it in to a bowl, I could have me a delicious home made cake mix...

The mix at this stage is quite grainy and bland, with, and I stress, a hint of chocolatey taste. So no fear of eating all your mix before it hits the oven...

And of course Betty was kind enough to squash some cupcake cases into the bottom of her box...

To be fair to Mrs. Crocker...it does make 6...

Ahem...Tudaah...

So texture wise, not too shabby. Moist...muffiny...tasteless. They really were like chewing on a muffin with literally no taste. Again, there was a whiff of chocolate in the air, but it really was just largely chewing on something that really wanted to be a muffin, but grew up to be a sad little chewy thing.

If you want to bake some muffins, or a cake, because you want to show people what they look like, or you want to poison your worst enemy, I'm Betty all the way.

But if you want to really bake a muffin, or a cupcake, or a cake, then I urge you to bake from scratch! The pennies you'll save buying Crocker's Box of Wannabe-Cake really isn't enough to justify not spending a few more pennies and another 10 minutes baking real cakeage the real way.

Down with Betty's Boxes!

Cloves, Oranges and Cinnamon!

I'm feeling festive, which means it's time to start obsessively baking Christmas Cakes!

I don't know about you, but since the dawn of time (or since my memory kicked in...which means I can't remember anything before the age of about 15 which should be quite worrying...but hey ho!) every Christmas I have stuck cloves into oranges and baked them with my dear old mum to make the house smell pretty and because I guess they look pretty...shrivelled burnt oranges with spikey cloves sticking out of them...

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is, most things that smell nice, taste nice to! So naturally I had to bake a Clove and Orange cake...

I basically made this recipe up as I went along; guessing at the method behind my madness. For example my first attempts at grinding up cloves failed gloriously as I was attempting to grind up whole cloves and of course the stalks refused to be ground...(interestingly, cloves are actually the shrivelled flowers from evergreen trees in Indonesia...don't you just love the random things you learn from my blog?! I am here to educate dear readers)

So yes, after my clove fail, I began to pain stakingly pick each bud from the stalk, throw it in a pestle and mortar until I had about a heaped teaspoon full of ground cloveage!

And here's the part where someone tells me you can buy ground cloves...(although I did discover the next morning that ground allspice smells suspiciously like ground cloves...)

Next comes the zest of an orange!

And I shall add here, I made up your basic cake mix first without adding vanilla extract as I didn't want it to over power or interfere with my prettyful cloves and orangeness...

(I used a 1 egg recipe; weight of 1 egg = weight of sugar, butter, flour...I knew maths would come in handy one day...)

Now, when's the cinnamon coming in?! I hear you cry. Well, in the buttercream of course...Make up as much or as little as you like, I advise making double what you need because you will eat it as you make it...and we do want some left! Then add a ton of cinnamon to taste! I added rather a lot because it didn't taste strong enough as I made it, but lo and behold the taste becomes stronger the longer you leave it, so if you add a ton and it still doesn't taste cinnamon-tastic; get someone to restrain you from adding more because a little goes a long way!

Bakey bakey...

Icey icey...

Cutty cutty...

My cake was demolished within 24 hours of it's birth, which is never a bad thing...

It tastes really lovely and festive; fruit cake without all the...fruit.

The cloves will put hairs on your chest if you add too much, so again, restrain yourself! Better to have a subtle of hint of it running through the cake and more orange flavour than have people spitting it across the room crying out various obscenities about the taste of cloves!

Enjoy!

Mince Meat

First of all, my sincerest apologies dear readers for keeping you gripped to the edges of your seats for this weeks post, only to find it 6 days late! My bloggage absence was not because I have forgotten your cakey needs, it was I assure you because I was fulfilling them!

And now I have before you, mince meat cakes.

I hear the sounds of glasses dropping and shocked cries from my humble abode. But I must assure you dear readers, that I mean only the sweet variety of mince meat, that made with juicy raisins, sultanas, spirits and spices...and beef fat of course. That lovely, crunchy suet we love to find nestled in our mince pies...

Now, I am not a lover of the mince pie, I favour only one: The lattice patterned mince pies from Marks and Spencers, and I shall eat no other. But I have always loved cupcakes more. So I pondered to myself, why should I idly sit by at christmas, watching everyone around me enjoying mountains of mince pies, whilst I abstain from the joys of over indulgence?

And then inspiration struck. No longer shall I not feel sick with everyone else. I shall take their mince pies, and turn them into something even more delicious! Mince Pie Cake!

Now, it still needs a little work, but this was more of an experiment to see if mince meat in cake would even be tasty...and I was very pleased to be proven correct.

