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!