Kitchen Alchemy

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

Well I haven’t gotten around to making the Caramel Cream Sponge yet. But I did have a chance to invent something new and special for a friend of mine who was celebrating a very special birthday. As her birthday guests snaffled the decorations off the side of her cake, I was reminded of my fifth birthday, where my friends did exactly the same thing. A lot of people ask me how I learned to make cakes, and I think that birthday would probably be the first time I was exposed to the art of sugar craft. My mum and Aunty Liz spent many nights hand moulding delicate pink sugar roses to decorate my fifth birthday cake. Back in those days a fondant decorated cake was normally white, but Mum decided mine would be pink. And usually the cake underneath was fruit cake, but Mum thought we could try chocolate and see how it worked out. I don’t remember if there was marzipan – there certainly wasn’t any chocolate ganache between the fondant and the cake. The thing I remember was being sung happy

Back in 1988 I read a book called Chocolate: The Consuming Passion, by Sandra Boynton. It was a great book about one of the things I truly love – chocolate. At the time I used to enjoy the occasional Nestle Milky Bar, so when I read her page on white chocolate, I was a little miffed. She had drawn a square in the middle of the page with a black dotted line around it and said “for the great flavour of white chocolate, cut out and chew!”. Years later after having produced flop after flop of one white chocolate sort or another, I have finally come to the realisation that white chocolate is nothing more than a tragic pretender to the chocolate throne, and should be renamed out of defference to the greatest sweet treat ever known to man. The latest white chocolate insult to my baking efforts comes in the form of a white chocolate mudcake. Jennifer Graham has a recipe in her Crabapple Cupcake Bakery book, and since I trust Jennifer implicitly, I decided to give it a go. But I wanted a bi