I literally made my trusty vanilla cake recipe (weigh 2 eggs, copy that amount in flour, sugar and butter, mixy mixy and add vanilla essence = CAKE!)

Then! Here's the special part. I added 2 heaped tablespoons of minced meat to this mix (I must stress, do make sure it's the tasty sweet kind, or you could end up with a rather unique tasting cake...) and then I chucked in a load of all spice! Christmas in a pot basically...

Mixy mixy...

Bakey bakey...

Let it cool off...whipped up some buttercream, basically 200g of butter and enough milk, icing sugar and vanilla essence until you think to yourself, 'yep, tastes good to me' for everyones buttercream preferences are different...there are some among us who find it too sweet sometimes, but we shall not speak of them...

Then to your overly sweet buttercream, add more all spice because it's delicious! Smother your cake in it, and hey presto you have a lovely mince meat and spiced buttercream cake which, I stress again, is DELICIOUS!

So for all you mince pie haters-cupcakes lovers; problem solved. Enjoy!

Notice the suet lurking in my mix...

Market Stall

So, at uni, I am doing an Apprentice stylie challenge where we have a bunch of groups and we all have to do 'tasks' and with every task, more groups get knocked out according to how much profit they made on that task until fiiinally 2 groups get through the final!
The first task were selling doughnuts in a shopping centre and my wonderful group, Team Bubble (I didn't choose the name!) made £200 profit! And won ;)

Now, on to the second challenge, and by far my favourite, The Market Stall challenge, and we decided to have a Cupcake Stall! So after 3 days of non stop baking and no sleep, we all got up at the crack of dawn and sold our cakeage for 8 hours in the freezing cold! And you know what? We came second! So my friends, we're through to the final :D And we have to pitch a product to John Lewis and House of Fraser so fingers crossed!

Now I know what you really want, pictures of cake!

Enjoy x


Putting my team to work making saucepans full of Buttercream! (This is a student apartment, so naturally compromises had to made...like using saucepans to make buttercream...but needs must!)

A boy decorating cupcakes! You're not imagining it.

Burger Cupcakes!

Inspiration struck me on the eve before the market stall, and I knew I had to make it. A Giant Popcorn Cake!

And of course 2 Giant Burger Cakes...




And here's our beautiful (vintage inspired...) Market Stall! By far the nicest one out of all the groups ;) And our beautiful sales lady Jo!

And, my favourite piece of the stall, a giant wooden cupcake! Luckily no one tried to eat it...

The Defiled Cakeage

So as part of the whole Evil Cake Shop shabang, I were asked to design a cake for the Metal band The Defiled. Consulting the ever reliable Google it soon dawned on me that a pretty pink giant cupcake would not suffice to do this band justice through cake; unless of course it was an exploding, blood splattering giant pink cupcake...

So with blood, gore and death in mind as the main theme for my cake, the idea of a coffin covered in blood with a knife through it naturally came to mind...

So! How did she do it? I hear you thinking. Well, to be honest, this is the first real 'Cake' I've ever actually done, I'm really a Cupcaker at heart. So this Cake was purely born from logic and a lot of mental trial and error in my head! I knew to get a big cake I'd probably have to bake a square cake owing to my lack of a handy coffin shaped cake tin...So instead I drew out a lovely little coffin on paper and cut it out as a template to cut around on the cake...

So several sheets of square red velvet cake later...(I didn't have enough mixture first time round to make a massive square cake so it ended up being 4 little sheets of cake sandwiched together for a totally intentional layer cake! *cough*)

Then, now you'll have to use your imaginations here...I lay the paper coffin template upon each cakey sheet of cake, and cut the cake around the coffin and repeated x4 for each cake to get the same shape! Genius...

Then with some lovely blood coloured buttercream I sandwiched all these laters together, praying to The Cake Lord they wouldn't split in half as I man handled them very carefully...And finally trimmed all the edges to get a nice neat Cakey Coffin!

Then came the fun part...something I had always wanted to do since I first watched that first episode of 'Cake Boss' I stumbled upon on Youtube...

Something I thought was only the stuff of legend...

I did a Crumb Coat.

Yes readers, I actually did something proper baker-like! For those of you still mystified by this allusive 'Crumb Coat' it is simply a rough, thin coat of buttercream around your cake to seal in all the little crumbs on your cake that thought they were too good to stick with the rest of the cake; only to be smothered and buried in buttercream!

The buttercream basically makes the cake nice and smooth ready for your cake to be draped in lovely rolled icing...

