Kitchen Alchemy

When my son requested a space party for his birthday this year, I rubbed my hands together with glee - finally I had an excuse to buy some cool tools from the Evil Cake Genius .  My grand idea for a cake was something that looked like Jupiter. I had seen a hand painted one on Pinterest, and I wondered whether I could create a similar effect with swirling fondant.  So I ordered the hemisphere baking tin and spherical cake combs and waited with baited breath until they arrived. You have got to love a fellow cake baker who shares their secrets with you - the Evil Cake Genius sent extensive instructions on how to create a flawless sphere. I was saddened to discover the bottom of her sphere is made from rice crispy treat. Straight away I knew I was going to be one of those smarty pants cooks who deviates from the well trodden path.  The instructions said to fill the tin to almost full to ensure you get a complete hemisphere. My first attempt was too short. I had to bake a

If you love cake as much as I do, you were probably astounded by the mergence of Katheryn Sabbath's drip cakes last year. Her use of candy colours combined with common candy decorations are a visual feast that has sent cake aficionados wild all over the world.  I thought I'd have a go at creating a drip cake myself, after seeing a tutorial this week that uses watered down candy melts for the drip component.  I had three seven inch vanilla buttercakes in the freezer. I set out to build a mega tower, which would let me take my 30cm Perspex scraper out for a spin. As I built the layers I quickly realised I'd end up with a cake so high, it wouldn't fit in my fridge and I would have trouble getting someone to eat it. So I went for three layers of two centimetres each.  I painted each layer with raspberry jam, then scattered a few frozen raspberries across each. Then I spread 3/4 cup of what I'm calling royal buttercream - royal icing made from meringue powder with 500g o

   So what have I been doing all this time?  Deepening my big cake skills mostly.  I found an amazing cake designer named Jessica Harris, who was an interior designer in a former life. She has an amazing eye for geometric design. I took her Craftsy class, Clean & Simple Design, in which Jessica teaches some of her most popular designs. But she also teaches her technique for getting the sharp edge on a fondant cake. Would you believe she turns her cakes upside down?  It's not for the feint hearted. Ganache must have been set for a day to attempt this technique. But it works! As you can see from this bee themed cake. So what's the trick? You prepare you ganache layer as normal, making sure you get the top level and the edges sharp. Here's what mine looks like when I'm satisfied with the finish.  I roll out the fondant and apply it in the same way as usual. I still panic every time I do this. You'd think I'd be over that by now as every job always wo

When I was asked to make an Octonauts cake for a little boy's fourth birthday, I was very relieved to have all the coloured fondants from the Bakel's Pettinice range on hand to use. A year ago I would have had to mix up all the colours myself, which is incredibly time consuming. Having pre-coloured fondant to work with saved me a massive amount of time in creating the colourful characters from the cartoon series, Octonauts. I made this cake on the same day as the purple 30th birthday cake, so I still had to struggle with the hot weather. Once again the ganached cake had to be set in the fridge. And I also had to work cornflour into the fondant to ensure it would go on the cake. Unfortunately, I think I put a bit too much conflour which changed the chemical composition of the fondant, which in turn caused cracking and scarring on the sharp edge. While I was able to recover the fondant this time, I found out a couple of weeks later that too much cornflour can actually wr

I haven't been blogging a lot lately because it has been a summer of utter cake avalanches. Some weekends I have been doing two or three cake jobs and had absolutely no time to share photos or stories about it. One of the greatest challenges has been keeping the cakes under control in the hot Australian summer. I work from home and I do not have airconditioning, so I've had to work out how to get cakes to stabilise instead of turning to mush. I made this cake for a 30th birthday and got myself very tangled up trying to get the ganache to set. I made it about 12 hours before I needed to use it, which normally would be enough in winter to get it to the right consistency. But in summer it never achieved better consistency than thickened cream, so I had to put it in the fridge. Once I started covering the cake it had to go in the fridge every 20 minutes to get each layer to set. Overall this took me two hours, but remove the waiting time and, using the barrel ganaching t

Well it seems every time I go to the markets I get less blogging done. Which is surprising because I am always cooking until I virtually drop. I came out of the corporate for a while again this year and decided to go back to market with my cupcakes. It's been an awesome time, and in between I've had some cool big cake jobs which I thought you'd like to see. This is The Batman Cake. Aka The Dark Knight Rises Cakes. It was made for a former colleague whose son was turning 21. It was an awesome pleasure making this cake because it really struck the right mood for the last Batman movie. The photo doesn't really show how cool the colour of the cake was - a mixture of cyan, grey and black icing. I made this cake for my little boy's third birthday. Despite his love of robots and cars he insisted that he wanted a duck cake. I had to make sure the duck design wasn't twee - otherwise it would have looked quite babyish. The interior of both the cake and the barn

