Christmas Cake

Hello!

No cards this time. This time I'm showing you my Christmas cake.  If I hadn't had the marauding hoards snapping at my heels begging me for a piece of the cake, I would have presented it more nicely for your viewing pleasure. As it was, I was lucky to snap a few shots before the first cut, LOL!

Every year I make a Christmas cake. This cake is a BIG cake and it takes a few hours to make. Some years it is fantastic, and some years I don't make it as perfectly as I'd like. This year's cake is PERFECT! Moist, delicious, mouth-wateringly fragrant...hang on, I might need to grab a piece before I go on...

I usually try to keep it whole until Christmas Day so that everyone gets to appreciate its beauty before cutting, but, as I said, it is perfect, and we couldn't wait until Christmas to try it out.

Yum! It's a boiled fruit cake. I put in some extra treacle this year, so it has gone very dark. It isn't burned, it's just dark brown. The nuts are macadamias, brazils, walnuts, and almonds.

So what do you think, do you feel like popping over for a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake?

Michelle
xxx

Edited to add: P.S. Ooh! I just noticed this is my 100th post. That would be a reason to celebrate... I might go and have a piece of cake...

Happy 9th Birthday!

Hello!

No cards this week-end. It was another busy birthday week for us this past week.  I'm about to pop off to bed to try to catch up on some sleep before I launch into the working week once again. But before I go, I thought I'd share my little bit of creativity for the week.

Well, actually, I copied someone else's creativity... but I did do the work myself, once I'd found the idea, LOL.

My eldest daughter turned 9 years old this week. 9 years! How does time pass so quickly?  She had a Hawaiian pool party planned with a few of her school friends. Saturday morning dawned. . .well, it actually didn't dawn... it began with a MONSTER storm that had the morning as dark as night - wild wind, lightning, thunder, torrential rain, everything a storm can be. It was amazing. And a little worrying, considering we were planning a pool party, eek.  Anyway, as the day progressed, the clouds slowly, ever so slowly, cleared. By the time party time arrived, we had some blue skies and some sunshine. A miracle. The fact that the pool was freezing cold was not a problem for this group of kids. They had fun in there anyway. Crazy.

So onto what this blog is actually about. The cake.  I like wandering through Pinterest. I collect ideas there. I also collect ideas on the internet and pin them back to Pinterest for safekeeping.  One of these ideas was an owl cake. My daughter liked this cake and requested it for her birthday.

This is my take on the cake (not a great photo, but you get the idea):

This was the idea, found HERE:

Close ups of my little owls:

And a Hula Skirt fruit platter that Super-Dad put together:

The kids loved it. The cake got lots and lots of positive attention. The party got many comments of "This is the BEST party ever!", which is very satisfying, considering I chose to NOT entertain the children, but left them to their own devices (under our supervision). They played in the pool, they played basketball, they played on the swingset (yes, 9 year olds will still do this, apparently), and they made their own disco party. They were well-behaved, polite, and had a wonderful time. My daughter has some very cool friends. My daughter is very cool, too.

Do you like my cake? It was red velvet cupcakes under all that decoration. They went down a treat.

Hopefully I'll be back to some more card making this week. Fingers crossed...

Michelle

xxx

Dora Rainbow Cake

Hello!

Every year I make each of my girls their birthday cakes. Sometimes I have to call on my hubby for the execution of the design (because he is awesome at presentation), but this year I did it ALL BY MYSELF.  This year's challenge for me was to find a recipe for the actual cake part of the cake that was yummy to eat. Every time I make butter cake, it ends up crumbly and dry and definitely not fine and soft. But this year I was determined to make something yummy to eat to go inside the awesome outside decoration of the cake, LOL.

I went first to Bakerella, because she is just the BEST baking blog in the whole wide world. I didn't need to go any further, because she told me how to get moist butter cake, AND she gave me a recipe to follow.  The recipe is in imperial measurements, but I managed to convert to metric okay.  Bakerella calls this a Moist Yellow Cake. 

For the icing I made a butter icing using 250g of butter and about 6 cups of icing sugar, eek!  I only put a little bit between the layers and saved the smothering for the outside of the cake.

The final product is not the best Dora in the world, but my little girl was thrilled, the cake tasted delicious, and everyone was happy.

When I made the layers, I couldn't tell what their colour was going to end up, because the outside was a bit brown from cooking. So cutting into this cake today was a beautiful rainbow surprise for me as well as all the little kids.

For this cake, I followed the tip from Bakerella which said to wrap the cake in plastic wrap 5 minutes after it came out of the oven. I wrapped each layer separately. I also put all the layers in the freezer after they had totally cooled, because I made the cake last week-end.  I defrosted them overnight last night. When I took them out of their plastic wrap today, they were so easy to handle, and they were moist as can be. Perfect outcome for me. I actually iced a cool cake this year, which means the icing stayed in place much more easily, LOL.

Would you like a slice?

Michelle
xxx

Babushka Dolls!

The big girl and I recently had a trip to Melbourne as a part of her birthday celebration. While we were there we found the most beautiful shop called Babushkas, which sold . . . you guessed it, Babushka Dolls, otherwise known as Matryoshka Dolls.  It was like russian doll heaven.  Here is a quick snapshot.

And that is only a small selection of what was available.  We did take one set home as a birthday present, because they were irresistible!

As a result of this discovery, when discussing what birthday cake she would like this year, the big girl put in an order for a babushka doll cake.  My first reaction was, "Oh no! How am I going to do that?", but when she said to me (very generously) that I could just make a round cake and draw a picture on top, I decided that I ought to make a little effort.  So, after some thought, I came up with the basic design, and then I spent an evening colouring different quantities of icing to create the masterpiece.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a good photo of it once it was finally finished, but this was close enough.  The big girl was very happy and I had exceeded her expectations, so I was happy.  :-)  And Babushka was very yummy - white chocolate mud cake was hiding under all that icing.

I spent the week baking and also prepared a few treats to send to school.  I hear the tea cups were a hit.

The biscuits on the base were Tick Tock biscuits.  I usually use Marie biscuits and spread with melted white chocolate, but the Tick Tocks saved some time and tasted just as good. 

I have a little more baking to do tonight and tomorrow, and then I have a couple of weeks off until the next birthday. . .