Sugarcraft chat

[wem]

I started a thread for cake people a while back but it got a bit lost in Chat so thought I'd try to tempt people into our lovely new baking topic.

Hopefully I'll see some of the posters from the chat thread, but for any new people popping in, introductions: I'm wem, I'm a recent cake obsessive and have been bothering mumsnetters about it a fair bit as I'm starting up cake decorating business. I don't have anywhere near the experience or knowledge of some of the posters in here, but I do have an excessive willingness to chat about cake :)

Let's try this again, eh?

Or finally, do what I do and colour it by eye...

Was it the icing or the cakes themselves that needed to be the same colour? My mathematical approach not quite so necessary if it's just the icing :)

It's the actual cakes Wem. The only flaw in your plan is I can only bake the cakes 1 at a time so a proportion of the cake is going to sit around for hours until I get around to baking it. I am going for the make one batch and keep a spoonful or so and just eyeball the batter colour match!

I have a solution. Mix the colour with one ingredient. Milk would be ideal if there is any in your recipe. If you coloured enough milk for all 3 then it would keep quite happily between bakes.

That's a great idea stealth! Though doing one batch and keeping a spoonful back would let you see the colour you were going to end up with I guess.

Right, well I've made a rainbow cake, looks ok (sliced the top off to get it flat and the colours were ok, not as bright as I'd hoped but I really didn't put much colour in) and tastes delicious. I opted for a white buttercream icing and did it in two goes with a crumb coat first. It's now chilling I the freezer (it's for tomorrow afternoon so I'll take it out first thing tomorrow morning).

I have tried to make a scorpion with sugarpaste, it looks relatively like a cartoon scorpion, it's now drying on the piano. I also make a few leaves with the left over (black) sugarpaste, and they actually look reasonable. They were a pain to make because the sugarpaste kept going really soft (it's 30° in my kitchen...) but after wrapping it in cling film and putting it in the freezer for five minutes I managed to roll it out thin enough.

Now, next question is, when can I put the scorpion on the cake? The cake needs to stay in the fridge until the last minute because of the buttercream, and I read that you shouldn't put sugarpaste in the fridge. So do I wait until an hour before serving, remove cake from fridge and assemble then? Or can I assemble in the morning and keep in the fridge for the rest of the day?

First question, viking, how did you do your buttercream and did you use super white? well i've haven't put my cakes in the fridge with buttercream at all should i would assemble at last minute, show a pic when finished.

Just used normal butter and icing sugar with a dribble of milk and let Woody (that's my mixer) do the rest, it does go white eventually, although butter here isn't as yellow as in England.

Even with very cheap UK yellow butter, I can get lovely white buttercream with some milk added and a good 5 mins beating on med/high speed in my KA

Scuba Cake here, BTW.

That's wonderful stealth, so much detail. What did you use for the sand in the end? It looks great.

Taken a bit of a detour away from sugarcraft with my first delivery to the soft play centre today! They want a carrot cake, a victoria sponge and a chocolate fudge cake each week :) Will keep things ticking over if the other orders don't come in.

Viking how did the scorpion cake go down?

I went for rich tea biscuits in the end for slightly paler, tropical sand - and because I wanted a more substantial ocean floor I built it up with rice krispie cake underneath the sand.

Cakes for soft play place sound good - are you making big ones, in which case how do you manage to get them to bake evenly and not come out dry [nosy]?

I'm just doing 8" cakes so not big really. I find I have to use a lower temperature and longer time than it gives in almost all recipes I use, otherwise the edges cook too quickly. But that might just be my oven.

8" I can manage usually - there is a tea shop locally who have 12" Victoria sandwiches and the like which they sell by the slice and I always wonder how they get them to bake so evenly (they look and taste really good).

You can get these things but saint Lindy recommends wrapping a double layer of greaseproof paper around the outside of the tin and putting a baking tray on the shelf above the cake once the top of the cake has formed a crust. I did it once or twice when I first got her book, but didn't notice a great difference so don't bother now. Maybe for bigger cakes it would be worth it.

The scorpion cake went down well, DS was really happy with it until he cut into it, then there was complete silence and DS said he thought there was maybe a problem with the cake (ie it had gone off)! But I told him a unicorn had probably sneezed on it and it should be fine... Anyway, once a whole slice was out it looked great, the colours hadn't run together or anything and it disappeared pretty quickly!

I think DH managed to get a photo of the whole cake before the camera ran out of batteries, I'll have a look later and see if I can put one on my profile.

Unicorn sneeze quick thinking! Hope we get to see a picture :)

Viking, what recipe did you use for your rainbow cake?

I just used a basic 4/4/4/2 , doubled with a handful of plain flour in to thicken so the colours wouldn't mix.

Currently struggling with the humidity! Fondant is getting sticky quickly making my smoothers stick! Am using a little cornflour to ease things.

blueberryboy I was just thinking that I was glad I don't have any full-on cakes to do this week (am contemplating cupcakes for teachers) - my only recommendation would be a large fan!

I have just put up a few pics of today's cake which I made for an MN-er in a crisis, I hope she likes it!

The flowery one? It looks lovely.

Blueberry to the rescue! It's beautiful. How do you go about working with fresh flowers? Do you use a particular florist? Do you just go in and see what they have or order in advance? And do you get loose flowers that you then arrange, wire and block yourself? Many questions! :)

Hello. Can I ask a butter icing question? Dh says the butter should be unsalted-does it matter either way. This is for DS1's school cookery tomorrow. TIA-I am not a baker.

I always use unsalted, but I have seen recipes that use unsalted but add a bit of salt. It's not a huge problem if it's the only sort you have got available.