This bit were rather tricky, and I have to admit I cheated a lil'...The idea of covering the cake in 1 sheet of icing scared me a lil', as I had no idea how I'd get a lovely smooth finish on all the corners.

Now don't judge me readers, but I may have dusted off my trusty tape measure, measured all the sides, copied those measurements over to my rolled out piece of icing, and cut out icing panels to stick to the cake...

Do not be disappointed in me dear cakers! I had no choice! I am merely a novice in the Kingdom of Cake! But my random methods didn't turn out too shabby...

Behold:

I piped a rather attractive grey buttercream over the joins so no-one need ever discover my dark secret...

And now, I present to you, The Defiled's Coffin Cake! Blood an' all! (literally)

And obviously, being a metal band, A Cake fight was inevitable...as was cake in plaits...

A day to bake and decorate...minutes to destroy :p

And of course I provided a Cleaver knife for the cutting of the cake...and a finger...

And my mould cake!

The Longest Week of my life...ending with meeting Jude Law :D

So my lovely readers, this week I have worked night and day baking and decorating my offerings for the world's first 18+ Evil Cake Shop Where I made lots of eyeballs, maggots and mouldy cakes! But it was not easy...kilos and kilos of butter and icing sugar had to be sacrificed, and some cakes just didn't make it and were pronounced burnt at the scene of the crime. But I got there in the end readers. There were moments where I struggled to see the light at the end of the tunnel and continued to ice cakes like a vacant zombie. Icing cake...after cake...after cake...

But I'll stop whining, and show you my efforts through a pictoral diary!

In the beginning, there were giant saucepans of cake mix and lots and lots of mess...

And from this mess, towers of cupcakes were built...

And seas of cupcakes flowed freely...

Then, from the skies, buttercream rained down upon these cupcakes, and lo they became pink and tasty...

And they were to be called, The 12 Cupcakes.

Some betrayed their Lord Cupcake, and were sent to 'The Reject Plastic Bag' where a terrible fate awaited them; consumption by The Dad.

Others went on to seek greatness; they became mouldy.

(I think I should add here I made them mouldy for that 'manky' effect...I didn't actually leave them to mould for months on end...*cough*)

Others explored the Cake world and found new land where they formed a new race of cake, The Green Cakes. An elite race of cakes that form communities in abandoned jars...

Where they went forth and multiplied. And The Cake Lord said unto them, 'You shall love thy fellow cupcakes, and obey The 10 Cupmmandments (Geddit? Commandments...Cupcakes...Cupmmandments...It's a stretch I know.)

1. You shall have no other Cupcake Lords other than me, for I rule the Cupcakes. I am the Uber Cupcake.

2. You shall not take the name of The Cupcake in vain. Or you shall be baked with out of date eggs, and ye shall smell.

3. Remember the Buttercream day, for it is a holy day, when all that is delicous rains upon little cupcakes and transforms them into little drops of Cupcakey heaven

4.Honor your Father and thy Mother, Mr. Oven and Mrs. Kitchen Aid.

5. You shall not eat other Cupcakes. Cupcakes are not Cannibals.

6. You shall not commit Cupcakey Canoodling. You shall be a beautiful tasty cupcake, and will not taint yourself with Cupcakey inbreeding. You are baked as a family of delicous cakes.

7. You shall not steal cupcakey goodness from your fellow Cupcakes.

8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. Should a fellow cupcake sit naked and Buttercreamless beside you whilst your bounteous amounts of buttercream sit upon you whilst you look suspicious, ye shall be sent to Cupcakey Hell. The Reject Plastic Bag.

9. You shall not covert your neighbour's cupcake case; you shall not covert your neighbour's buttercream, nor his decorations.

10. You shall not try and recreate yourself in the Lord Cupcake's image. He alone stays forever delicious and has the perfect ratio of icing sugar to butter in his Buttercream.

Behold my Kingdom of Jar Cakes.

Maggots!

Beautiful cupcakes conquered by Maggots.

The Washing Up.

Before.

After.

(1 hour later...)

Cake Pop Eyeballs! Rather popular in the shop ;)

And finally a picture of the queue for the shop (Courtesy of Molly Bakes!) Stretching down the high street! Who knew London was so full of sick minded people after 18+ Cake...

P.S I dropped off some cakes to Cupcake Camp London in Camden today where, and here's why I think there is a God, there was Jude Law! He is a beautiful, beautfiful man. I had to convince his children my maggots wern't actually real...(Which of course they are...)

PP.S My cakes were on the telly! BBC 1's 'The One Show'. You can see my Maggot Cake and my eyeball!