Even before I did the "Lia" wedding cake last week, I had great fun creating this fairy themed cake for a friend's little girl. I love it when people give me a very loose brief because it means I can let my imagination run wild. For this cake, I was asked to make it fairy theme. I knew straight away it had to have a toad stool on it - the white dots against the red top are always striking. Then I knew there had to be a fairy and of course some green tendrils and loads of flowers. So I assembled all the pieces I needed, covered the cake in fondant, and began adding bits on. As I completed each new addition, I stepped back, took and look, and then decided if anything more was needed. In my opinion, cakes like this reveal themselves - you just have to be prepared to go with with the flow. Right up until I added the ribbon, I felt the cake wasn't quite done. But once the ribbon went on, ta-dah! It's cakes like this that make decorating so much fun. In a cou

I'm almost at the point now where I can make any big cake I can dream of and it will turn out pretty much as I planned. Last week I made this big cake for a wedding, and I am naming it "The Lia" after the bride. She asked for a chocolate cake, white on the outside with red flowers, but pretty much left the rest up to me. The wedding reception only had 30 guests, so there was no need for a multi-tiered construction. But I didn't want the cake to be a flat thing on a table for the photo with the bride and groom, so I made a stacked chocolate cake - two eight inch cakes both 4 inches high, covered in chocolate ganache then covered in fondant. All the flowers are edible, and again, I made them all myself. It's the first time I've ever put sugar flowers on a wire and I must say there is a trick to it, which I don't think I'm privy to. If you are every wondering why wedding cakes like this cost so much, it's because the handmade sugar flowers tak

Some months ago I was sent a photo of an amazing three tiered gold cake. I was so enthralled by it fantastic whimsey that I immediately began looking for an opportunity to have a go at making such a cake. After a great deal of thought, I determined the gold colour had to be sprayed on. So I bought myself a few cans of PME gold lustre spray - which was significantly more yellowey than the original picture, but excellent none the less. I baked three vanilla butter cakes - 11 inch, 8 inc and 5 inch. I coated each in white chocolate ganache , and then applied crispy white icing with a few different textures. My husband and I had a very frustrating time cutting the dowels for the bottom and middle layers - I cut them too short and he did half of them too long. But we thought we got it right in the end. This morning when I assembled the cake, I found th dowels could have been a little lower. And because of the icing on this cake, I could not cover my mistake with ribbons or pi

We've have the great pleasure lately to produce some big cakes for customers that have pushed our skills to new limits, and I wanted to share them with you because they're just so delicious to look at! The first was a Dora cake for a little girl turning three. Inside was a vanilla buttercake layered with white chocolate ganache. We spent quite a lot of time working up the colour density in the fondant to give this cake the vibrant theme that Dora is famous for. We thought it was all about the colours! But when our young customer laid eyes on it, the first thing she said was "Where's the monkey?". Turns out Dora doesn't go anywhere without Boots the monkey! Next time we'll have to work out how to incorporate him into the cake. Last weekend we made a cake for a new t-shirt company called Yellow & Co. Yellow's philosophy is quite simple - different colours represent different frequencies and you choose your colours based on the frequency

When I first met my husband his interest in fruit was limited mainly to watermelon and bananas. Considering the wealth of fruit that is available in Australia, it was hard for me to understand how a person could be so exclusive in their enjoyment of what I consider to be the best part of summer eating. Yes – watermelon is definitely a great summer fruit! As a kid I had a book called “Summer” which concluded with a broadly smiling girl eating a whopping big wedge of watermelon. But summer, to me, says mangoes, nectarines, peaches, cherries, lychees and passionfruit. None of which my husband would choose to eat, or even put into the shopping basket. Yes, he’d eat apples – a staple in winter. But I couldn’t even get him to eat strawberries, simple and yet exotic, in my book. So imagine my surprise, several years into our marriage, when my husband comes home from work and announces he now likes raspberries! How, I enquired, did this come about? He worked at a training company that

I heard a shocking story yesterday of how suppliers of cupcakes for weddings have been ripping people off. The story came to me via a friend about a customer who had two daughters get married in the space of two years. One of them decided she wanted cupcakes to serve as dessert, so she sought out a supplier for a quote. Can you believe she was given a price of $15.00 per cupcake? Luckily she wasn’t sucked in by this shocking price, so they sought a second quote. Can you believe the second supplier quoted $7.00 per cupcake? When the woman commented on the price being a little high, the supplier justified themselves by saying, “Well, they are very fiddley and quite time consuming you know.” That’s utter rubbish!!! For everybody out there who is looking for cupcakes for a wedding, please note the following: 1. When you say “wedding” to any supplier, the price immediately doubles. Hide this fact for as long as you can. 2. The base price for a cupcake should be between $3.50 and $4.50. If s